Thursday: Spend hour and a half writing article I will never publish. Last half of first draft interrupted by night time call from my girlfriend. “Do you want to do something crazy?” she asks.
Nothing too crazy. Only a late supper. Or an early breakfast, depending on one’s perspective and considering what we’re having. A date, and a good one at that. We meet at My Fair City’s one-and-only known all-night waffle house. I order a Strawberry Belgian, side of bacon, and a chocolate milk shake. For her, a veggie omelet with hash browns. Milkshake: strawberry. And all is right with the world.
Lat night bus schedule dictates we must eat our break quite fast, or else face the long walk home with full, rolling stomachs. We wrap our left-overs in tin foil and huff it, both sated and drowsy with digestion.
We get home and I smoke my last cigarette. I fall asleep in my lover’s arms and wait.
Friday: Pay day. I open the article I’d left in situ the night before. I find it’s suffered and died during the interim. I’ve lost its thread somewhere, somewhen.
Fuck it, I think, leaving to pick up my pay check.
It’s a ninety minute commute to my place of work. My cube farm in the Silicon Forest. I get there and receive the third degree from my manager. “Were you scheduled today?” he asks.
The scheduling program is open right before his face. I can see myself there, and the blank space that is Friday. For two months I’ve worked four, ten hour days for the explicit purpose of keeping Friday to myself. I’ve not worked a Friday since July. Since my birthday, in fact.
“Well, you were scheduled today, and you’re already late.”
Bullshit. The word rushes up through the breakers of my mind, whole, rabid, wanting nothing more than to build a home in my boss’s ear.
Instead I say something far less articulate. “Nuh-uh,” or somesuch like. “My schedule, it just says, ‘Off’. I’m always off on Friday. I’ve already worked my forty hours.”
Bullshit, indeed, but to say so would not be polite, now would it? And it would certainly not fall into my plan of keeping the mask in place. We all wear our masks in public, do we not? I certainly find I must…to function if nothing else.
“No, look, it says ‘Nine-to-ten-thirty, off.’ Then ‘ten-thirty to noon, off’. So you were scheduled from nine to noon and you’re already late.’”
The hell I am, fool, I think to him. Unless your dumb ass is about to pay me over time, ‘Off’ still means ‘off’ in my part of the English language. “Off,” as in, “I go home, you stay here.” “Off,” as in, “this time is my time.” “Off,” as in, “You will cease to pay me for this amount of time, and I will cease to think a single, blessed thing about you, you managerial monster.”
So for ten minutes my boss and I dance a dance of ignorance. Apparently, a good number of my coworkers misread their own schedules and failed to show up on this fine Friday. I am not one of those workers. Ten minutes, a quick walk to my desk, and a comparison of schedules later and my boss, he says, “Don’t worry about it.”
I smile. Oh, don’t worry, I think to him, but do not say. I won’t.
I don’t say it because his eyes are wild and spinning in their caves. His mind is haggard and thrown to the four winds. He must do the work of twelve now, to make up for the missed work of five. He has no pension, no savings, and no plan beyond the coming weekend which, for him, will be exactly one day long. He is a poor, small, frightened man and I do pity him.
But I’m not about to worry for him. Not one damn bit. His accusation, mistaken though it may be, stung a deep and very Protestant part of my brain. The part that honors its obligations and tells me, Work. And save. The part that drags me from my girlfriend’s side every morning and brings me to that awful place and now realizes it doesn’t matter. That I am, once again, guilty until proven innocent. After all, the call center employee is a useless jack-about, unsuited for even the simplest unsupervised task. They must be watched and called to task at the slightest provocation because the entry-level call center employee is little more than a half-bright animal really. Child-like and sad. Their sloth and laziness really can’t be helped, you see, though it is the (white) Manager’s Burden to eternally try. Through goading, through promising, through careful persuasion. And, if all else fails, through bald-faced accusation.
So I won’t worry about my boss, or “it.” No. Instead I’ll worry about the fact that I call in, by God, when I’m gonna cut work. And how much of a fool does that really make me?
As I leave, another six-hundred forty-four ill-gotten dollars in hand, I think of the long, odd causal chain of association that must flourish inside my bosses head. After all, he assumed (1) that I was scheduled to work, despite the evidence before his face (2) that I then skipped work for God-only-knows what reason, before ignorantly (3) stopping by, and walking right to the man’s desk. What kind of fool cuts work, only to show up with his hand out a few hours later?
The kind of fool foolish enough to voluntarily work my job.
To that end I realized I do not hate my job, but I will soon. It won’t take long and when it comes it will come a’ sneaking under the invisible seams along the side of my face. My mask will slip as surely as Vic Sage’s did when he took up smoking. (Filthy habit, kids. Don’t ever pick it up.) I can feel this happening already, during the long, slow progressions of my ten hour days. It’s the trapped-animal feeling that always comes to me whenever I’m forced to do something I do not wish to do. Do not believe in. Do not care for, with, or about. When I’m doing any job, in other words, that is not this, my real Work, the writing.
What else?
Saturday: I write. I drink. I do not smoke.
Sunday: I do the same, with reading thrown in for good measure. Because those without time to read do not have time to write and that’s a fact, as the video game says.
In between I nurse my girlfriend, who’s come down with what, at first, she thought were allergies. Now her eyes water and her nose runs and its day two of these “allergies.” She and I both know there something else. “Don’t get to close,” she warns me. This I ignore, as I ignore so much good advice.
Monday: I wake at 4:16 a.m. The voice in my head tells me, Call in sick. It is the calm, still voice inside my mind and this is the first time its woken me up in the middle of the night. In the past, I’ve dismissed it as a hallucinogenic fantasy, a paranoid delusion, or something worse. But at four in the morning its words carry more weight…a weight I feel creeping slowly through spaces in my head that are usually empty.
Not their clogged. I can barely breath. Swallowing is a godly effort. My head feels twice as large as I know it should and I think, Maybe the Magic Voice is on to something here. Yep, sure seems that way.
Restless sleep takes me back into itself. In my dream I call in sick and am summarily fired. I call in sick and my manager screams down the line, the Wicked Witch of the South West. “How ‘bout a little fire, Scarecrow?” he asks in his new high keening Wicked voice.
My alarm rings. Its seven a.m. A ninety minute commute stares down into my gullet but I am just asleep enough to remember Friday. And the voice. Separately, the two would be forgotten and dismissed and I would be waiting for a train home now, miles away from my computer. But taken together, the Magic Voice and bitter experience have led me to declare this National Fuck Your Job day.
So I did. I dialed the Sick Line number, handily provided on the back of every employee badge. I negotiated the Byzantine automated phone system that answered my call, story primed and at the ready for the inevitable questions. “Why are you calling in sick, D?” Well, it’s like this: the little voice in my head woke me up at four a.m. to tell me to. Because it hates your guts, and all you stand for. Suck on that, you mistrusting bastard.
“Thank you for calling ——‘s Automated Help Line. No manager is available to take your call. To leave a message, press—”
I press one, speak my piece, and crawl back into bed with my beloved, head pounding, voice cracked and spent.
Hours later I wake to the sun in my eyes and think, I can’t waste this day. Oh, no. The old Protestant part of my brain would never allow that.
So I scan the classifieds, plan out bus routes and chorus lines, and format a short story I plan to send to Asimov’s. Within hours I’ve located another call center, less than thirty minutes from my home. They’re hiring, and on my way from the post office.
I consider myself lucky, despite the way daylight stings my watering, salt encrusted eyes. Despite the way bus fumes and screaming children make my head throb. The receptionist doesn’t seem to mind. She hands me the sheet, times me on the typing test, and within thirty minutes I’m back out the door, spent, but happy.
Fuck work. I’ve lived today. And someday, God’s willing (har har) I’ll make the difference very clear to a certain boss of mine.
Then we’ll see who worries.
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