Try This Weird Trick to Escape Your Life — I
Combing through the junk in my email inbox, I came across the daily Medium digest. This wasn’t a good time for it, of course — I was at work, I had work to do, work was piling up, but I clicked anyway. The click transported me to the cool, clean world of Medium. Big, pretty pictures beckoned (so big and pretty — when had this happened, this arms race of beautiful pictures on the internet?), the minimalistic typography lulled me into an Apple zombie trance, and the estimated reading times, with the illusion of control they suggested, closed the deal.
Next thing I knew, it was lunchtime, and I’d done absolutely nothing. Sure, I’d consumed approximately seven two-minute poems, a NFSW short story, and gobbled up a few how-to’s on online networking, but all of it was disappearing from memory, already draining away. Maybe every bit of it would be out of my system along with my Pumpkin Spice Grande the next time I took a trip to the restroom down the hall.
If my boss, Chuck, knew I’d used my morning in this manner, he’d probably give me the look. It would be half-disappointment and half affability, a strange mix of Dad and principal. He’d have me come in his office, and would sit on the edge of his desk, looming over me. Then he’d ask if I’d seen the Suns game last night, and whether they should trade Eric Bledsoe or play him and whether the front office was screwing it up. Maybe he’d tell me about the mountain biking excursion he and his wife had taken on the weekend.
Meanwhile, I’m sitting in the guest chair, sweating, my long-sleeved shirt itching at my neck and pits. Coffee breath is washing over me as Chuck regales me with irrelevant anecdotes, smiling. Anyone walking by would see a tall, middle-aged guy, slightly balding red hair, a little pot-bellied, sitting with his coffee cup and telling a story to his young, nervous-looking subordinate. They’d probably wonder why I look so scared. If they even notice.
Yes, this has happened before. At the end of the conversation, I realize that I’m not going to be fired. Not this time. The kind of relief washes over me that must come to a prisoner on death row when the guard walks past his cell and gives the bad news to the guy next to him. Because shitty as it is, I need this job.
“A couple of us are coming in on Saturday,” says Chuck. “It’s about the only time you can get anything done around here. The file room really is a mess. Lots of misfiled records. So, around eight, okay? It’ll be off the clock, of course.”
I wouldn’t get out of there until six or seven. I wouldn’t be permitted to leave. It would never be said, exactly, but it would be made clear. What Chuck and his buddies in upper management did on these Saturdays, I have no idea. I just know that it sucks when I have to come.
So I was staring at my monitor, that rather large monitor that can be seen from nearly any point of the rather large cubicle farm room, thinking how stupid am I that I’m checking out mindless articles, giving over-exuberant amounts of claps to my writer friends (I dabble in writing, too, who doesn’t?), all the while knowing if I get caught, at best I’ll lose my weekend to mind-numbing menial work?
There could be lots of reasons, I guess. Like, for example, that I hate my job. Or that I had a funny sense that —
Something hit the back of my head, and I yelped. I felt back there. Didn’t seem to be any blood. On the brown berber carpet was a chewed-up pen cap, which I picked up and stared at.
“Hss!” I turned around to see who’d thrown the cap. From my cubicle, I could see three people — Bryan, Pam, and Julie on the other side of the aisle, their backs facing me, each seeming to be hard at work. On my left was Gail and my right Anthony, but they were behind glass panels and I would have noticed them moving with my peripheral vision. But I didn’t have time to figure out who’d thrown the pen — Chuck was strolling into the room from over in accounting. I guess the hurled missile had been meant to warn me.
It had worked. I was in the habit of keeping the arrow on the X in the upper right hand corner of the screen, so that with a single click, the internet would be gone, and a serious-looking Excel spreadsheet would appear. It had become a reflex, and the moment the cap hit my head, my cubicle had gotten a whole lot more businesslike.
Chuck had a mild, brainless smile on his face. He goes about 6’3”, which means I have to look up, he has thinning orange hair, pasty white skin, and wears glasses. Clean-shaven, soft. Today he was wearing a yellow shirt with a gray tie and was carrying some files under his arm. He leaned over to Bryan, who was on the aisle across from me, and exchanged some pleasantries. If Chuck had seen me reading erotica on Medium or trying to find a new self-help article on getting that job you love, he gave no sign.
Of course, that was the scary thing — he wouldn’t. You wouldn’t know you were in the dog house until he called you into his office, until he droned on for half an hour about his recent fishing trip or extracted a conversation about the Cards and whether they were doing enough to compete during Carson Palmer’s window, and then at the end, he’d tell you were fired or maybe that you had to go help Jennifer in Payroll this Saturday. You wouldn’t know until the end of the talk.
I think he likes that, no, I know he likes that. A beep came from my computer. I looked down and realized I’d unintentionally had the butt of my palm on the keyboard, and it had been deleting cells. Probably it had started slowly, but then it went faster and faster.
“Shit!” I went to the undo button and clicked on that a hundred times, until the spreadsheet looked like it had before.
“Springboro, Ohio Payroll for US Express,” boomed a voice behind me, making me jump halfway out of my seat. It was Chuck, of course. He’d snuck up on me and was leaning over the cubicle half-wall. I could see a white square — my screen — reflected in his glasses. He was reading the title of my spreadsheet, a good-natured smile on his face.
At least, it looked good-natured if you didn’t know him. My friend Joanne had thought so — she’d found out otherwise.
