Coldwell Banker — part 1
This morning, he takes his daily constitutional along the nearby beach, and enjoys the familiar sight of the sun, as it muscles through the western clouds and paints the morning a forbidding clementine. Oh, how glorious, how beautiful it all is. I have everything, he thinks, and frowns, frustrated at finding himself already frustrated so early in the day. And here I am wanting more. Always wanting something more, something else, something different. I’m sick! Sick!
He toils alone at home. He works remotely now. Actually, the company argot has changed. He works distributedly now. Yes, I know, rather an ugly turn of phrase, but what did you expect? He gets to know the bed of vivid diodes that is his screen so well it loses its very form, like the rim of one’s favorite sunglasses, so that he arrives at a point of simply absorbing the flickering shapes as the content of the world. His monitor is his friend, his shaggy dog, his slave. Or master? He would like to think more about this, and what role his arthritic keyboard and wheezing mouse should play in the schema.
But he can’t now. The hour has come for the day’s manual data entry. Actually, it takes many hours. Inputting numbers, and their correlated tags, or as he likes to think sometimes, when he feels intellectually frisky (which is less often than he would like, to be quite honest), inputting tags with their correlated numbers. This is drudgery, absolutely base and Dickensian, no question about it.
His name is Coldwell Banker. A sick joke, perhaps, but that’s what happens when your grim mother works in real estate and your father is a Banker. But his father is not a banker. He also works in real estate.
The Bankers are wealthy, but irony claims a substantial portion of young Banker’s portfolio, if you catch my drift. He’s growing rich with it. Coldwell is inputting numbers, and outputting numbers, and numbering those inputs, sometimes making a mistake and inviting his manager’s wrath. Coldwell almost got fired last month for negligence, which is probably too generous a way to phrase it. Suspecting his workload was being fabricated and his finished work discarded, as a pretense to keep him busy, Coldwell resolved to sabotage a company document. Yes, he was sometimes subject to these violent and inexplicable urges. So Coldwell completely vandalizes a spreadsheet with arbitrary figures, pounding the keys gleefully, his eyes closed, randomly inking the bleach of the nauseating grid. It was an exercise in morbid masochism, to see if anybody would notice. Someone did notice, and almost right away. Coldwell claimed his keyboard malfunctioned, and they almost believed him, not because it was plausible (it wasn’t), but because he was a persuasive actor, and the truth would have struck them as far less credible. They kept him on ‘thin ice,’ though the company calls it an end of the year review. This is Coldwell’s fourth winter at Sally Billiconne-Vanque. This was his first such review.
