The two of them worked in the Human Resources lobby, within a circular counter situated in the middle of a low-ceilinged, windowless room with recessed fluorescent lighting, dusty potted plants, and the oil portraits of hospital benefactors bolted to its walls. There were twenty-one chairs arranged in three semicircular rows facing one quadrant of the counter, and twenty-one clipboards with twenty-one pens attached to them by twenty-one tiny chains. And every day, from eight to five, there were twenty-one applicants rocking and fidgeting in these chairs, filling out job forms. Upon this beige-carpeted sea of employment anxiety, the other receptionist captained an efficient little ship of mission and service, gliding from computer to printer, from fax machine to phone console in her wheeled chair, which she steered expertly with her tiny feet. She could complete any task and offer any assistance without ever getting out of this chair. She could answer any question put to her and never move faster than was just necessary for whatever crisis was at hand. Clarissa Snow often caught herself staring in openmouthed awe at this woman, who spun chaos into order while turning placidly within her circular domain. She was like a twister in reverse, gliding cows into their pastures and floating roofs down upon houses.
There were eight phone lines at the reception desk, and they never stopped ringing, and Clarissa Snow’s job was to answer them. On her first day, she said “I don’t know” to so many callers that the other receptionist referred to her as the I Don’t Know Girl. “Just give them to me,” she said gaily. “Just give them all to me until you get the hang.” And as the morning progressed, so did Clarissa Snow. For some questions she consulted the Learned One, the other receptionist’s pet name for the Employment Bulletin, a black, half-foot-thick duct-taped ring binder of job listings for the entire county hospital system. Handling these calls was as easy as looking up a word in a dictionary and reading a definition into the phone. For questions that the Learned One could not handle and the I Don’t Know Girl could not yet possibly know — which schools offered EMT certification, for instance; or whether they would be hiring occupational therapists in the near future; or what the lunch special in the cafeteria was — for these questions, Clarissa Snow put the callers on hold, for no longer than two minutes, and gave them to the other receptionist, who — while simultaneously coding an applicant’s job forms or proofreading copy hot off the fax machine — took each call in turn, nodded with equal gravity to each query, and answered immediately: Northpoint College, possibly next month, and Cajun chicken with garlic mashed potatoes. Clarissa Snow noted the correct answers and eventually got the hang of these calls as well. “My, my,” the other receptionist said to her just before the lunch hour. “We’ll need to find another nickname for you, won’t we?” Clarissa Snow beamed as she left the lobby for lunch. The benefactors on the wall — a high gloss in their pink cheeks — seemed to beam after her.
O hubris of the temporary employee! For that very afternoon Clarissa Snow received a series of phone calls for which she was completely unprepared. “So,” began a woman on Line Six. “Do you think I should apply for this position to get my foot in the door and take the chance of getting stuck in a dead-end job? Or should I risk waiting for the job I really want to come up, which could possibly be never?” “Tell me,” Line Three implored. “Tell me I haven’t missed the application deadline for the job in Medical Records. Please, please, please. Please tell me that.” “Guess where I’m sleeping,” Line Four began. “Okay, I’ll tell you. I’m sleeping on my brother-in-law’s living room sofa. I’m a forty-four-year-old man sleeping on my brother-in-law’s living room sofa, and if I don’t get a job by the end of the month, the punk is going to toss me out on my ass.” “I see,” Clarissa Snow said. (What else could she say?) She was, by the end of the day, distressed and befuddled. But the other receptionist was encouraging. “A good day’s work,” she told her as they locked the lobby doors. And Clarissa Snow was comforted.
The next day was worse. One caller with questions about openings in Occupational Therapy proceeded to tell her about his messy divorce from “that bitch.” (Later that week, a woman would call and discuss her divorce from “that bastard,” leaving Clarissa Snow to ponder the coincidence.) A woman calling from a pay phone near some sort of major traffic artery shouted absurdly generic questions about employment—“What kind of work do you have! How much do you pay!”—then abruptly asked if you had to skip a meal, which one would you skip? An ex-priest struggling to get back into the job market confessed, with quivering voice, that he was scared. And there were more such as these, caller after caller who took Clarissa Snow’s rote offer of help and service too readily to heart; who begged her for work and pumped her for advice; who shared more than she needed or wanted to know about themselves, and without warning sent her sprawling into the intimate muck of their lives, clutching at her simply because she was the one who picked up the phone.
The other receptionist, of course, handled these calls expertly. She had an answer for everyone. Platitudes bubbled out of her as if from a ceaseless wellspring of benign concern. “That field is very promising. And that kind of work can’t be replaced by a machine, you know.” Or, “Well, breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Breakfast is definitely a keeper.” Or, “These are difficult times, darn it! But try back in the spring. Things always come up in the spring!” She nodded appreciatively, uh-huhed understandingly, then blissfully reeled off whatever cliché popped into her head.
By the end of her second day, Clarissa Snow had the jitters. And by the end of Week One of her eight-to-twelve-week assignment, she had developed an eczema rash on her neck and arms. She was popping aspirin like breath mints. Her hands would not stop shaking. Her bus ride to work in the mornings felt like the Bus Ride of Doom, her mind racing in loops of dread of the day to come. And out of this heat of her frenzied anxiety came the Jobless Beast, the coalescence of all callers: a large, sad, hulking thing that lived only to forage for employment; that slept in its car under freeways at night and emerged by day to make calls from pay phones; that loped from Human Resources Office to Human Resources Office, presenting itself with an awkward smile and a jocular tone edged with desperation, stooped and cramped from its hunger for work, for any morsel or crumb that Clarissa Snow had to offer, crying out to her, I’ll do anything, I’ll do anything, just help me, please. Why me? Why me? she implored the Beast in her mind. Because, the Beast implored back, because you answer the phone.
Her lunch hours, once easeful respites from the office, were now taken up with escape maneuvers from the Beast. She trekked as far from the hospital grounds as possible, hoping the malign presence of the Jobless Beast would diminish. It did, a little. She found scant relief at whatever bench or stoop would accommodate her, where she managed to eat her lunch: several raw brussels sprouts, a slice of apple on a bagel, a fistful of toasted soy nuts. An hour later she was back at her station behind the phone console. And after just a few calls her gut would begin to fill with a sadness so bloating that whatever she had managed to get down her throat at lunch would come right back up by afternoon break. As she dashed for the bathroom, the hospital benefactors regarded her from their ornate, theft-proof frames with undisguised pity.