I returned to work feeling lighter and happier for my little noontime jaunt.
I promised myself I’d spend more of my lunch hours exploring Irvine.
The days dragged.
My job was mind-numbingly boring, made even more so by the knowledge that it was completely useless. From what I could tell, Automated Interface would have had absolutely no trouble getting along without me. The corporation could have eliminated my position entirely and no one would have even noticed.
I mentioned this to Jane over dinner one night, and she tried to tell me that, when you got down to it, most jobs were useless. “What about the people who work for companies that make foot deodorant or those magnets that look like sandwiches and Oreo cookies? No one really needs that stuff. Those people’s jobs aren’t important.”
“Yeah, but people buy those things. People want those things.”
“People want computer things, too.”
“But I don’t even make computer things. I don’t design, produce, market, or sell — ”
“There are people with jobs like yours in every company.”
“That doesn’t make it okay.”
She looked at me. “What do you want to do? Go to Africa and feed starving children? I don’t think you’re the type.”
“I’m not saying that — ”
“What are you saying, then?”
I let it drop. I could not seem to articulate what I was trying to say. I felt useless and unimportant — guilty, I suppose, for taking home a paycheck when I wasn’t actually doing or accomplishing anything. It was a strange feeling, and not one I could easily explain to Jane, but it discomfited me and I was not able to ignore it.
Although I did not like my job, I did not hate it enough to quit. In the back of my mind was the idea that this was temporary, something to tide me over until I found the position I really wanted. I told myself this was a transitional phase between school and my real occupation.
But I had no idea what my “real” occupation would be.
One thing I quickly learned was that, in a major corporation, as much time is spent trying to look busy as is spent actually working. The week’s worth of assignments I was given each Monday I could have easily completed by Wednesday, but although workers in movies and on TV eagerly complete their assignments in record time and then ask for more work, impressing those higher up on the corporate ladder and elevating themselves through the ranks, it was made clear to me early on that such initiative in real life was not only not encouraged, it was frowned upon. The people surrounding me in the company hierarchy had asses to protect. They had, over the years, worked out what was for them a comfortable ratio of work to nonwork, and if I suddenly started cranking out documentation, it would throw off the productivity curve in the company’s labor distribution study. It would make them look bad. It would make my supervisor look bad; it would make his supervisor look bad. What I was expected to do was equal or improve very slightly upon the output of my predecessor. Period. I was supposed to fit into the preexisting niche created for me and conform to its boundaries. The Peter Principle in action.
Which meant that I had a lot of time to kill.
I learned quickly to follow the lead of those around me, and I discovered many ways to simulate hard work. When Stewart or Banks stopped by the office to check on my progress, there were paper shufflings I could perform, desk straightenings I could do, drawers I could rifle through. I don’t know if Derek ever noticed my little act, but if he did, he didn’t say anything. I suspected that he did the same thing himself, since he too seemed to suddenly become a lot busier when the supervisor or department head came into the office.
I missed going to school, and I seemed to spend a lot of time thinking about it. I’d had fun in college, and though it had been less than half a year since I graduated, emotionally those days seemed a million miles away. I found that I missed being with people my own age, missed just doing nothing and hanging out. I remembered the time I went with Craig Miller to the Erogenous Zone, an “adult” toy store in a seedy mini-mall close to campus. We’d been carpooling at the time, and Craig suggested that we stop by the shop. I’d never been there, was kind of curious and said okay, and we pulled into the small L-shaped parking lot. The second we walked into the store, ringing the small bell above the door, all three cashiers and several customers turned to look at us. “Craig!” they called out in unison. It reminded me of the TV show Cheers, when the patrons of the bar would all cry, “Norm!”, and I couldn’t help laughing. Craig grinned at me sheepishly, and I remembered thinking, in the words of the song, how nice it was to go to a place where everybody knew your name.
At Automated Interface, no one knew my name.
I was still not sure why I’d been hired, particularly since both Stewart and Banks seemed to despise me. Was I some sort of quota hiree? Did I meet some type of criteria or fit into the right age or ethnic group? I had no idea. I only knew that if the hiring had been up to Banks or Stewart, I would not have gotten the job.
I seldom saw Ted Banks, but when I did, when he took his occasional tours of the department, he was rude to me and unnecessarily abrasive. Unprovoked, he made derogatory comments about my hair, my ties, my posture, anything he could think of. I had no idea why he did this, but I tried to ignore it and play it off.
Ron Stewart was a little harder to ignore. He was not as obvious or crude in his dislike as Banks; he was even polite to me in a superficial way, but there was something about him that rubbed me the wrong way. When he spoke, it was always with a slight trace of condescension. His words were pleasant enough, but they were delivered in a manner that made it clear he felt far superior to me in intellect and position and was doing me a great favor by talking to me at all.
The annoying thing was that, when talking to him, I couldn’t help feeling that he was superior to me, that he was more intelligent, more interesting, more sophisticated, more everything. The words we spoke were the friendly words of equals, but the underlying attitudes that subtly shaped the subtexts of our conversations told a different story, and I found myself behaving in a slightly subservient manner, playing the deferential flunky to his smug overseer, and though I hated myself for it, I couldn’t help it.
I wondered if I was being paranoid. Maybe Banks and Stewart treated everyone that way.
No. Banks joked with the programmers, was courteous to the secretary and the steno women. Stewart was friendly to all of the other people under him. He even indulged in light conversation with Derek.
I was the sole recipient of their hostility.
It was about a month after I’d been hired that I heard Stewart and Banks talking in the hallway outside of my office. They were speaking loudly, just outside the door, as though they wanted to make sure I heard what they were saying.
I did.
Banks: “How’s he working out?”
“He’s not a team player.” Stewart. “I don’t know that he’ll ever get with the program.”
“We have no room here for slackers.”
My first review was not for another two months. They were just trying to provoke me. I knew that, but still I felt angry, and I could not let such accusations go unchallenged. I stood up, strode around my desk and into the hall. “For your information,” I said, confronting them, “I have completed every assignment given to me, and I have completed them all on time.”
Stewart looked at me mildly. “That’s nice, Jones.”
“I heard what you said about me — ”
Banks smiled indulgently, all innocence. “We weren’t talking about you, Jones. What made you think we were talking about you?”