The Coder
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It was an unremarkable room, where I worked, nestled inside a long hallway underneath Sixth Avenue. Mostly it was gray and crowded with desks and boxes. It was quite symmetrical, though, because the steward of the room, my boss, thought in straight lines and even numbers. There was nothing alive there, and nothing inspired liveliness. It was just the forty of us sitting at our work stations, tapping at the keyboards; all of us, lined in two columns of five rows of four people.
My boss was a quiet and humorless man. One could not engage him in any kind of casual talk, whether it was about the book he was reading or something as simple as the weather outside. He was, in many ways, a sort of automated man: there, but for the grace of the company. That he supervised forty individuals who did not even know what the company was, much less espouse any sort of loyalty to it, would have made his position quite a precarious one, were he not so effective in his job.
He was a short and fit man, probably somewhere close to forty-years-old. He had eschewed the hair atop his head years ago—this made his bare crown his most prominent feature. It was an affect, his only one, save for the blazer-vest he often wore in the office—though perhaps the latter was merely a function of his poor wardrobe choices.
His moods were, by apocryphal testimony, generally those of a bored fascist. His rules were considered too strict (one could not, for example, utilize the Internet at any time on a company machine) and punishment for violating the rules was a stern admonishment, followed invariably by termination upon further offenses. If you got up from your seat too often, you drew his attention.
What I found most interesting about him was the fact that his highly regimented work ethic was inexplicably bound by a code of neurotic symmetry.
Let’s examine. For one thing, he only hires and fires us in pairs. I came in a group of eight, and the last few came as a group of four; when he fires people, he’ll only do it if he can find two he dislikes. If only one person is doing a poor job, he then surveys the lot of us hoping to find someone who does something he does not approve of. One girl was unlucky to be a fan of the New England Patriots, and this unthinkable preference for an out-of-town sports franchise was her undoing. When Clement had made up his mind to fire Joe the Talker, she became collateral damage.
That was his name: Clement.
The talk around the office was that Clement was moody. But Clement was dying.
*
I had been working there for several months. I wanted to leave.
*
Clement often stood behind me. For all the mystery and wonder of the universe, and for all the thinkers and their majestic pursuits, Clement wondered whether I, coder 125, was in-fact working, or whether I was pretending to work.
I listened to podcasts and mindlessly extracted information from documents. I did this for hours at a time, and while mind numbing, I would be remiss if I did not point out just how easy such a task becomes after a few months.
Oggetto, the Italian word for Subject. This is a key term, the key to the Italian documents.
*
When I had made up my mind to get canned, I thought I would start by irritating Clement. Attempting to disrupt his sense of order, I went to the attendance sheet and signed in at 9:29am.
Seven minutes pass; I sit down, log-in and settle. My neighbor, Quentin, dons his ipod earbuds. Like many of the others, he listens to book-on-cd or mp3. Generally speaking, though, very few of us actually listen to music—I should point out that I spent a good deal of time listening to different versions of Mahler’s first symphony. They listen to Cussler, Grisham, and many other writers I have never heard of—this despite having majored in English.
“Isn’t 9:30am better?” Clement said in a low whisper as he hunched over me, and as I sat at my desk. (His golf-game whisper was the only human voice audible over the clicking of computer keys.)
I was briefly confused. When I realized what he was talking about I nodded my head and replied with: “Hmm… well, I got here at 9:29, Clement.”
“I know,” he demurred, “but you’re not getting paid for that extra minute.”
“But I was here.”
“I realize that, but I’ve seen you arrive much earlier than that and yet you still sign in for 9:30,” he said, knowing that he had me.
“Well, I’ll take it under consideration, Clement,” I nodded repeatedly. He took it as the patronizing condescension comment that it was and walked-off. A few moments later, Clement confiscated the sheet and returned with it to his cubicle.
The sign-in sheet returned an hour later; all of our names and times were identical and in Clement’s handwriting. The slackers who hadn’t yet arrived, were signed in and spared the hit to the paycheck.
I took two days off, was late on the third and simply failed to show-up or call on the fourth, but was not fired. On the days I was there I ate croissants at my desk, drank a liter of soda and fiddled with my cell phone. I spoke to my neighbors, made jokes about Clement and, in a blatant act of passive revolt, went to sleep in my chair, and in full view of Clement, who sat watching from his cubicle.
“Don’t do that,” Quentin warned softly. “He can see you.”
“It’s okay,” I shrugged sleepily. “I know what I’m doing.”
He continued anyway: “You’re going to get in trouble if he sees you.”
I thought about that for a moment. What was trouble anyway? All Clement could do was fire me. He could not send me to my room, assign a new bedtime or ground me for the weekend, and there was no aspect of our job any worse than the current aspect.
I continued to feign sleep, until it turned into real sleep.
There is really nothing interesting about my job that I can fill a paragraph writing about. It’s really simple: I code documents, that’s all there is to it. There is no drama, although I am sometimes amused at the witless banter I read when sifting through the client company e-mails—but even those are pretty boring. The baby-talk through e-mail is the absolute worst.
Lovie,
Little Abigail joined us two days ago…. She weighed six pounds and five ounces…. Pictures are attached!!!! Thanks a bunch for the 49er tix!
Hugs and Kisses,
Margie
I feel like writing back to these people sometimes:
Hello Margie,
I work for the law firm currently litigating the action against your company. As I have poured over many thousands of documents, I now know everything about you. You like stilettos, chocolate (what a shock!), the 49ers and gay men. You can’t stand baseball, the rain, George Bush or clowns. Your Italian sucks, by the way, which is why your cousins write you back in English.
I am sick of your emails, sick of the pathetic talk about your baby, and worse: I am sick of you.
Thanks a bunch!
- Name Withheld
*
The female employee at Burger King, with whom I share the occasional rejoinder when I feel like complaining about my job, has no sympathy for me. Perhaps it is because I wear a shirt and slacks and am grossly overpaid for my work—added to which I can listen to music all day as I work?
She doesn’t get that she could do my job as easily as I could do hers. Granted, it might require her to learn to write clearly and concisely in English sentences like “This is an e-mail from the company CEO affirming the swap transaction.” Then again, maybe I am setting the bar too high; she could probably get away with “The cranky boss motherfucker said he’s okay swapping some fucked-up shit.”
Theoretically we are saying the same thing. Who is to say that the CEO isn’t cranky? Certainly the inflection from his letter or e-mail might indicate such. If so, then would the latter description be more descriptive?
Indeed, she must think I am a complete schmuck for complaining about my employment. After all, people have jobs these days, not careers.
Yes, I have only been here for the paycheck, and while this got me through the first few months, the sheer number of hours thrown-away each day could no longer be justified by a paycheck. I can’t imagine the anguish of the Burger King lady, now that I think about it: having to deal with asshole customers: the aggressive midtown Manhattan types who have no patience for bumbling stupidity, or people who otherwise cannot possibly pay less attention to details.
That’s life in a law firm: details. If you screw the details up, you hear about it. If you’re a paralegal, you hear about it from an attorney; if you’re really unlucky, then you hear about your fuck-ups from another paralegal. Do you know what it’s like when a fresh-from-university junior paralegal catches your mistake? It’s downright awful.
Interestingly, the ambulance-chasing associates I’ve worked for in product liability were the most out-of-touch. Injury? What Injury? Client? What Client? I could have told them anything I wanted; such as The client says his wife’s head just exploded and wants to know if we can reevaluate his claim for further damages. Or: [The Partner] just called me to say that we should send retainers to everyone we previously rejected.
Of course, that was real legal work, which I was no longer doing, and it was as real as you could possibly get.
*
Document is a personal email wherein the author describes her new-born offspring to a colleague from accounts receivable. Email is part of an ongoing string regarding aforementioned offspring.
*
I almost lost track of the months. I posted a tiny ad on the firm’s electronic bulletin board: I hate my job, what about you? Call me. To which I received several replies by e-mail. One came from a Senior Associate, asking why I hated my job. Another came from a mailroom employee who asked the obvious “then why are you here?” question.
I was called into the Senior Litigation Paralegal’s office to explain myself. By the time I arrived, Clement was just leaving her office.
“I explained everything, it’s okay don’t worry.” He quipped walking past me. He paused and I changed direction to go back to the dungeon.
As we walked toward the elevator bank, I told him: “I really do hate my job.”
“It’s okay, you’ll feel better later,” he said dismissively.
There was nothing really to say at this point. He obviously knew I was trying to get fired, and was not about to let it happen. But why?
It took me an hour to get coffee. It was sixty degrees outside, and it was only January and I wanted to know what global warming felt like. The wind gusted through, blowing my coffee-stained napkins onto Sixth Avenue. The witless school kids bandied about as they walked, referring to each other using profane terms. They laugh a lot, I noticed. Stupid laughs, certainly. I sipped quietly and watch the different people stream past me. The banker, the bum, the student, the skateboarder and the dying man.
Clement stopped when he saw me, but did not disapprove of the meeting. “Warm today,” he thundered brightly, his arms outstretched as if embracing the day. “As if issued to children.”
“Huh?!” I replied.
“That’s from a good book.”
“Oh, the children thing, I got it.”
“Yeah, it’s from Mrs. Dalloway.”
“Right.”
“Did you ever read it?” he beamed.
“In college.”
“What did you think?”
I paused briefly, struggling to remember the book: “It was good,” I replied unconvincingly.
We stood awkwardly—pondering what to say next—he had never engaged me in a real conversation before, and I felt a twinge of guilt at not keeping-up my end of it. I tried to think of a proper segue, but nothing came to me. After another moment, he smiled and nodded, “yes it was a very good book.”
He gazed upward, perhaps admiring the size and stature of our building, but I doubt this. It was a very general gaze, the sort that has no purpose except to absorb the vastness of a thing; in this case he was probably taking in Sixth Avenue, with its skyscraping buildings.
It was then that I noticed he looked a little pale. He looked vaguely mournful—about what, though, seemed a mystery. He just stood and pondered the sky, the shapes of clouds, how they moved across the sky slowly but definitively. It didn’t seem quite as awkward to stand here any more.
“Coffee is bad for you,” he warned suddenly.
I was just as abrupt in changing the topic: “You’re not going to fire me, are you?”
“As long as you continue to do your fine job, your job is safe,” he said approvingly.
“But I’m not doing a fine job. In fact, I think I suck very badly at it.”
He ignored this last remark completely and patted my shoulder before turning toward the street to walk away. “You will be coming back,” I inquired.
“Back where?” he was confused.
“To work, Clement, to work.”
“I’ll be there. Keep up the good work,” he said walking off.
I stopped shaving and wore a shirt and jeans to work, inspiring disapproval only from my co-workers. Within days, few of the men were still shaving, but most had done away with the time-consuming ritual all-together. A few of my intrepid colleagues had begun to wear less-than-formal apparel, but mostly they continued to look presentable. Since few of the project associates and partners ever bothered to visit us and our work room, we could have dressed in Halloween costumes.
On the second-to-last day, I sat staring at the computer screen. 9:31am. It was depressing, frankly, to be sitting there and thinking about all the many things I could be doing. I did not want to load the first document, and decided then and there that I would forgo working in favor of catching-up on the news.
The papers contained the same nonsense stories that would be mostly irrelevant in a generation. The election was a big exception.
That year was a pivotal one in U.S. politics. The Democrats fielded some decent candidates for a change, and the result was truly surprising, especially to the world outside the states. Things turned out okay, thankfully, though it seemed like it could have gone pretty poorly.
Famous people were dying at a rate greater than usual. They were very young… for the first time I looked at their names and ages and realized that they were younger than me. While this was a sobering thing to realize, I also realized that these young people essentially died for nothing more than the opinions and perceptions of others: the pressures of fame and the expensive price of coping.
After an hour, I put the paper away when I heard what sounded like a loud thud from the room behind me. I did nothing, because I thought it was nothing. No one did anything. We were too programmed, now that I think about it, to focus on anything but the space immediately around us.
What happened next is something we could only guess at.
*
As Clement lay in the back room, he could not muster the energy to prop himself up, nor could he marshal the energy to cry-out. A single tear began to form, and he began to become afraid; his life now seemed as if a resource rapidly vaporizing into nothing.
In the main room, the forty temps continued their work; they coded their irrelevant documents, shuffled around irrelevant papers and spoke irrelevantly about irrelevant subjects in an irrelevant way. Clement, thought of how irrelevant his life had become, and had been as long as he had lived it.
He felt shame in thinking of the symmetry of reaching his 40th birthday, even though this was impossible now.
His eyelids sunk until they covered his eyes. I am just matter, he thought to himself, just matter. I will soon become nothing, he thought—his mind much clearer now.
Suddenly he was a giant and symmetrical being facing the prospect of his own extinction, safe in the belief that his logic would perpetuate his own being, yet never understanding the imperfection of his logic, not understanding the idea that the atoms of his soul would not end with his death, but would disburse into the ether before settling once again, perhaps into the tail of a zebra or the heart of a tapioca stem.
So this was fate: the idea that the soul is separate from its memory. That it cannot die, that nothing dies, and that conversely, nothing is remembered quite the way we’d like to remember it: even, pure, framed in a symmetry of straight lines and perfect circles, free from our human baggage, and most of all, free of the culture that occupies us when we aren’t off asking the important questions.
Fettered in his cell, he looked through the bars onto utopia, never realizing that each man is the constructor of his own the prison, his own sentry, and thus holds his own key.
I was finally let go a day later. Evidently the new boss didn’t like any of old slackers who Clement protected in a bold, if misguided, attempt to regain his humanity.
