Josh M. Parker
Typical Day?
I woke up, not even realizing I’d fallen asleep, to the sound of hammering on my door. I peeled myself off the sofa and rubbed the morning grit from my eyes. I’d slept in the living room. I guess I was afraid that with none of my idiot friends couch-surfing last night, the sofa would be lonely.
The hammering again. "Yeah, yeah," I muttered, stretching and running a hand through my hair. I was hoping it wouldn’t be the super. To give you an idea of how much I did not want it to be the super, I will admit that I would have been relieved to see Mr. Mister on the other side of the door, thrusting a blandly handsome wallet-model in my face and asking if I’d seen this man.
In fact, I was so certain that this was what I would see that for a moment, I did. I opened the door and there he stood, his suit in place and his earpiece, clean now, neatly plugged into his right ear. I blinked, and Mr. Mister became Chucky.
"You comin’ into work today, bruh?" he asked, a gap-toothed smile crossing his Cro-Magnon features. "It’s like, a quarter past nine."
Oh, fuck my ass with a cheese grater. He was right. Well, okay, he was wrong, because he doesn’t understand the difference between "a quarter past" and "half past", and it was, in fact, half-past. Derek was going to do to me about the worst thing a boss can do to you. Not yell, just give me that face, you know the one, like you’re his only son and you’ve bitterly disappointed him. A chewing-out I can take. That look makes me ashamed I was ever hired.
"Yeah, sure," I said. "Sorry, I guess I didn’t hear my alarm go off." That’s the kind of thing that happens when you go to sleep in your living room, and your alarm is in your bedroom.
As I hurriedly tried to make my hair look like I hadn’t slept on it, and changed my shirt, hoping no one would notice that I was wearing the same pants, I thought about the events of the previous night. To say they were odd would be about as understated as saying that life in the factory town is basically a series of oddities. See, we know our town is a bit odd, because as I mentioned, we do occasionally see what life is like in other towns. It’s just that our oddness is ours. We own it. We live with it day by day, and it doesn’t really seem that odd anymore.
That’s not how last night felt. This business of feeling watched by some unseen presence, not to mention Mr. Mister or the neighborhood kids and their catastrophic pass-times. Last night was definitely an alien experience, even for the factory town. And the end result was that I was so preoccupied with it that I stayed up late and fell asleep on my sofa. This morning it didn’t seem quite so serious. Maybe it really was just my growing need to get out of this town. Maybe it was my frustrations with how ridiculous this place, and the people in it, can be.
I followed Chucky down the stairs and together we headed for his truck. I could see Soup already seated in the cab. The eternally jobless Soup, who played bass in our band and lived with his parents.
"Why’s he here?" I asked Chucky.
"He didn’t have nuthin’ better to do," he said. He seemed to think that explained it.
Sometimes I feel a bit guilty that I still hang out with Chucky and Soup. Then I remember that this is Chucky and Soup I’m talking about. Yes, I think I mostly do hang out with them because it makes me feel smarter by comparison. They’re certainly no pair of Einsteins or even Al Bundy’s.
"Hey, Wes, hopin’ to play hooky today?" Soup bellowed from the cab. His rotund form threatened to make it a squishy ride.
"Well, sorry, Soup," I said. "I guess you’re always on time for your job."
The jab failed to land. "S’right," he said. "That’s the advantage of not having one. I’m never late!"
Like I said, smarter by comparison.
I threw my bike in the back of the pickup, then Chucky and I did our best to wedge ourselves into what little seat remained on either side of Soup, and off we went.
I should explain a few things about my friends. I’ve already told you that we all grew up together, and that we’re now in a band together. This is true. What I haven’t told you is that I never have liked either of them, but I couldn’t get them to leave me alone when I was a kid, and eventually grew to accept their presence.
Also, their names aren’t Soup and Chucky. We call Soup Soup because his name is Campbell, and thus, well, if I have to explain it, I’ll probably have to explain quite a bit about what’s been going on in the world since you crawled out from under your rock.
We call Chucky Chucky because he’s a fucking douchebag.
The band idea came together in High School and writing that down just now has sliced another cross-section off my soul. We started out trying to be grunge, which for those of you born after the year 2000 is this style of music that looked like Punk Rock after it lost its razor and spent a weekend in the gutter following some hard drinking, and sounded like the buzzings of many flies after they smoked some hash. I personally love it, but like so much, it didn’t last.
Nowadays, in an effort to stay legit but not completely sell out, we’ve moved on to Black Metal, which is when a bunch of middle-aged men who want to feel edgy grow their hair long, paint their faces in weird designs, and sing about demons and possession and all those things your mother was certain, back in the 70’s, that all rock music was about. The end result sounds more like a garburator trying to digest a Toyota transmission. Of the three of us, only Chucky has the hair, and we don’t do the paint on our faces, primarily because we can’t afford the paint. But the middle-aged part is getting more and more authentic all the time.
We call ourselves Sepulchräe, which means...that it looks and sounds kinda cool, and we all feel like it’s a name a real metal band would use. It’s got an umlaut, which right there makes it twenty-five percent more metal than the runner-up name, Carnal Cathedral. We’re still planning on using that as the name of our first album. Yes, fifteen years together and we’re still talking about our "first" album. We are pros.
I’ve been allowing myself to believe that our band is the thing that will get me out of this town. In fact, that was one of the reasons I started it. My plan was, form a band, get heard by lots of people, get signed to a label and go on tour. As I got older, my rational side had to admit that the plan had unraveled. But I couldn’t bring myself to give it up because the band had transformed from the thing that was going to save me to the only thing that was keeping me sane.
My dad passed away when I was twenty-two. You’re not supposed to lose your dad that young, and even though I was technically an adult already, I had grown out of that idea you get between the ages of twelve and eighteen that you’re already smarter than all the adults around you and could, in fact, teach them a few lessons about life. By my early twenties, I had reality come crashing down on me all in one fell swoop, even before we realized Dad had cancer, and I realized that not only couldn’t I teach my elders anything, I wasn’t really finished being raised. I probably should have been, but it’s hard to teach anything to a kid who thinks he knows everything. So, in a lot of ways I was still a kid, and now I didn’t have my dad.
I’m not saying Dad was any great wise man. But he was someone I could lean on, and now I didn’t have that. To make matters worse, I now didn’t have my mom. Not really, at any rate. Dad’s death transformed her. She withdrew, got old before her time and basically just...stopped. Once a week, at least, I make it a point to stop by her house, make sure she’s eating, make sure her bills are being paid on time with Dad’s life insurance money, do any odd jobs she needs and read her the newspaper, being careful to edit out some of the more uncomfortable items like the odd death or disappearance, the rain of toads we had one time shortly after the factory had a small fire break out in Central Containment, or the strange red lights seen coming from the woods.
So, I can’t say there’s a lot in my life I’m holding on to. I mentioned one of them already; my friend Sam who will probably marry someone more stable and have a number of little babies that will have her beautiful smile and her husband’s unibrow, and that will be the end of my love life, which only barely existed in the first place, and never will exist once I lose her. Well, fail to ever have her.
The band is the only other one. What about my job, you ask. Well, what about my job?
Speaking of, we were nearing the factory. Chucky was blasting some Bring Me the Horizon on the car’s low-fi CD player, because he hates life and everything in it.
I felt Soup’s hands doing something weird next to me. I looked down and saw he was flipping off the factory with both middle fingers as we drove and muttering something under his breath. Even sitting next to him it was hard to hear, but it sounded like "fifty black muffins". Fifty black muffins. Only my stupid friends...
"Hey, Roger," said Chucky to the gate guard. Roger hadn’t said a word to us in years. He silently raised the gate and we headed in.
That’s when I saw the tall man in the white suit standing by the loading bay’s entrance. He was rail thin, had a tan, wore his hair slicked back like a 40’s gangster and from where I was standing he looked very tall. Possibly taller than the doorway. He was watching me. I guess he might have been watching Chucky, or even Soup, but the feeling I had last night was back again. No, I was definitely the one he was looking at. I shook my head and silently hoped he wasn’t Mr. Mister’s partner.
I’ve spoken before about my office, and I don’t have much to add about it except that at this point in my day I was no longer the only person in it.
Patch Morgan sat at the cubicle next to me. He was a sorry sight. I don’t mean that morning. I mean every morning. Over forty, paunchy, bespectacled and with a voice that sounded like a cross between Steven Wright and David Schwimmer. He claimed to have been married once, but I’ve known him for ten years and I’ve never known him to even date. In short, he’s a frightening vision of my future.
Karl Budd sat next to him. Karl has been here the longest, and he’s our senior desk-side representative.
Technically we all make desk-side visits, but Karl is the one designated our "senior", which means he’s utterly dedicated to finding various, and rather ingenious, methods of ensuring that he’s never available when a visit is needed. Karl long ago quit caring about our dress code, and is usually wearing a t-shirt plastered with a message broadcasting his mood (today it was "Old, Unfit and Sick of Your Shit"), old, dirty jeans and literal combat boots. His hair was long and shaggy, as was his beard, and he had numerous faded, old tattoos. He’s a pretty talented musician as well, and I asked him once if he was interested in joining Sepulchräe, and he looked me dead in the face and said something I’ll never forget.
"The day I lower myself to join your little Negative-Zone of skill and professionalism will be the day I walk on my lips across the wet storage stains in the factory’s greenhouse."
I took that as a "maybe".
Derek Waddell was, as I was afraid of, standing by my desk. Derek was what we call a prodigy. Only 28, he looked like a snazzier version of Neil Patrick Harris, only he carried himself with more dignity and poise. I honestly don’t know why he stays around this place, but he manages to combine the two traits of a manager I like the best: he came up through the trenches, so he knows how we do our job, and he leaves us the hell alone to do it. I couldn’t help but respect the guy.
Which is why I felt like a whipped hound when I saw the expression on his face.
"Good morning, Wes," he said. "I usually say that about two hours ago."
I did forget to mention one thing about Derek. His only hang-up is punctuality. I’m not usually late, and when I am it’s not this late, but when I am, he makes note of it. Usually my late evenings make up for it, but this was not the case for walking in more than two hours past my start time.
"Listen, Derek," I said. "I know what you’re gonna say, but it won’t happen again, okay? I had...kind of a rough night last night."
"Should I smell your breath?" he asked.
"Not that kind of late night," I hastily replied. "Just going through some things, okay? My uh...my cat died."
"Sorry to hear that," said Derek, not really sounding all that sorry. "So did Christina’s."
"And mine," said Patch.
"And Patch’s," said Derek. "And Ferd’s. They were all here on time."
I sighed and slumped at my desk. I might respect Derek, but when he turns into a slave-driver about timeliness he can be a real ass. By the way, I forgot to mention the other side of the room. Christina, Naresh and Ferd make up the network and infrastructure team. For people with such shitty jobs, they’re usually quite chipper. Maybe the factory broke them. Naresh won’t shut up about video games, which is annoying because Patch and Derek like them, too, and they can talk about them for hours.
Christina is the only one here who could actually advance herself in this place. She’s sort of our token female and is very bright, outgoing and motivated. She’s also only 19 and just started here about a month ago. I give her another three months until she snaps.
Ferd...well, Ferd is unique. He was cursed with Resting Bitch Face, meaning he always looks like he just swallowed a dog turd, until he smiles. Then he looks demonic. Actually, he smiles about as much as he frowns, which means I try to keep sharp, pointy objects away from him. I don’t tend to talk to him unless I have to.
I started firing up my apps and wondering what kind of emails I was about to see. Probably a few angry ones from users wondering why I had not resolved their issues from the day before. I’ll briefly explain what happens to me on most days, but I’ll keep the details to a minimum so as not to depress you too much. Essentially what happens is a user will send in a ticket about some issue. Say they can’t print. Well, my duty is then to call them up, see what I can do to resolve it remotely, and then head over there if it turns out to be a hardware issue. But I can’t do jack shit until I reach the user, which is about as easy as putting toothpaste back in the tube with a fork. Users are forever not answering their phone, not in their office when I call, screaming uncontrollably or too busy with their jobs when I do get ahold of them. But they never take that into account when it comes to speed of resolution. Somehow I am expected to work feats of great sorcery and resolve their issues without them ever having to see or speak to me. As if I have the kind of resume that would get me into the sorcery department.
I’ve often had the conversation with my co-workers over which job is more thankless; that of IT or janitorial services. It’s a close call, but I think we win out. Or is it that we lose out? Well, anyway, I think we’re at the top rung of the thanklessness ladder. Sure, both our departments have a lot in common. No one notices at all when we do our jobs well, even if we really shine, and in both cases if we manage to miss something, no one ever forgets and complains endlessly about the "worthless" cleaning and/or IT crew. But where the janitors get off easy is in the blame category.
If a user spills their own coffee cup all over their own desk, or splatters their own wall with half-human entrails, or accidentally causes stored items to fall off their shelves, or pukes chunky black blood on the new carpet, they don’t immediately blame that on the janitor. They might call the janitor to clean it up, but they won’t act like the janitor is at fault for it even happening. They don’t get calls saying "your mop-up job has caused an explosion of viscera in raw materials!" IT, on the other hand, is frequently blamed for any problems the user had. It doesn’t matter what it is, or when we dealt with them last. Just the other day, Patch got a call from Eunice Hardiger on 5. Eunice is always angry because her name is Eunice Hardiger, but we can’t help her with that. So she takes her anger out on us by calling us at least once a week, usually raising the roof about some issue like her Ex-Site password expiring, her external hard drive speaking to her in the voice of her dead son, her emails not sending fast enough, you know. Standard stuff, but to her it’s the end of the world, and she’s confident it’s our fault.
This time, she was assuring Patch that my updating her to Office 2016 last month had changed her home page from the company’s website to a picture of a leering, grinning face covered in blood. It’s usually a simple job of running her virus scanner, a quick exorcism and resetting her home page back again, but she was more interested in assigning blame than actually solving the problem. Janitors don’t get that. They’re just asked to clean up shit, and as long as they do it, no one complains.
As my emails began to load, I got a sinking feeling that turned into blood-freezing terror. On top of Mr. Mister, the kids and their feline felonious behavior, the feeling from last night and everything else, the only thing more unsettling than all of that put together had just come into my inbox.
My boss had scheduled a meeting between himself, myself and an HR representative for an hour ago.
I don’t mean Derek. That would have been bad enough. I mean Derek’s boss. The Director of Information Services himself...Peter Dyck.
He hates it when I call him that. Which sucks for him, because it’s his name.
I hate Peter Dyck. He is the image of everything I find repugnant in the corporate professional. He ass-kissed and delegated his way into his upper-management position by learning and using what I think of as “manager-speak”, which sounds like English, but only makes sense if you’re in management, or want to be. Every now and then he’ll talk to us about “dramatically maximizing resource-leveling paradigms” or “appropriately targeting multifunctional potentialities” and that’s when he’s talking to us grunts. I shudder to think what kind of bullshitese gets spoken when he gets together with upper management types.
But as much as I hate Peter, he hates me worse. More than once he’s threatened to fire me, and usually it’s because he thinks my ticket counts are too low. That’s Peter for you. At heart, he’s not a tech, he’s a bean-counter, and he thinks of IT as a ticket-generating unit. That’s how he measures our productivity. Not service level, not first-time resolution, not hours worked on active tickets, not any metric that makes sense. Just...ticket closures.
And today he wants to meet with me and an HR rep. Not a good sign. An even worse sign was that the meeting was an hour ago.
There was another email from Peter. He wanted to know where the hell I was and why I wasn’t in Meeting Room 003 with him. It was only from a few moments ago, so I figured I’d better get over there now.
I stood, looked at all my co-workers and seriously considered taking a moment to tell them how much I enjoyed working with them, but the thing is, that would be a lie and they’d know it was a lie. So, instead I just sighed and walked out the door into that dark hallway. I waved to the unseen entity at the end and headed the opposite way, to Meeting Room 003 and my impending doom.
Some of you might be wondering why, if I hate my job so much, I care this much about losing it. The answer is, of course, I need money and this is all I know how to do. IT support isn’t needed anywhere else in town, and while it’s a transferable skill, I don’t know how I would get a job outside of town, especially as I don’t know if I ever really can leave this town. So as much as I hate it, I don’t want to lose it, either. It’s kinda like me and the factory are a married couple who’ve lived together long enough to thoroughly despise each other, and yet combining their incomes is a comfier life than a divorce would be.
Meeting Room 003 was the only room in the hallway with a light on. I briefly wondered why I was meeting Peter and the HR rep in a meeting room instead of Peter’s office, or some place more private, at least, but as I entered, that question was answered.
The meeting wasn’t going to be private.
Peter was there, looking thin, dry and disgruntled as he always did. The HR rep, a chesty lady whose name, I think, was Bibi, was sitting to his right.
Sitting on her other side were two men I recognized. The tall man in the white suit, and Mr. Mister.