The Ignored (4 page)

“All right, then.”

I waited. He did not get out of my chair but sat there, leaning back, as
he looked at a stapled sheaf of papers in his hand. I stood awkwardly in front
of my desk. “On January first,” he said, “Automated Interface will be coming out
with a new software package called PayPer. PayPer is an integrated payroll and
personnel information system that will allow users to maintain personal data
files on employees as well as process payrolls, calculate state and federal
withholding deductions, and incorporate pretax and posttax flexible benefit
programs. I want you to write a description of the product for a press release
I’m preparing.”

Already I felt hopelessly out of my depth, but I nodded in what I hoped
was a confident, competent manner.

“I’ll leave this overview with you to look at.” He leaned forward,
placed the sheaf of papers on top of my desk, and stood. “I don’t think you’ll
have any problems, but if you do, just give me a ring. You can turn in the
description before you leave today, or even tomorrow morning if you want. That
should give you more than enough time to finish the assignment.”

I nodded again, flattened against the wall to let him pass as he walked
around the side of the desk.

I sat down, looked at the paper he’d left me. I wasn’t sure what he
wanted. A description? What did that mean? No stylistic guidelines had been laid
out for me, I’d been given no examples of the company’s previous press releases;
I had not been told “this is what we want” or “this is what we don’t want”; I
had not been given a length or line limit. I was on my own, and I realized that
this was my first test in the new job and that I’d damn well better pass it.

I glanced over at Derek, and this time there was a real smile on his
face.

I did not like the way it looked.

I gathered that Stewart was writing a press release, and that I had to
write a short description of this PayPer system for him to incorporate into the
release. I read the information he gave me, which was basically a detailed
description of PayPer written from a technical standpoint, and figured all I had
to do was paraphrase and simplify what I’d been given.

Before I knew it, it was twelve, and Derek was putting away his papers
and getting ready to go to lunch. In the hallway outside our office, I saw other
men and women carrying sack lunches or jingling keys as they walked toward the
elevator. I did not want to be stuck eating lunch with Derek, so I let him
leave, then gave him a few extra minutes before walking over to the elevator
myself.

I hadn’t brought a lunch, and I didn’t especially feel like hanging
around the building for an hour, so I took the elevator to the first floor and
walked out to my car. I’d seen a Taco Bell near the freeway on my way in that
day, and I figured I’d eat there.

Apparently, a lot of other people from Automated Interface or the other
corporations in the area had the same idea as me, because Taco Bell was packed.
It was a half hour before I ordered and got my food, and because all of the
tables were taken, I was forced to eat in my car. By the time I finished eating,
drove back to work, and found a parking place, I knew my hour would be over.

From now on, I decided, I would bring my lunch.

I saw Lisa walking out to her car when I returned, and I waved to her
and smiled as I made my way through the parking lot. She stared at me blankly,
then looked away. I realized, too late, that her show up there in Personnel had
been just that—a show. She had not been flirting with me after all. She had
been doing her job. Obviously, she smiled at everyone the way she’d smiled at
me, touched everyone the way she’d touched me.

I returned to my office, feeling chastened and humiliated.

I was finished with my description by two, but I still had three hours
to kill, so I spent the time going over my copy, trying to make it perfect. I
typed the description on the typewriter next to my desk and brought it to
Stewart’s office around four-thirty. He said nothing as he read it, and no
expression crossed his face. He didn’t say it was brilliant, didn’t say it was a
piece of shit, so I assumed it was acceptable.

He placed the page in a drawer. “Next time,” he said, “I want you to
write on the PC so we can revise your work if necessary. I’m going to have the
typewriter taken out of your office.”

I was not that familiar with word processors, but I had used one in a
communications course in college and was pretty sure I’d be able to pick it up
easily, so I nodded. “I would’ve used it for this,” I said, “but no one told me
where it was.”

He glanced at me. “Sometimes you have to take your own initiative,” he
said.

I nodded, said nothing.

Jane was making dinner when I came home—spaghetti—and I took off
my jacket and tie, threw them on the back of the couch, and walked into the
kitchen. It felt weird to me, coming home like this. The apartment was warm and
filled with the smell of cooking food, the local news was on TV, and though
these were things that happened every day, I felt out of it and slightly
disoriented because they were already in progress when I arrived. I hadn’t been
home when Jane had closed the windows against the late afternoon chill, I hadn’t
been home when she’d turned on the TV for
Donahue
, I hadn’t been home
when she’d started dinner, and all of this made me feel like a stranger, an
outsider. I guess I’d gotten used to the way things were, to working part-time
and hanging around the apartment for a good portion of the day, and this
readjustment of my daily life threw me more than I would have expected.

I walked into the kitchen, and Jane turned to me, smiling, still
stirring the spaghetti sauce. “How was it?” she asked.

She didn’t say, “How was your day, dear?”, but the intent was the same
and for some reason it rubbed me the wrong way. It was… too
Ozzie and
Harriet.
I shrugged, sitting down. “Okay.” I wanted to say more. I wanted
to tell her about Lisa and Banks and Stewart and Derek, about my horrible office
and the horrible break room and my horrible job, but her question put me off
somehow and I sat silently, staring through the kitchen doorway at the TV in the
living room.

I opened up later, during dinner, telling her everything, apologizing
for my earlier silence. I was not sure why I’d taken out my frustration on her—I had never done that before—but she took it in stride and was more than
understanding.

“First days are always the worst,” she said, collecting our plates and
carrying them to the sink.

I closed the lid of the parmesan cheese container. “I hope so.”

She returned to the table, reached underneath and gave my penis a small
squeeze. “Don’t worry. I’ll cheer you up later,” she said.

We watched TV after dinner, our standard lineup of Monday sitcoms, but I
told her I had to get to bed early because I had to wake up at six for work, and
we walked into the bedroom at ten instead of the usual eleven.

“Do you want to take a shower with me?” she asked as I sat down on the
bed.

I shook my head. “I’m not in the mood.”

“Too tired?”

I smiled. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m too tired.”

“Too tired,” was our own personal euphemism for oral sex, one that had
gotten started when we’d first moved in together. She’d wanted to make love one
night, but I wasn’t sure I’d be up for it, so I told her I was too tired. I’d
closed my eyes, and the next thing I knew, her mouth had been open and ready for
business. It had been wonderful, and ever since then the phrase “too tired” had
taken on a new meaning for us.

Jane gave me a quick kiss. “I’ll be right back, then.”

I took off my clothes and crawled into bed. I was excited and already
had an erection, but I really did feel tired, and I lay back and closed my eyes,
listening to the sound of the water running in the bathroom, and by the time she
finished her shower, I was dead asleep.

Assistant Coordinator of Interoffice Procedures and Phase II
Documentation.

Despite the implications of my rather pretentious title, I turned out to
be little more than a glorified clerk, typing memos that needed to be typed,
proofreading instruction sheets that needed to be proofread, doing the jobs the
Coordinator of Interoffice Procedures and Phase II Documentation didn’t want to
assign to a secretary and didn’t want to do himself.

That first assignment was either an aberration, or else I’d failed so
miserably at it that Stewart was not willing to risk having me work on a real
job again.

I was afraid to ask which.

I tried talking to Derek the first few days, saying hello when I arrived
in the morning, good-bye when I left for home, occasionally attempting to start
a conversation at other times throughout the day. But all of my efforts were met
with the same stony silence, and I soon gave up. Technically, we were office
mates, but our relationship was even more impersonal than that. We shared the
same work space.

Period.

The depressing thing was that it was not just Derek. No one, it seemed,
wanted to speak to me. I did not know why this was. I was new and knew no one,
and in an effort to become acquainted with my coworkers, I tried nodding or
waving to other employees I passed in the halls, saying “Hi,” “Good morning,”
“How are you?”, but more often than not, I was met with blank looks, my
greetings ignored. Every so often, someone would wave back, smile slightly, or
say hello, but that was the exception rather than the rule, and pretty damn
rare.

Among the computer programmers, my presence was barely tolerated. I was
not required to deal with them on a regular basis, but several times those first
few days I had to go over to their area and either deliver copies of memos or
pick up papers to be proofread, and they made clear their disdain for me by
ignoring me and treating me as though I were a slave—an emotionless,
personalityless automaton there only to do my professional duty.

Every so often, I would meet one of them in the break room, and I always
tried to break the ice and establish some sort of one-on-one relationship, but
my attempts invariably failed. I talked twice to Stacy Kerrin, the blond woman,
and I gathered from reading between the lines of what she said and what she
didn’t say that my predecessor had been well-liked within the department.
Apparently, he had maintained friendships with many of the programmers outside
of work and had seen them on a social basis. She spoke of him fondly, as an
equal.

But I was clearly a second-class citizen.

I wanted to feel superior to these people, should have been able to feel
superior—they were dorks and nerds, geeks to a man—but I found myself
feeling uncomfortably out of place around them and even slightly intimidated. In
the real world they might be losers, but here in their world they were the norm
and I was the outcast.

I took to spending most of my breaks at my desk, alone.

On Friday, Stewart had assigned me to correct the grammar on an old
chapter of the department Standards Manual, and I spent at least an hour trying
to get the paper aligned in the printer. I was supposed to have the assignment
finished before noon, and I had to wait until all of the pages were printed
before leaving, so I was late for lunch.

It was twelve-thirty by the time I xeroxed the chapter, placed a copy on
Stewart’s desk, and finally went outside.

The two BMWs that had flanked my car this morning were gone, and I
pulled out easily. The Buick was almost out of gas, and there was no gas station
between here and the freeway, so I decided to try the other direction. I figured
I’d find a Shell or a Texaco or something at one of the intersections.

Ten minutes later, I was hopelessly lost.

I’d never really driven through Irvine before. I’d driven past it on my
way to San Diego, I’d passed through a corner of it on my way to the beach, but
I’d never driven
in
it. I didn’t know the city, and as I headed south on
Emery, I was amazed by its monochromatic sameness. I drove for miles without
encountering a store, gas station, or shopping center of any kind. There was
only row upon row of identical two-story tan houses behind a seemingly endless
brown brick wall. I passed four stoplights, then turned at the fifth. None of
the street names were recognizable to me, and I continued turning, right and
left and right and left, hoping to find a gas station, or at least a liquor
store where I could ask directions to a gas station, but there was only that
brown brick wall, lining both sides of every street. It was like some
labyrinthian science fiction city, and I was getting worried because my gas
gauge was now definitely on E, but there was also a part of me that found this
exciting. I’d never seen anything like it before. Irvine was a planned
community, with businesses all in one area, residences in another, farmland in
another, and apparently stores and gas stations in another. Something about that
appealed to me, and though I was afraid of running out of gas, I also felt
strangely comfortable here. The mazelike uniformity of the streets and the
buildings fascinated me, and seemed to me somehow wondrous.

Finally I did find an Arco, deceptively disguised in an unobtrusive
corner building the same brown brick as the wall, and I got my gas and asked the
attendant how to get back to Emery. The directions were surprisingly easy—I
hadn’t gone as far afield as I thought—and I thanked him, and drove off.

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.