What a flagrant waste of wages. It would be far more efficient to have me recopy the set and cut the others down for scrap paper.
I knock on his door. Silence.
I knock again. He initiates a phone call.
Confident in my assessment of the situation, I set off for the copy room. Of course, all the paper trays are empty. When I open the cabinet for more, I am met with a bright orange Post-it note. It reads: Ms. Baker, Do NOT make new copies.
I can’t even…
Shaping up to be my least productive day. Ever.
10:35 a.m.
*
Location
: Conference room B.
UP TO MY GIZZARD in sorted stacks of corporate propaganda. Reams and reams of it. The Lorax would be impressed with our tree carnage.
It now makes sense to me that it was both a) important not to waste this much paper by reprinting, and b) a mistake by a former personal assistant worthy of at least reprimand, if not quite deserving of dismissal.
Make personal note to propose we use a short-run printing house to produce similar future projects.
“So this is the tower that Beast has been keeping you toiling away in?” Madeline teases, entering the room.
I greet her with a withering look. “It’s not so bad, actually,” I say and imagine what it will be like to have to spend eight hours a day working closer to Canon, in the scorched earth outside his office. “It could be much, much worse.”
She starts to set down a fresh cup of coffee and a piece of her homemade banana bread near a few sorted paper stacks. I suck up half the air in the room as I imagine coffee stains ruining the project to which I have dedicated my entire day thus far.
“I’ll just put this down over here,” she says, placing it on a separate table. “I thought you could probably use a pick-me-up, and I wasn’t sure Mr. Canon allows breaks. I wouldn’t want to see what would happen to you if you incurred that man’s wrath.”
Wrath of the Tight End. I’d watch that movie. I might even buy the DVD. It couldn’t be any worse than the remakes.
I know I’m legally entitled to a break, but I didn’t take one. Not sure why. But I sincerely appreciate Madeline’s thoughtfulness. She’s like a USO pilot, dropping a care package behind enemy lines.
4:10 p.m.
*
Mindless Tasks
: Causing me to lose mine.
I’M IN THE BASEMENT, hunting for the market trials we did on preteen pseudo-cosmetics years ago.
It’s a wild goose hunt, and I’m dangerously close to cooking Canon’s.
I get the distinct impression that Canon is avoiding me.
Why, I do not know. Maybe he wants to avoid the hassle of hiring yet another PA before his upcoming trip. Never being near me definitely limits the opportunities to irritate him.
I have had far too much time to myself down here. Like, life-evaluating time.
I feel like my life is on hold, in limbo. Do this. Accomplish that. Work. School. Rent.
Clara says I don’t leave time for love. I won’t argue. But it’s not accurate.
I don’t exhaust time on relationships or people who aren’t worth what little time I have.
Which sounds bitchy, now that I put it in so many words. It’s probably more…cautious. I want a love like my grandparents had. Grandpa saw my grandma on the first day she started at his school and said, “That’s my girl.” They never parted until their dying days. An inexplicable aura of caring.
A hollow clunk from the basement door startles me, and I drop a file. Papers scatter in two hundred directions. I begin playing fifty-two pick up. When I’m a few papers away from done, I can see a person’s shadow move against the far wall.
I stop short.
“Hello?” I force my voice out, quashing most traces of fear.
“Ms. Baker.” Canon steps out from behind a rusty file cabinet. If he brushes against it, he’s gonna need a tetanus booster. “You’ve been down here a long time. I wanted to make sure everything was okay.”
Make sure everything is okay down here? Or that I am okay here?
Huh. That is…nice.
I don’t know what to do with that.
He’s standing to the side, apparently surveying the place. I can’t see his face, just the outline of his frame. I note, appreciatively, that his voice has a calming effect. Which is good since he was skulking around down here like the Ghost of Christmas Party Blow Offs Past.
He’s wearing the norm. Suit. Button shirt. Designer tie. It’s how he’s wearing them that stops me.
Let me make it through a week at this job. Oh, I won’t last long, but I can make like a Young Gun and go down in a blaze of glory.
Day of Employment:
370
9:22 a.m.
*
Old Desk
: Makeshift Vegas.
*
Canon
: Add an “N” in the middle and launch him out of his own name.
HE HAS LEFT ME ANOTHER LIST.
Madeline has turned my old desk into a veritable gamblers’ oasis. There are side bets on everything ranging from what I will screw up to get fired, to how long it will be before Canon deigns to interact with me.
Lists are a favorite tool of mine. I don’t have anything against lists.
I am, however, beginning to resent being left a list of tasks a mentally compromised orangutan could complete with minimal difficulty.
He must think I am a grade-A dolt.
Nothing can get me righteously pissed off faster. Do not pass go. Do not collect your teeth from the floor.
Visit my old desk. Rest and recuperation in the old stomping ground.
Bert assaults his keyboard.
“How’s your workweek going?” I ask him. “Anything new or exciting going on?”
“I work in a box. My weeks are all pretty much the same.”
Fair enough.
12:19 p.m.
*
Lunch
: Cold. Mine. His. Both.
*
Demeanor
: Icy.
I WAS BID TO GO AND FETCH his lunch. Which I did.
I delivered it to an empty desk over twenty minutes ago.
He did not bother to share his whereabouts with me. Even setting aside how impossible not knowing such an important detail cripples the ability to be an effective assistant, that makes the dropping of everything and dashing off to retrieve his hot food pointless.
Now, I am told to set it outside the conference room door.
I am not a labrador.
However, I am closer than ever to lifting a leg. I’d cheerfully whizz in his Cheerios.
5:00 p.m.
HE IS WITHOUT A DOUBT, bar none, the most infuriating man on the planet. If I didn’t need this job so desperately, I would tell him where to stick it. I could draw a detailed, relief map of it. Describe it so well that a police artist’s sketch artist’s rendering could look like a sixty megapixel image.
How long have I worked for him? Three days? Three full days and not a single word spoken to my face. Not a syllable or a gesture or even a yawn. The most I get from him is a condescending look now and again, as he shreds another file.
Earlier this morning, just when I had begun to consider that he was perhaps stricken with acute onset laryngitis, I overheard Canon on a call, clicking his pen, and talking to any damned person but me.
And now, he is looking at me, staring at me in the corridor by the time clock, as if someone who looks like him has never seen a woman like me in a dress before. As if my clothes are not suitable. Well, hell. I ran out of dishwater-dull duds and had to resort to a short, black column dress.