Scattered laughter around the table. Barb managed a slight smile at the jab. “I suppose I would. Does that bother you?”
“Does it bother you?”
“No.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Why should it?”
“Is your job more important than your son?”
“What kind of question is that?”
“What do you mean, what kind of question is that? It’s a very simple question. Is your job more important than your son?”
“That’s asinine.”
“Asinine,” Jay said, his voice a mocking snort of dismay. He dragged on the butt of his cigarette and stubbed it out in the ashtray. “That’s right. It’s asinine to be more concerned for your kid than your day-job, but what the fuck do I know, right? I’m just the grunt that maintains the website and fixes the shit whenever some hacker releases a new Trojan on the internet.”
“Jay, I think you’re making a big deal out of this.” This comment came from Harold Tyler, one of the men who was in the meeting and who’d tagged along to Lone Star. He was at the far end of the table. Michelle didn’t know what his working relationship on the chain of command at Building Products was, but Michelle got the impression he had some kind of seniority over Jay. “Besides, Paul isn’t here anymore.”
Michelle was thinking this, too; she’d met Paul briefly when they first entered the Lone Star and hadn’t paid much attention to him as she tried to get involved with the conversation of her Corporate Financial Consultant colleague Alan, and the rest of the Building Products team. Jay and Paul had sat on their end of the table and talked and Michelle hadn’t really paid much attention to them until she happened to notice Jay was now alone. Paul had left, and Jay was nursing a cup of coffee and smoking a cigarette. Everybody else was nursing beers, except for Barb, who had been drinking bourbon on the rocks since their arrival. A few of them were getting tipsy, and Jay was watching them with what appeared to be a faint sense of scorn. It was then that she’d taken a step back and began listening to the conversations around her; they were talking about work and the project, and it had been their sole source of conversation for the past hour and a half.
“Yeah,” Jay said. “I guess I should have left when he took off.”
Barb gave Jay a look again, one that seemed to say I got the best of you, then turned to the rest of the party. Alan and Harold and the others slipped back into their conversation and once again the topic was work. They slipped into it so seamlessly that it was as if they hadn’t stopped the conversation—they just picked right up where they left off. Michelle was a little taken aback. I guess they were really itching to get back into whatever it was they were talking about. She picked up her glass, which was a quarter filled with beer, and took a sip.
She met Jay’s gaze over her glass and shrugged. “Well, just for the record, I’m still bored,” she said. Jay laughed.
“So is Paul’s daughter okay?” Michelle asked. She scooted her position so she was a little closer to him. Jay appeared momentarily surprised by her question but recovered. He began filling Michelle in. Yes, Paul’s daughter was fine, although she suffered a mild concussion, a broken arm, and a compound fracture in her left lower leg. She was still in the hospital but was going to be fine. Michelle said, “Well, I’d be out of my mind if it were my kid.”
“So is your job more important than your kid? Or should that be plural?” Jay asked. He lit another cigarette.
“It isn’t plural, and I don’t have children.” The little painful memory flashed briefly as it always did whenever anybody asked if she had children, and was quickly gone. “But if I did, my child would be more important than my job. What about you? You have kids”
“I have a son. He’s a year old. And it’s really nice to hear you’re not like the rest of these dolts.” Jay leaned back, fresh cigarette in hand. “You’re a breath of fresh air. And from Corporate Financial—you must be new.”
Michelle blinked, not sure what Jay meant by that remark. “Well, I am new. I just started with Corporate Financial a few weeks ago.”
“Really? Do you like them?”
“So far so good.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really.” Michelle took a sip of her beer. “Why do you ask?”
Jay shrugged, took a drag on his cigarette. “I always wondered what it was like to work for them. I hear the perks are pretty good.”
“They’re the best I’ve had so far.”
Jay appeared to think about this for a moment as he smoked. Everybody else at their table was still talking about the project, which Michelle had no interest in now. She shared Jay’s opinion regarding after-work discussion with co-workers. She’d worked jobs in the past where she went out with co-workers to a bar or restaurant after work to unwind and hang out and their jobs rarely came up in discussion. When it did, it was to complain about them. There were a few times members of management came to these after work drink-fests, and occasionally they would talk shop, but even they, too, eventually found other topics of discussion more varied than the office. Michelle commented on this to Jay, leaning toward him so she wouldn’t be overheard by the rest of their group and Jay leaned over the table so he could hear her, nodding in agreement. “Exactly!” he said. “I dig ya. That’s normal. These guys,” he indicated the group with an impatient gesture of his cigarette, “aren’t normal. They behave like mindless zombies.”
“Are they always like that?”
“Pretty much.” Jay took a drag on his cigarette. “It got worse after Corporate Financial started doing some work for Building Products.”
“Oh?” Michelle prepared herself for the slam against the company she worked for. Not that it would bother her; she’d learned long ago to separate her working time from her personal time and, as a result, things like what happened to her at work rarely bothered her. Even criticism against the company she worked for didn’t bother her. She wasn’t her company; that’s how she was able to take the criticisms levied against her employers. She didn’t make corporate decisions. Some faceless drone in a suit did. “How so?”
Jay regarded her a minute and his eyes flicked briefly to the group at their table. They were still deeply involved in their discussion of the project. Jay’s dark eyes went back to her again. “Well, I can tell you’re cool because of what you said earlier about choosing your personal life over your job. Don’t construe this as a slam against you or anything, or a slam against your employer, because it isn’t.”
“None will be taken,” Michelle said. Despite having quit smoking seven years ago, the urge to take it up again was strong now, mostly having to do with breathing Jay’s second hand smoke.
“I’ve been at Building Products for five years,” Jay began, his voice lowered slightly. “And it was cool when I first started, but like all jobs it has its ups and downs. You know? Office politics, management bullshit, that kind of thing. I don’t give a shit about any of that anyway. Never have. They pay me to come in and do their website and maintain their servers and do anything internet and web-related and that’s what I do. I don’t give a flying fuck if my boss is fucking his secretary, or if Barb over there is a closet alcoholic who neglects her kids—which she does, by the way—or if some know-nothing executive wants to initiate some stupid bullshit policy that will end up costing the company thousands of dollars in productivity because it’ll make his bottom-line look good to the stockholders and it completely wastes my time when I can be doing stuff that’ll keep the company running. I don’t really give a shit, long as I get paid on time and have my medical insurance and 401k. I just come in and do what they ask me to do and I try to do as good a job as I can, to the best of my abilities, and in my humble opinion I think I’m pretty goddamned good at what I do. There are times if I see something that will be a waste of time, I let my boss know and many times he agrees. If he doesn’t, that’s cool. Whatever. Like I said, I don’t give a shit. They want me to put porn on their website, I’ll do it even though I think it’s wrong, know what I mean?”