Solitary: 4

The morning head of steam dissipated into the still office air. Josh slumped into his chair and rolled into position. His back ached in a distant way. He squirmed. He envisioned his spine and a time-lapsed vignette of X-rays tracking its compression over years of sitting. No one ever sat this much. He stared down at his desk, jumping along its speckled laminate surface. A little like cookies-and-cream. Been a long time since I had any ice cream. Faintly audible voices mumbled in either frustration or excitement. Being inside the confines of his workstation was like being on the brink of fainting. The sound-dampening batting behind the cloth of the cubicle walls muffled all sounds beyond his perimeter. 

This isolation reminded Josh of being inside an igloo. From years six to eight, he and his father built crude structures out the snow removed from their driveway. Snow is on the short list of most exciting events in a child’s life. The cancellation of school was no less relieving than last-minute clemency granted to a death-row inmate. After rising from the sweet rest of sleeping in, Josh wanted nothing more than to play in nature’s time-sensitive embellishment. The world became an amusement park and a battlefield when a white blanket descended upon his neighborhood. So much was newly possible: the sledding and the slippery surfaces, the laughing and running and heaving lungs constricted by icy air, the nose red and dripping like a faucet to be absent-mindedly tongued or wiped with a sleeve, the hurried scooping and packing, the close-calls and the cold melting down your shirt, under your gloves’ cuffs, and clinging like ice-cubes around the ankles of socks. At least, those were Josh’s dreams. 

Dad and lad, with age-appropriate shovels, created a mound on the western side of their north-south slab of concrete. After the best the Midwest had to offer in the way of blizzards, the final products would be taller than Josh. They looked lumpy like mashed potatoes, except with undertones more blue than brown. Carefully, young Josh dug a hole in the center of its base. This was his bunker. Once the cavern was sufficient to contain him in a fetal position, he outfitted the fortress. He carved out tiny enclaves to house a secret cache of snowballs in expectation of an attack. This was his arsenal. Once completed, he army-crawled inside and waited for the siege to begin. He felt safe at first. He thought it was like being a part of mom, dark and warm with body heat. Inside, nothing beyond respiration could be heard. He had made it. Mission accomplished. The kids would come and he would be ready. Now he would be protected. Even more, he would be victorious. Who else had an igloo? He waited for his chance. He laid on his stomach and felt the chill seep through his black snow-suit that swished when he walked. It was so quiet. No cars, no air conditioning, no dogs or television made noise. Dad went inside. There was nothing to do. There was nothing to look at. Everything was the color of graphite ahead of him. Looking around his puffy red, blue, and yellow coat, he saw the glow of light by the mouth of the mound. Were they out there now? Why was he in here? Excitement fooled him again. Nothing happened. He had no friends. The neighbors’ children never welcomed him into the fold when he moved onto the block. The snowballs sat in their spots. The silence became antagonistic. He was deaf to the world. He felt consumed. Within fifteen minutes, he grew hopelessly bored and frightened. He started to panic. Josh was lost (in the sense of not knowing where he was going rather than knowing where he was). He retracted from the orifice like an inchworm. Defeated, he went inside and dried off by the floor vent, thawing on the carpet. Mom made hot chocolate with swollen marshmallow icebergs in it that clung to his lips mid-sip. He looked out the front windows with their droplets of condensation at the igloo, a monument to disappointment. After a day in full sun, the forlorn structure would start to sag. Often it would be trampled on by the kids he wanted so badly to play with when they returned from escapades unknown, laughing, with ruddy cheeks and sleds in tow. If left alone, the igloo would stay longer than the rest of the snow. It melted and froze into the consistency of a snow cone. It would be soiled with the little bits of dirt that floated in the wind he learned about in science class. In his ninth winter, he heard of a similar structure collapsing on a child and suffocating him. He imagined the terror of being trapped inside that scary place—unable to see, hear, or move. The danger, coupled with recollections of previous attempts, was enough to prevent him from doing anything with the subsequent mounds Mr. Stevenson confusedly built on his own. Poor dad. 

For all this thought of snow, Josh felt colder. He rubbed the sides of his arms quickly, making his hands tingly. His eyes were open, but he paid no mind to his visual field.

While on the clock, it never looked good (i.e., productive/profitable) to have translucent neon bubbles floating across one’s screen or pipes stochastically elongating and bending atop a black backdrop. Accordingly, Josh disarmed his screen-saver. His monitor’s steadfast display suggested he was never far away from where he should be and never stopped doing as he should be doing for more than ten minutes. It was a simple move to ingratiate himself to the “powers that be” (wherever they were) should they ever pay him a visit. Moreover, it prevented the wandering eyes of passersby from gaining compromising intelligence. The ploy was not without drawbacks, though. First and foremost, the cursor blinked indefatigably. It never stopped. It seemed impatient like a mother tapping her foot. By the end of most days, its throbbing was reminiscent of the tell-tale heart. It made Josh feel guilty. The blinking black line would not let him forget the job he had to do. It was waiting for him, taunting. It could keep this up all day. It was going to outlast him. Presently, Josh saw it pulsate confrontationally. Damned machine. Clocks do the work for you. Cursors, though…they won’t do a thing without your effort. He rubbed his chin, which felt warm and slick in comparison with his cold, dry hand. He wondered how many times in an average day he derided himself for daydreaming. Come on now. Back to work. He swigged his tepid coffee. It did not satisfy. The aftertaste was not unlike burnt toast. At least it’s strong. 

Josh grabbed for the mouse. He ran his circuit around four websites. He checked his personal email (nothing), his profile (nothing), his blog (nothing), and then his preferred news outlet (nothing). He sifted through local scores and half-heartedly read a recap of a recent hockey game. He was not interested in sports, but hometown allegiance was an easy position to act upon when idle. For grins, he perused the “most popular searches” feature of his standby search engine. Apparently an actress announced immanent plans to take a sabbatical from the screen and spend the summer in a recording studio. She enthused, “I just think music is great and I really love movies still, too, of course, they’ve been good to me. But I’ve always wanted to sing ever since I was like a little girl. I think I can now, you know? I want to make something really special, you know, that people will want to go out there and buy and connect with. I’m really excited! I’ve got a bunch of ideas for album covers already.” This is what people are interested in. He withdrew from the mouse, pushed down on his heels, and rolled back a little. A faint sound, either laughter or sobbing, briefly interrupted the silence. Josh looked about himself. Kleenex. Mug. Calendar. Papers. Kinda barren. I really should put something on the partitions. A thumb-tack would go right through that material. A print? Cezanne? Would need to cut off the bottom title. Tacky. Why do they put those titles on there? It detracts aesthetically. Better to not know than to detract from the art. Why are people so concerned with the title or who made it? The art stands alone. Is it just curiosity? People naturally want to know. Misses the point of the artwork, though. It’s not for knowing. Still, credit where credit’s due. The point of art, though—what’s that? 

The musings were arrested by footsteps. His adjustable gooseneck desk lamp quaked in anticipation. Here comes Ralph. Ralph Metcalf, chief supervising engineer and elitist in residence, was neither good nor bad. He was simply large. Everything about him was large—his bovine face, his booming voice, his splayed and bulging wing-tips, his mile-long parabolic ties that never managed to descend beyond the dark concavity his gaping navel created beneath his shrink-wrap-like dress shirts. Given his girth, the ground announced him before he could announce himself. The steel girding of the high-rise flexed with each stride. Upon noticing this phenomenon, Josh had visions of the Cretaceous period. The ever-so-slight jiggling in his fleshy parts could well have been the sensation of concussions produced by some great lumbering reptile. Like a vulnerable-yet-savvy herbivore, the tremors caused him to scamper to safety. A thought of Pavlov’s bell raced across his consciousness, but he let it dart by. Josh drew near his desk, opened the folder again, and began to rattle off more letters. Mr. Metcalf hollered, “Stevenson!” as he passed. His matter-of-fact tone implied the utterance was merely to identify what he saw, rather than to greet or scold it. A force of nature. Although his shoulders drooped and he exhaled after the thuds receded, he did not stop working.

Solitary: 3

It was time to face the inevitable. He clicked open his task management software. He selected the folder on the server that was home to automatically generated lists of reply letters to be sent. 53. Not bad. He started from the top and worked his way down. 

These letters began by rehashing the query (not completely accurately) with sentences starting with “You told us (insert problem)” and “We explained to you (insert explanation of user-error and/or the warranty technicality that, lamentably, tied First’s corporate hands).” Thereafter, the correspondence shifted in tone. It reminded customers of how deeply interested First was in their plight and how committed First was to their satisfaction. Pronouns were always in the royal “we” (as though the author represented a great and magnanimous body) and featured as much passive voice as possible (since, as Mr. LaRoi explained, “these things happen”). Nearly all follow-ups ended with the placating, “We thank you for contacting us. We, like you, believe that products and services ought to be perfect because it’s what you deserve. That’s why we are the People people™.” 

So far as Josh could tell, these letters were intended to affect one or more of the following: (1) confuse customers whose memories were intact into thinking they had misunderstood the content of their recent customer service interactions in the hopes they would take no further action and, thereby, waste less First time, (2) console customers who were forgetful into thinking everything was okay because a company exists who knew them and wanted to help wherever possible, even though the company was unable to help at this (outlying) time, and/or (3) provide a mindboggling and ass-covering paper-trail in the event of class-action lawsuits. 

Whatever the purpose of the letters, Josh could relish the act of transcribing them. He often watched his peers typing and prided himself on his relative grace. Others’ hands looked like spastic spiders jumping on a hot surface. His fingers moved nimbly over the keyboard, fast and elegant like the wings of a hummingbird. After years of training, they were precise. He could trust his hands. Even in imprecision, he displayed a mystical union with the keyboard. He intuited and corrected the few faulty swipes without cognizing the letters involved. He curled and stretched, punched and lifted, tilted and raised like an impresario. Whereas a pianist moved along one row, he moved along five (not counting the function keys, whose size, like an underutilized appendage, suggested atrophy). Reminiscent of an apothecary, he knew exotic combinations to yield unusual, yet not unhelpful, results. His repertoire went far beyond the comparatively sophomoric CTRL+ Z or CRTL+V. Josh subconsciously engaged in showboattery whenever a co-worker would look in on him (usually to avoid working him-or-herself) as he was working. He would continue typing unabated and, taking his eyes off the screen, casually perform the ALT+SHIFT+BACKSPACE or, when completed, the ALT+SHIFT+K. He had no sign his coworkers understood these magic tricks, or even noticed them, but he enjoyed it all the same.

Typing was one of his few cerebral releases. He could not ponder anything else when in the throes of this fever of productivity. He could not introspect. He could not think about what all of this meant, where he was going, or why he had consigned himself to this position. If he did, his digital accuracy would suffer. This profound thoughtlessness and channeling of the environment (from the eyes to the hands) reminded Josh of hurdling down the side of a Michigan sand dune in his childhood. The angle of inclination could not have been less than 75°, yet he ran rather than tumbled to the bottom. He did not know how he was staying upright. He did not command his legs to pump. He thought nothing of it. They hyperactively bent and straightened in step with the pitch of the dune’s face. At eight, he did not have the words to convey the feeling, but he was consumed by it. Thoughtlessness had a pleasure all its own. The undisturbed state of being—even being an unreflective action—seemed to Josh seventeen years later an alluring-yet-frightening Eastern sort of pleasure. Nirvana.

Clicking, however, could be neither meditative nor artful. There was no order or pattern to it. It involved larger fields of movement within which irregular paths were made. The up, down, and around, the jagged swipes next to the long arcs felt sloppy and all-too-human. It was less like communing with another and more like ineptly manipulating something formless and foreign. Traced out, the trails would be indistinguishable from a toddler’s scribbles. The picture was something to be displayed because of the endearing ineptness it contained rather than aesthetic attraction. Then, there was the issue of the sticky left button on Josh's mouse [a source of bottomless frustration and instigator of six (rejected) PO Request Forms]. More than most people, he disdained clumsiness. This had a chilling effect on his use of the mouse and enticed him to lean heavily on that field-jumping miracle key, TAB.

He typed much and clicked little. Work moved through him. He hummed along at 85 WPM. The cursor hurdled across the screen, jumped back, and tried again a little lower. The clock spun. 

As with all repetitive motions, even the most pleasurable become painful over time. When his eyes began to water from a lack of blinking and he could take no more, he squeezed his lids shut and forced the remaining liquid out. He rubbed his cheeks dry. He flexed his wrists and threw his tartan-lined arms out and softly groaned. He bent his ankles beneath his chair so that his toes pushed down inside his shoes. He waggled his heals. He stared at the blue LED light symbolizing power on the frame of the monitor, which gave the outside world the appearance of dogged concentration. Josh imagined himself in the classically out-of-body sort of way. His vantage point was over his shoulder near the drop-ceiling, like that provided by a security camera. This was his day: overwhelmingly silent—nearly complete silence were it not for the plastic clacking—and overwhelmingly inanimate—nearly complete inanimation were it not for the movement that made the plastic clack and the consequences of his prolific caffeine consumption. Josh thought of how, in heist movies, crafty criminals would hack into monitoring software and replace the live feed with a freeze-frame. The video-made-photograph confirmed the status quo to the guards whenever the checked. Change, the difference between live and frozen, was impossible, but the guards had no idea. Josh’s day looked like this. No one could tell the difference between the photograph and the video for hours at a time. This was his life. He felt uncomfortable and left his desk in a rush.

To use the restroom, employees traversed a lengthy corridor flanked by various salaried workers deserving of offices composed of drywall, steel, and wood (rather than felt, aluminum, and cardboard). The doors of these titular nobles were invariably shut and eerily quiet. Still, one felt the urge to walk past them quickly and hold one’s breath in the hopes of passing unnoticed. Josh made the first of many passes, pushed to the left of the hand plate (to avoid germs), and entered the confines of the men’s room. An artificial bouquet clogged the space. Oranges. It always smells like rotten oranges. A faulty ballast hummed. The facilities were chromed with white accents. The tile was beige. The stalls were the color of nutmeg and made of compressed plastic. Josh was alone. He approached the nearest urinal with a thud-slap-thud-slap. He liked the sound of his soles against hard surfaces. Dramatic. He relieved himself and listened to the spatter. He dropped his lids and thought about the evening. A movie? Not again. Something…physical. A walk maybe. It would be nice to take a walk. Bundle up. It may snow. Too much snow this winter. A record? He did not flush (to avoid germs) and went to the sink. He met his reflection and was surprised at his hair’s disarray. He pushed down on it, ruffled it, and pushed down again. It was stubborn and remained puffy. I need a haircut. Soap and water were dispensed automatically. As he was lathering, Edward Kaypart sauntered in. Josh eyed him in the mirror. No greeting was exchanged. The stream was too cold to linger under. He focused on the dull feeling the temperature gave him.Enough. He patted his hands dry and listened to his footsteps again as he left. He heard Kaypart grunt as the door swished shut behind him. 

Given the square-footage of the building, a person toiling in the central commons could go all day without a glimpse of the (relatively) natural world. One of the lone publicly accessible vistas was the fourteenth floor’s waiting room. Josh frequently took a circuitous route from the restroom back to his cubicle in order to confirm the existence of the outside world. The room, which was always empty, was lined with faux-wood adorned with conical sconces reminiscent of a gastropod’s home. Newspapers were feathered tastefully across the black granite top of the coffee table, unread, and replaced daily. Beyond the chairs and table, floor-to-ceiling windows looked out on other structures with mirrored exteriors. The patchwork of glass rectangles across the street distorted images, melding the cityscape with ambient light. It was not stretched and skewed like a funhouse, but bulging and pocked like diseased skin. Through the gaps left by the avenues below, Josh could see the river, lazy plumes rising from the industrial district, and the horizon beyond. The sky was swaddled in a taught overcast blanket. Looks sickly. He felt as poorly returning to his desk as he did when he left it.

It was disconcerting how much of an affect the environment had on its inhabitants. Seemingly all that was required to be in good spirits was a bright sun and a temperature that made you neither sweat nor shiver. Contrarily, when the sun was impeded and the temperature oppressive in either extreme, absorbing the pallor was inevitable. Where’s the dignity of man? This line of thought agitated the sensitive humanism Josh could not be rid of, despite the stoical (if not defeatist) theme of his maturation. He liked to think of himself (and people generally) as self-possessed and rational. This meant they could always be reasoned with. What reasoning, though, was there in this realm? A person was a body within a system operated on by other bodies. For the better or for the worse, it was all inhumane. There was no challenging the emotions stirred by nature or otherwise. Language was emasculated. A person could not be talked out of a mood. How unhelpful was it to tell a person (himself included) that, “It’s not so bad.” True or false, the proposition did not matter. “Okay, so what?” the heart (whatever that is) seemed to say on its own. “It feels so bad.” People recognize the uncontrollability of circumstance. The painful consequences of it were manageable. They aren’t “up to you,” so you can cast it aside. To have something inside of you that would not submit to your own commands was frightening, unwieldy, and dangerous. How can you dissociate from that? The riddle of mental illness entered Josh’s mind, but then there was the chair, climate control, and the unwavering glow of 65W tubes over his work-station.

Solitary: 2

Josh passed the break room and ventured to his office (i.e., his 6’x8’ swath of commercial space immured by 5’ tall walls). He walked through a haze of hushed soft rock and a dirge of keystrokes. A few people were speaking sternly into their headsets. Nearly every surface was two shades off white, either towards brown or black. It was difficult to find a pronounced shadow given the effusion of fluorescent light. A large print of Edward Hopper’s Night Hawks hung beside a manager’s office, indicating a level of aesthetic sophistication foreign to the surrounding plebeians with their comic cut-outs and fading family photos.

When he approached his own nondescript mottled gray cubicle, Josh was relieved to find it just as he left it the evening before. His chair was in the same position, angled away from his work station as a monument of hurried departure. His relief was understandable. At sporadic intervals, one of his three supervisors would leave a stack of papers for processing on his chair and turn it to face the computer. This practice assured two facts: (1) Josh would never overlook the stack and (2) he would be frightened to spin his chair around in the morning. This ritual, the unveiling of the worn tan-gray cushion blotched with relics of coffee spills from past employees, was the awful commencement to an awful day. To complicate matters, on some blessed mornings, Josh turned his chair and found the seat vacant. The vacancy, along with the systematically shifted desktop implements and accoutrements, signaled the cleaning crew made its bimonthly sweep of the 14th floor. (Josh suspected the sweep consisted of two tasks (1) emptying trash cans and (2) rearranging desktop items to give the area an appearance of being wiped down and dusted.) Thankfully, he could take his time this morning.

The lunch bag went, as always, to the left of his filing cabinet (which was home to archaic documents both unknown yet indisposable). He sat down with a creak and turned to face the monitor. He jostled the mouse and a click sounded the return of electricity to the screen. It slowly awoke. The login screen displayed its nearly-mandatory background (the Customers F1rst logo). He typed ‘ct14’, struck Tab with his left pinky, typed ‘4867’, struck Enter with his right pinky, and was granted access to the server. 

‘ct14’, his user name, was an abbreviation for ‘clerical technician 14 out of (currently) 73’. The title was inaccurate as Josh, who had been tactlessly reminded almost daily, was an assistant clerical technician. Heightening the inaccuracy, to the best of his recollection, Josh never assisted anyone. (He assumed the moniker was chosen to suggest an employee’s inability to do anything significant on his own rather than a person’s occupational charge to be helpful.) After two years of service, an employee could lose the ‘assistant’ from his title. After ten, he could gain ‘senior’. After fifteen, he could lose ‘senior’ and gain ‘supervisory’. Nevertheless, for abstruse reasons involving computer language, ‘a’ could not safely be added to ‘ct’ in the internal database. Thus, Josh and the other (currently) 40 assistants were daily able to taste a sample of their unimpressive-yet-relatively-less-offensive futures. ‘4867’, his password, was the theoretical extension for his telephone (“theoretical” because his telephone has been conscripted for other, most pressing, causes). 

As there was no pile of papers on his chair, he was free to tend to matters of pleasure rather than business. Josh ran his circuit around four websites. He checked his personal email (nothing), his profile (nothing), his blog (nothing), and then his preferred news outlet. He skimmed a story about the findings of a recent survey of happiness within the fifty states. Am I supposed to move as a result? Is it for bragging rights? He scanned the list rankings to find his own out of curiosity. He found it depressing Alaska (the land of day-long night) was more than twenty positions ahead of his own. Must be good for napping. The lead photograph was of a woman jumping for joy on a beach wearing Capri pants and pink toe-thong sandals. Josh could not relate.

Josh disengaged from his workstation and headed for the coffee pot. The break room trapped the pernicious smell of popcorn at all hours of the day. The hyperbuttery scent did not combine favorably with brewing coffee. Angela “Angie” Sondervan, a human resources specialist, was rummaging through the office refrigerator. To avoid detection, Josh was careful to quietly slide his mug from out of the cabinet. He placed it gently on the counter, removed the pot, and began to pour. Josh noted the green and yellow striped socks tucked beneath Angie’s black Mary-Janes. Ever the quirky one. The burner sizzled as a drop escaped from the grounds above. Angie retracted from her position. Her blond curls were frizzy.

“Thought I put some yogurt in there. Did you see my yogurt?” She shut the door. “It was strawberry. You didn’t eat it did, you?” She pointed an accusatory finger at Josh for a moment, put her hand down, and smiled.

“No on both accounts.”

“Oh well. Guess I’ll go the vending machine.”

Josh grinned sheepishly. Angie spun around and left. He returned to his desk, mug in hand.

Customers F1rst, LLC, was the rock on which Josh’s philosophy-and-english-major ship ran aground. First (as it was referred to by its employees who opted for brevity’s sake to leave out reference to customers altogether) was a subsidiary company that managed the customer service issues of third-party companies that lacked the time, interest, or resources (or any combination therein) to address customer service issues on its own. First’s primary objective, from Josh’s perspective, was to inundate customers with text in order to wriggle out of ostensibly clear-cut responsibilities to make right something a third-party company’s product or service did wrong or poorly. The more confused a person is, the less able they are to pursue a goal.

Josh’s responsibilities consisted of various tasks that were as underwhelmingly unimportant as they were overwhelmingly necessary. (“The shit must be shoveled,” Gary LaRoi, managing administrator and resident Straight Shooter, had once presciently explained.) Specifically, he dealt in redundancies. Primarily, he was an extra set of hands to send correspondence to customers attempting to repeat what had already been said to them during a recent conversation with a First customer service representative. Additionally, he was a superfluous set of eyes to run over text already reviewed by two other people. Last on his list of job duties was the horrendously general, yet legally binding, “complete various tasks as needed.” To date, various tasks included: redacting documents, moving boxes, rearranging furniture, and dissembling (never assembling) neutral holiday décor.

Josh imbibed half of his coffee. I need a bigger mug. The familiar burnt taste reminded him of where he was. He placed it on the desk and dipped his toe into work-waters. The cursor traced across the screen to the intraoffice email software. After two more clicks, the inbox read “1.” Josh opened the email and read one of Calloway’s painstakingly devised disciplinary form letters.

From: ma1@cf.local 
Sent: Thursday, December 22, 2011 8:05 AM
To: ct14@cf.local
CC: hr2@cf.local

Subject: Tardiness Warning
Mr. STEVENSON:

I am writing to inform you that this morning you were tardy for the THIRD time this calendar year. 

Pursuant to Chapter 2, part 3, subpart C, item ii (i.e., Attendance Expectations and Procedures of Punishment) of your Employee Handbook, you have hereby been formally warned.

Please beware additional tardiness will warrant further steps to be taken, steps which ultimately result in termination. Please consult Chapter 2, part 3, subpart C, items iii-vii for information regarding these steps.

Bernard Calloway, Supervisory Technician
Customers F1rst, LLC
“The People people.”™

The year’s almost over. No steps will be taken. Josh closed the letter. He eyed his keyboard. He ran his fingers along the crease at the bottom of his mouse pad above the wrist rest. The neoprene felt cool. He pinched his nostrils together then sniffled. He flexed his upper lip. He closed his eyes and rolled his head around on his neck. He enjoyed the fluidity of the motion. He put outstretched his arms, feeling cuffs of his shirt tug at his wrists. He tapped his foot. Another day.