First of all, I shouldn’t even be working on this. I have other things I need to work on.
I started writing this because I thought it was funny. But it’s not. An artist will tell you that if you really want to see a picture, draw it. I’m sure that a writer would tell you that if you really want to understand a story, write it. Someday I’ll hire someone smart to fix all my verbs and adjectives.
If you have not heard my inside voice, you do not know me.
The Smartest Girl in the School
The smartest girl in the school was my best friend in high school. We met through a mutual friend during the summer after our freshman year, in between being on the track team and being on the cross-country team together. I rode horses with our mutual friend and it was in August when the smartest girl in the school tagged along with us.
One of her classmates from the honors classes was trotting towards us.
He said, “Hey!”
And she said, “Hey!”
They walked side-by-side and I walked behind them.
“I have to tell you something. I got into Harvard.” Oh wow.
“Congratulations!” She grabbed his arm and shook it.
“Thank you,” he smiled.
…
“OK, see you later.”
“Bye!” Bye.
Sometime prior to this, she told me that he had once asked her to look at his erotic poetry. He was gay so she wasn’t really concerned by it.
We didn’t know each other. He didn’t acknowledge me at all and I said nothing to him. I probably assumed that, between second and third period, it was open mic and I was quietly bracing myself. But, of course, that’s not what it was.
Around the same time, a boy from our grade asked her to prom. (Like me, going to prom wasn’t something that interested her.) Why did he ask her?
“He told me I’m the smartest girl in the school.”
She probably was. Earlier that year, she learned that she was a National Merit finalist. And now she was going to be an Ivy League kid.
“Oh my gosh, that’s really good. I actually enjoyed reading that.”
I was over at their house when she delivered the letter to her their front door. Whoa, that’s kind of crazy.
“You give people too much credit.”
The Talk
We work in an office that provides customer service, among other things. We engage with the public in person, over the phone, through email and through text. Slug and I are almost exclusively in charge of sending out text campaigns – like, pay your bill, sign up for this, the deadline for this is on this date. That changed when another department – marketing – looked at our texts and decided that they could be improved upon.
I said quietly, almost mouthing the words, and very matter-of-factly, “I’m about to bail.” (Normally, I would never use the word “bail” like that. I was fuming and falling back on SoCal slang.)
Her eyes got really wide and she mouthed back, “I KNOW.”
She started shaking her finger at me and tried to say several things at once until she asked, “Are you leaving now? Do you want to walk out with me?”
Her invitation was shocking. I was only trying to express some anger – maybe a tad inappropriately. Slug was not a friend and I wasn’t sure if she was even an ally. I just needed to hear myself say the words to someone. I didn’t actually expect any validation. Real, authentic, validation is gold and receiving it from others is rare for me. This was especially shocking coming from Slug because, since the day we started this job, when it was 5 o’clock, she was gone.
“I try to keep my distance from everyone.” Ohhh.
In the early days, for months, and at the end of each workday, I waited a few minutes past 5 before leaving so I could pretend like I cared and was trying to do a good job. Now, taking her lead, I start to close up shop at about 4:56 pm so I can get the hell out of there. At 4:58 pm, I’m standing around, looking at my phone, watching the little red second hand tick towards the 12. But her office door was always closed shut at 5. And she always walked to her car alone. The work clique walks together to their cars. But Slug and I – I guess being the new people – walked alone. I made this observation and just kind of shrugged my shoulders and said, whatever, these are coworkers, not friends.
“I just kind of said to myself that it’ll be OK, because if I leave, they’ll still have you.”
“I was saying that too! They will have you, so it’s fine.”
Slug reminded me of the smartest girl in the school. She too had studied literature in college and wanted to go into publishing. The smartest girl in the school found a career in publishing, but, for Slug, it was “just so competitive.”
“You have to live in New York City and I just wanted to stay close to home.”
Slug was quietly applying for other jobs.
There was a new task that the whole office needed to be trained on. I hadn’t learned it yet because I was on vacation for two weeks. When I returned from vacation… Earlier in the day, I announced to the office that I had shuffled customers into breakout rooms on Zoom so that a higher-up could join them and complete this new task. I had two customers, each in a breakout room, and I needed a higher-up or two to join them. The boss jumped into the office chat and asked me, ” .” I think she was trying to tell me that I, too, needed to process this new task. But, also, she was making a sarcastic remark… A moment later, Ricardo came running into my office–apparently, this is the one who had told me that only the higher-ups are supposed to complete the new task.
“Sorry, I didn’t realize that all of us were supposed to be doing the new task. I thought it was just the higher-ups.”
Then he said,
“So-n-so says that sometimes when the boss phrases it like that, she doesn’t mean you or me. What she’s really saying is them. Can you do me a favor and ask her if I’m supposed to do the new task too?”
“Sure, no problem. I can do that.”
One of our coworkers was nice enough to write up the instructions on how to do this new task so that the whole office would know what to do. I responded by saying thank you and that that would be really helpful. About an hour later, this coworker send us the document of instructions. I added to the conversation that, in the future, if all of our training could include a document of instructions, it would be really efficient. I added a smiley face too so that people would know that I wasn’t being passive aggressive, which I wasn’t. We would have something to study rather than asking a coworker to repeat the training 3-5 times. About a month ago, I came up with this ingenious idea – by the fifth time of having my coworker walk me through a new task, I figured out that I could video him with my cellphone and study the video. Smart.
“…”
That was the last straw. I spent the morning thinking about an exit strategy.
A few months ago, a new undefined policy was implemented by the boss. Money was tight and we had to identify the dividing line that separated the customers who would continue to receive services from the customers who would be banished. The staff put a piece of printer paper on a clipboard in the lobby and anyone in the office who had a question about this new policy could write their questions on this piece of paper for the boss. My coworker, Kiddo, next door to my office, had a number of questions on the clipboard. But for some reason, she was intimidated by the boss because she said,
“I don’t want to get yell at by the boss.”
I never heard any yelling in the office.
Kiddo could see on the calendar that I had a one-on-one meeting with the boss that day and,
“Can you do me a favor? Could you take the clipboard to the meeting and get all the questions answered? And can you share the answers with me?”
I agreed to do this because I’m the type who never has any questions to ask.
Well, actually, it depends. I usually have a lot of process questions. But I almost never have any out-of-the-blue type questions.
So, having this huge list of questions to ask the boss would make me look good – I’m thinking about things; I want to do good work; this new policy is verrrry important. Plus, I figured I’d type it all up and share it with the office – I’m a team player. So, yeah,
“I’ll do it.”
Pure Bliss
On a Thursday afternoon, the boss approached me in my office. She asked me if I had reapplied to my job and I said I hadn’t. In order to continue working, I would have to be included in a group of applicants who had recently applied. Those were the people who the boss could choose from to hire in the office for the upcoming year. I wasn’t told that I needed to do this. I assumed I was getting pushed out due to an ‘administrative error.’ I sat there starring at my computer screen for a few minutes assuming that my performance there had finally caught up with me. I felt a little embarrassed. In a month, I was going to start graduate school and I had planned to cut back my hours anyway.
Sometimes I’m sitting at my computer, my mind is doing the factory work of our daily tasks, and I completely forget that in less than eight hours, I get to go home. I forget that being there is a choice. It doesn’t occur to me that even if I were forced to be there, at some point, I would be able to go back to my cell and get a night’s sleep where I could be alone. I’m only there for five days out of the week and if I want to take a day off, I’m allowed to do that. But usually by mid-morning, I have forgotten that and I start to feel hopeless and I’m unconsciously trying to survive in a prison. I’m constantly aware of what the other prisoners are doing and what are the guards doing and what are the whoever doing. And I’ve got to make sure I am saying the right thing and doing the right thing. There is definitely something going on in your head when you’re keeping track of all these things and you forget that you don’t actually have to do any of it.
I was euphoric. I actually felt optimism. I felt more optimism than I’ve ever felt in my life. All of these ideas about what I could do and how I would spend my time were rushing into my head.
I need to start exercising again. I sit at a desk all day. There is a massive stretch mark growing on my right hip and it itches like hell.
I think this was my beginning of one of those trendy existential crises.
I sent Slug a GIF of a dancing Napoleon Dynamite.
“HAHA literally was about to text you!”
I texted Slug.
“F… I still work here.”
“Same here, homie.”
Shadowing
My replacement was told to shadow me.
The thing about people who go to world class schools is they have world class behavior. They’re not deaf to their prejudices and invasive thinking – unless they’re doing it on purpose. In any case, either you didn’t get into Oxford or you’re an idiot.
“Do anything fun over the weekend?”
“Not really, haha. When I get off work, I’m usually doing more work. I was working all day on Saturday.”
“You have a side gig or something?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, do you nanny?” Do I nanny? Baby-sitting?
“No. I do a type of data collection.”
“Oh, cool. Do you have kids?”
“No… I’m one of those ladies who never saw myself as a mother.”
This is obnoxious. I preferred the company of those chunky wenches. I had to share with Slug.
“Me either!”
“I don’t even know what a cute baby looks like.”
“I know, right!”
When I was a child, I viewed all babies as an evil burden to society – future people who would destroy the environment, increase the development of open land and cause even more loss to endangered species. My dad was so irate with me because I would openly refer to babies as “insects,” meaning, things that must be squashed from existence. These were my innocent thoughts as a 10-year-old.
One time I was riding in a taxi in New York City with the smartest girl in the school. We were heading to the airport to return home. The taxi driver tied to start a friendly conversation. He looked at us through the rearview mirror and asked,
“You have baby?”
I just let out an uncontrollable sound of disgust,
“UGHHHHH…”
There was loud laughter. I looked over at the smartest girl in the school with stink eyes. She had thrown her head back and was clapping her hands.
Slug said that when she was a child, she would shove kids to the ground because she hated children. (Her mom would yell at her for that, too.)
“I don’t even want to get married.”
“Oh my gosh, I don’t either.”
The scholar continued…
“Oh, are you a cat lady?’
“No, I have dogs.”
“So, like, how many dogs?”
“Two. But the dream is to have 10 dogs. The issue is that both of my dogs are on health insurance, which is a $500 bill every month.”
“That’s like a car payment.”
“Yes, it is. If I had 10 dogs, that would be about $5000 in insurance each month, which is like having a mortgage. So, I’m limited by my income.”
It took me a while – about two weeks – to realize this was a wake up call. First of all, my dream of having 10 dogs was not making any progress. But also, with nearly zero prior interaction with this kid, he already had my unauthorized biography in his pocket.
It reminded me of an interaction I had about a week earlier. I was at a luxury car dealership grabbing data when I encountered an old saleslady. Her long blonde hair was unkempt straw and her wrinkled dress shirt was partially untucked from her plaid pleated short skirt. Her wardrobe was strange. She asked me where I worked and I told her.
“Oh, that place is fourth in the state.” Huh. Fourth in the state.
Her dumb words trailed off in my head.
“Ohh, wow…”
I told her which car I wanted. After her spiel, she asked me to write down my name and contact information so that she could follow up with me and close the sale on a Saturday morning that would never happen.
“You have very neat hand-writing. What did you major in in college?”
Everyone always comments on my hand-writing.
“Thank you. Uh, art and psychology.”
“You can tell about a person’s humanity by looking at their hand-writing.”
“Ah…”
I’m Ted Bundy.
“You have a very quiet demeanor.”
“Haha, really? People say that to me often.”
“The people that come in here are usually go-getters.”
“Hm.”
I could have told her that “my husband” is the go-getter. I didn’t want to encourage her.
I’ve been called a go-getter once in my life – a long time ago, when I was washing my car. I lived at the bottom of a hill from the university in a small apartment building with other university students. There was an apartment above me and an apartment below me. I literally lived down the street from where Ted Bundy had lived.
Anyway, I was vacuuming, washing and waxing my car. It took all day.
An animated, wide-eyed, blonde girl who lived in our building was heading out.
“Look at you! You’re a go-getter!”
“Haha. Thanks.”