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“There is nothing more personal than doing your job,” something I read on a granola bar wrapper on my way to work.
And how I love an office building in the evening! I can pee in the bathroom anonymously. I can clean dirty mugs, construct rubber band booby traps, paper clip trapezoids. A motion sensor controls the overhead lights, so when my colleagues have gone home for the night, I retreat to the dim, postfluorescent glow of my temporary corner office. There is nothing lonelier than lights extinguishing themselves at the end of a long day, no one left to do them the simple kindness of snuffing out.
The gods created the First Temporary so they could take a break. “Let there be some spare time,” they said, “and cover for us, won’t you? Here are all our passwords and credentials. Here is the keycard, and here is a doohickey to clip the key-card to your purse. See? Oh, sorry, here is a purse. Go on, fill it to the brim! Fill it a little more. Yes, it’s supposed to be heavy. Here is your contract, and here is our copier, and here is the shared binder for all known manner of things.”
“Can I stay? Permanently?” she asked, and the gods just laughed and went to lunch.
At the end of the day, when the gods went to their god homes, the First Temporary thought, What should I do now? The office had a smell that happened only at night. “That’s the smell of innovation,” the gods had explained. She found one corner of the office that didn’t smell so much and sat there for a while. It wasn’t really an office, not the way most people today would picture an office. It was a collection of matter and inertia that suggested the sensation of work. She activated her keycard and swiped herself into existence.
The worst kinds of offices are the ones where no one can tell who’s in charge. My new crew was once a company of internet pirates, but they rebranded. Delete a few syllables and lo, you have a new profession.
“There are only a few kinds of jobs in the world, it turns out,” says the captain, who is the type to pontificate and listicle on subjects varied and profound. “Jobs on land,” he continues, “jobs at sea, jobs in the sky, jobs of the mind, and working remotely.” “You mean like working from home?” I ask. “No,” the pirate captain says. “Working remotely is what we call being dead. Pirate lingo.”
“Oh sure! Like Davy Jones’s locker?” “No, no,” he says, exasperated. “That’s where we keep the office supplies.” “Right. Sorry.” “You’ll get the hang of it,” he says with a slap on my b...
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I hang my head over the side of the ship, and the first mate of human resources finds me swinging there. “I’m the first mate of human resources,” he says. He flips me across his broad shoulders, walks me down into the hull, and carries me to his office. I haven’t been carried in such a very long time. “Sit here,” he says, placing me on his sofa, “until you’re fit to function.” The human resources cabin is mostly bare. A large poster on the wall features a cat with a peg leg paw. “There is no Purr in Pirate!” reads the caption.
“Remember that I helped you! Remember, I’m your trusty HR mate. Helping is what mates do,”
Come morning, I’ve been terrified into excellent health. A note on the door reads, “A clean bucket is an acceptable bucket, and an acceptable bucket is the only kind of bucket worth filling.”
I haven’t seen him in a while, but he assures me that time multiplied by distance equals the square root of affection and long-term achievement.
“Is it dangerous?” “Of course,” she says, “but in the wrong hands, so are staplers.”
In some careers, you draw blood to make an eternal bond. In others, you draw blood to fake an eternal bond.
Getting older is the difference between solving mysteries and studying to become one.
