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Life lesson: if you hate your coworker enough to give them the evil eye when they return to their desk after they mysteriously and suddenly disappear, you’re not going to be able to see their vulnerability clearly enough to capitalize on it.
If Perry had actually looked at me, there were signs of an exploitable complacency she could have enjoyed. One of my hands was shaking despite it having a very hot coffee in it, and the other hand was shoved in a pocket much too small. Meanwhile, my face was drained of all color, and its features were completely fallen. Maybe my lips were even trembling. Who knows? I didn’t check. In fact, I was avoiding mirrors. Even the reflective surface of my computer screen wasn’t my friend. But details aside, I definitely didn’t want a conversation. And if she had asked me to do some part of her job, I would probably have agreed just to avoid talking to her.
See, there’s two ways to end a conversation with someone you don’t like who is determined to make you do something neither you nor they want to do:
I usually elected to do the latter. It worked for me. And given how much of a divergence from my usual nature that behavior was, HR was willing to overlook quite a bit. On that day, however, I wouldn’t have been able to do it. I wouldn’t have been able to muster up the energy or the nerve. But Perry didn’t notice, and so she did not seize the chance. So we sat there in our usual tense and uncomfortable silence. Until Perry took yet another call that was supposed to be professional but got way too personal, eating up moments of her day that should have been spent doing the tasks that she didn’t like doing. And that would lead her to run out of time for those same tasks that constituted key parts of her job. Which would then lead her to complaining about her lack of time for the tasks that would remain undone sitting front and center on her performance review. And that would lead to a fight that would suck up more of her time, and the cycle continued.
Perry interviewed well, and she presented herself well in her immaculate office attire and clean-cut hair style. But besides those things (and getting on people’s nerves), she did nothing else well. She couldn’t even be considered a personality hire given how abrasive and bitchy she was. I, on the other hand, had consistently done my job and done it well despite my interview with this company being a tad lackluster. Did I particularly enjoy my job? No. So I reduced all functions to mere if-this, then-that protocols that could be carried out without much thought.
See, I worked in customer retention for a software company. I should have been “personally and directly” managing a portfolio of customers and providing “direct care” and “tailored business proposals.” Except nothing of what I did was all that personalized. See, every business has its frustrations and grievances. The exact combination might vary, but they all fall under similar categories. So it was just an if-this, then-that sort of work.
Getting hit with a bunch of chargebacks? We have fraud screening tools. Hate your website? We have a team who can design a new layout or color palette. Trouble with shipping labels? We can set up your software to avoid the shipping company you hate and make the customer pay for it. There was something in my tool kit for everyone, so I made a plugin that could scan my email for certain catch phrases and respond appropriately. And it could do so quickly enough that my clients were always quick to come to me with every little grievance. I was an ear that would listen, the thought, unaware that they were screaming into the void of my inbox.
It made contract renewals easy. It made upgrades to existing plans somewhat inevitable. I found one sale’s pitch that worked and just kept through it at customers. It was beautiful, effective automation. It was almost a piece of art, some might call it.
Not that I told my manager or really anyone about any of this. It was a secret I kept close to my chest because some days, I just couldn’t do anything. Call it exhaustion. Call it the buildup of creative juices fermenting and getting me figuratively drunk enough to fall apart. Call it just wanting a day off of work but being too shy to call in. Whatever it was, I’d long since made peace with the fact that my role was currently a supervisor of mechanisms I built and little more.
It was an easy secret to keep. Perry couldn’t see me from her desk; the divider between us wasn’t as high as some of the others, but she was also fairly short. And the two other cubicles in our four-cubicle bay were vacant because of course they were. Other people had an easier time leaving than I did, especially after they got a taste of Perry’s disposition. And they had better opportunities out there waiting for them in part because they were looking for things that they knew they wanted. Whereas, I knew I had options out there: writing (which I should have been doing but I was not doing) among others, but I couldn’t get myself to take them.
As for our manager, well, you know you’re in an odd situation when your quarterly performance evaluations include the phrase “Speak to me about any promotions or higher positions you might be interested in.” That’s as loaded of a sentiment as any review can have. It’s a signal that not only can you leave with a glowing recommendation but also that your manager still cares about you despite the many workplace norms that tell them not to.
Also, there’s a bit of pity in there. Or there can be. Because they’ve made assumptions about why you are staying in your current position that are potentially more disheartening than they are accurate. Bad economy and all that, things you just happen to have been born into. Or maybe no one taught you how to aggressively market yourself for a new job at your current company or externally because your mother didn’t know how and your father is dead. Oh, and all those resources available to you at your college’s career center? You were too busy doing other things to take them. Or you couldn’t motivate yourself to drag your tail end down to that on campus office because you saw how easy it was for other people to find their way, and you grew bitter because your peers were just positioned by the way they fell out of the uterus to take on certain roles and only went to college so they could later pretend to be competent.
That’s what I would think during those reviews and after they were over. I would repeat this seemingly endless nonsensical, half-garbled rambling to myself until the meeting felt like it was a lifetime ago. With that perceived though inaccurate passing of time, I could go back to the way things were: occasionally working but occasionally not working, struggling to choke out that aforementioned set of decent sentences strung together to make a quotable block of text that rested in a book-like vehicle of delivery that could be sold but not read.
On the 21st of June 2018, I wasn’t in immediate danger of one of those meetings. I just wasn’t happy. I wasn’t happy sitting across from an annoying voice who had interviewed well and done nothing well since then. And even when those two other pod seats were filled, I was only going to be dealing with other people who might be terrible to work with. And if they weren’t, then I was only getting attached to someone who would eventually leave. So there were no good outcomes there.
But above all, I was tired. Even before Erika’s call, I was in one of those ‘struggling to get out of bed in the morning’ type of funks, looking for even the most absurd reason to push through. Really, I was just making do, for as long as I could. Eventually I would have to stop making do. And ideally, I could make something else–like a book–and maybe then I’d be okay. Maybe I’d be okay because with that second book, I would know I was really meant to be a writer, and I wouldn’t be stuck at that job, across from Perry and with a constant guilt about not writing.
Which made the lack of writing so much worse, didn’t it? There was a chance that it could be the key to make me feel human, and I still wasn’t doing it. I genuinely needed it, and yet, nothing.
I sighed, feeling how difficult and strained even that movement was. That was part of the funk I was in, though, so I shouldn’t have been surprised. But I was, and that left me vulnerable to an inexplicable unease that slowly filled me as I sat there. I bit down on the inside of my lip, trying to chase that feeling away. But I would need something else, something outside of me, to really make an impact.
Just then, before I could fall too deeply into that unrest, the rescue I hoped for came. In the distance, I heard a familiar set of steps, and I lifted my head to see the woman I knew was coming: Ellie.
There is something dramatic about learning the sound of someone’s walk. It speaks to a canine-like desperation for one’s perceived master. I was aware of that, and it bothered me that I was essentially looking to Ellie to help me survive. But I couldn’t entirely help myself. There were clear parallels there. A dog looks to its human for food, shelter, and comfort. And while I wasn’t looking to Ellie for those all things, I was looking to her as some sort of lifeline whose nature was hard to describe, though I knew not to describe it. I knew doing so would thrust us both into a situation neither of us could handle. I knew that sort of thing had to be unsaid and unexplored. The less I thought about it, the better.
Consequently, subtlety was an absolute must, though it did have its downsides. One in particular stood out. Ellie was absolutely amazing, and I was pretty sure people never told her that. Personally, I never explicitly told her that, even if I tried to hint at it with my actions or small tokens of appreciation. But in general and setting aside my attempts to show her the right amount of care in a language no one else could hear, she didn’t hear it enough because how could she? Human existence is finite, and her goodness was infinite. I didn’t think there were words that existed that could concisely sum up all that makes her good. But I could say–with no doubt and hesitation–that Ellie was the one person who kept me from completely losing hope in humanity.
It’s an important role, to be honest. It’s likely something of a global service she was providing by simply existing, considering how important of a counter argument she was making. As a collective, humanity has done some pretty messed up things. We are beings bent towards self-interest, and even when that’s not our guiding principle, we regularly screw up through callousness, ignorance, or some other flaw on our part. And that’s the part I tend to focus on. I tend to wallow in the misery humanity creates and the despair that flows forth until I want to just lay on the floor and never get up again because the only result of getting up is seeing more reasons why I don’t want to.
That was my worldview for a while. And then Ellie walked into my life. Her timing was always absolutely flawless. Just like it was right then when she walked into my office area shortly after the reveal and my having to re-emerge into the world like nothing was wrong. She came in, dark ponytail bouncing as she moved, and I felt better just by seeing her. With her nearby I just wasn’t inclined to think about the typical terrible things that so often absorbed my mind. In fact, she made it impossible to do that. She was so warm that being around her was like wrapping yourself up in blankets with hot chocolate by a fire on a cold, wintery day just before Christmas if not on Christmas. When you’re in that state, you’re so nice and comfortable and happy that you aren’t inclined to worry about the final bill associated with the holiday despite its relevance.
But in more traditional words, Ellie was the warmth that shut out the chaos, fear, and dread of my life. All of that was densely packed in her petite frame, and I always thought if there was any more of her the world just couldn’t take it. We probably wouldn’t explode, but maybe we would. There’s no way of knowing.
On this specific 21st of June (the one in 2018), Ellie rounded that corner just as I needed her because everything was spinning, and I needed someone to make it stop. The large expanse of an office-themed void was full of cubicle pods, and yet, Ellie’s light brown eyes locked on to mine, partially out of habit and partially because she could probably feel me staring at her. But from that one glance, concern set in immediately, and the color drained from her face.
Cue the guilt because I was clearly taking her down with me.