The Cerebral Catalyst

Harold sat quietly at his desk staring at his keyboard, a state he found himself in often. At some point his computer would make that detested little beep notifying him of a new e-mail, and he was preemptively annoyed. He looked forward to the e-mails; it was the sound that bothered him. Music used to play when a message arrived, a short melody he downloaded and brought in on a flash drive. But one day he came to work to find only the annoying little beep. He changed it back to his tune, but the beep returned the next day. A few repetitions of this cycle led him to make his one and only call to the corporate computer help desk. The technician, who sounded as if he’d been awoken by the call, explained that the corporate servers in Minneapolis pushed a standard desktop configuration across the network every night. This standardization was making system administration and troubleshooting much easier, he explained. He promised to see what he could do about Harold’s e-mail notification sound. The next day, Harold found he no longer had permission to modify the computer’s sound scheme, and so the beep was there to stay.

Today was unusually quiet. With the end of the week usually came a flurry of documents to be checked as the processing servers in Kansas City and Phoenix ground through the backlog of transactions the buyers had furiously clicked on the day before, eager to meet their weekly targets. Today though, the grating little chime had been an infrequent visitor, and that made the hours drag. The clock said 1:32. He quickly checked the on-line time card he would submit to the West Coast finance office before leaving and confirmed the overtime he’d worked on Tuesday. If he didn’t leave his desk for lunch he could go home in two hours and thirteen minutes. Harold hadn’t left his desk for lunch since before The Streak began.

He stared at the keys on his keyboard, wondering how many times he had pressed each one since the new computer arrived last February. Could his life be measured in keystrokes like that? The white letters stood out against the black plastic of the keys, starkly in some places, barely in others. “A” and “S” were practically gray, as were “N,” “L,” and “M.” The state of the “C” key surprised him. He would never have guessed it to be the overlooked contributor its color indicated. Harold briefly imagined that, were he a key on a keyboard, he’d be a “C”. Vital, yet overlooked. Reality quickly overtook this fantasy though and he decided he’d be the “`” key, lying unused above the Tab, interacted with only when bumped by fingers on their way to the Esc key. Like “Q” and “Z” he would be pristine in his unimportance, so shiny he may well have been replaced every night by invisible administrators from another time zone.

As if to remind him that they were always there, the system administrator’s daily virus scan caused the CPU fan on the computers to speed up rapidly, noisily. When he’d shared the office with Randall, this had been the catalyst for a daily tirade. Randall hated the scan for always running during their shift, startling him awake on a slow day or slowing his computer to a crawl on a busy one. He would declare that he couldn’t work until it finished, and proceed to fill the time by updating Harold on his many and various ergonomic battles. “Sounds like the damn thing is about to take off,” he would say, or “I’ve heard chainsaws that weren’t that loud.” Such pronouncements were inevitably followed by the latest on his carpal tunnel syndrome, or his sciatica, or his eye strain. Debilitating, and always the fault of poor office furniture, or monitors, or policies, these conditions seemed to rule Randall’s life. It was only through superhuman dedication to his job, Randall seemed to boast, that he managed to drag himself in everyday. Harold often wondered what portion of his conscious day Randall spent somewhere other than work or a doctor’s office.

***

Early last year Randall was let go. The letter informing him of his termination arrived as an e-mail attachment, bearing all the hallmarks of an automatically generated document designed to appear personal, right down to the scanned signature in blue font. It cited decreasing productivity, spawning an indignant, seemingly endless rant that put Harold behind schedule for the rest of the week. Randall was convinced the cost of his medical care lay behind his dismissal, and he grew ever more incensed as he rattled off the list of denied requests he was sure would have nipped all of his problems in the bud. A new chair, a larger monitor, a new keyboard, an ergonomic mouse, better lighting – if they’d only spent a few dollars fulfilling those, he never would have needed all the medical care. He vowed to fight his unjust termination and stormed out of the office to find a lawyer to champion his cause. Harold never saw him again.

Two weeks later, Harold arrived at work to find Randall’s desk cleared. He couldn’t say he would miss him but couldn’t believe he was gone either. He wondered if Randall had returned to box up his few belongings, or if the building staff had simply received an e-mail directing them to dispose of the contents of desk number such-and-such. As far as Harold knew this small office was the only room the company leased in this building, so he must now be their sole representative here, perhaps even in the whole city. He didn’t like that idea.

For a time, he anxiously awaited the arrival of Randall’s replacement. He fretted about what the new guy would be like. For all Randall’s moaning, he’d been a good office mate in Harold’s opinion, happy to do all the talking and never really expecting much of a response. What if the new guy was chatty and nosy and social? Randall never asked about life outside of work, and that was fine with Harold. The new man might always be curious, always prying, always wanting to know. What if it wasn’t a man? What if it was a woman? An attractive woman who wore nice perfume? Women made Harold uncomfortable. He never knew how to talk to them.

But no new person arrived, and a new fear began to gnaw at Harold. How long would the company continue to lease an office occupied by only one person? Surely that couldn’t be cost effective. He began to fear that every new message in his inbox was his digital pink slip. The annoying little beep became terrifying. He willed himself to be ever more meticulous in reviewing the purchase documents he was charged with, afraid the slightest error he let slip might be the grounds for his dismissal. At the same time, he felt compelled to accomplish each job faster and faster, ever mindful of the consequences of Randall’s declining productivity. He logged on one day to find a message in his inbox from corporate HR with the subject line “Personnel Actions.” He stared at it, quivering, for almost an hour before resigning himself to his fate and opening it. His shaking fingers double-clicked, and he winced as the message window popped up, revealing a reminder to update his skill profile in the corporate capabilities database.

The next Thursday as he walked home, mentally exhausted from the day’s efforts, he stopped at an ATM and found his paycheck had not been direct deposited. Panic rose in his throat as he imagined his job was history, that he had been removed from the regular pay cycle and would soon receive a final check with a pittance of severance pay. He raced to his apartment, mind rushing through alternatives, and glued himself to his computer. For the next hour he continually clicked the refresh button on his web browser, praying with every reload the balance on his bank account would update. He finally gave up and slumped, still dressed, over his twin bed, convinced his job was gone. He would walk in tomorrow to find his own letter in his inbox, and he would follow Randall out the door.

Instead the next morning he found two unusual messages. The first, from the head of the accounting department, apologized for the delay in payments. The roll out of new software in Denver resulted in several hundred employees not receiving their pay on time. Assurances were offered that the problem would be rectified by the close of business, Mountain Standard Time, and the affected employees would receive a $100 bonus as a token of the company’s sincere regret over the incident.

The second was even more startling. At the top of the monthly human resources newsletter from the office in Lexington was his name, in bold print. Citing his stellar productivity and zero error rate, Harold was the division’s Employee of the Month. A small table next to the announcement detailed the performance of Office #442 over the previous six months. Harold stared at it. Surely there was a mistake. He knew he had been working harder since Randall’s departure, but if the table was to be believed, the total number of transactions processed in this office was up over 10% after Randall’s departure. That would mean Randall had spent eight hours a day at his desk, but done virtually nothing. How could he have gotten away with that for so long?

He began to relax, to entertain the prospect his job was safe after all. Then he began to get angry. Initially his anger was at Randall for making him worry over his job in the first place. That quickly burned out though, and in its place rose anger at himself. He felt like such a cliché: Employee of the Month at a job he hated, that sucked his soul out keystroke by keystroke. The last coals of his anger at Randall faded to envy. Wherever he was and whatever he was doing now – probably milking some new employer – it had to be better than this. He brought up the calendar on his desktop and counted back. Forty-two days since Randall’s departure. Forty-two stress-filled, error-free days. He took a red dry-erase marker from his desk and wrote a large 42 on the whiteboard adjacent to his desk. The Streak was born.

***

He leaned back in his chair, staring at the red numerals, wondering when his relationship with them had changed. They started out as a reminder of how much he loathed this place and how badly he wanted to leave. Now they were... something else. He thought the big red digits would prod him to make a change, to leave this little cell that made a daily mockery of him, to do something. But now he found himself oddly protective of them. He looked forward to coming in and adding one to the count each day. Mondays were especially grand when he got to count the weekend. The Streak had indeed become his motivation, but not as he’d planned.

The dry office air finally took its toll on the adhesive holding a post-it note to the whiteboard. The fluttering scrap interrupted his musing, twisting across the office and landing on the floor near his feet where he left it lay. Harold knew what the note said, knew its contents by heart. It had arrived a few months ago, enclosed in a parcel that appeared mysteriously on his desk one day. The box had been addressed to him, which was highly unusual in and of itself; he received e-mail here, not real mail. The return address was a cryptic abbreviation from a city he'd never heard of. Had he been at home the internet could have quickly deciphered the acronym for him. But behind the corporate firewall, Google didn't exist.

He'd opened the box to find a mass of Styrofoam packing peanuts. He hated packing material. There was something unsettling about the way it clung to things with the power of static electricity. Buried in the center of the mess he found a clear plexiglass plaque, its edges irregular but soft and round. He supposed it was meant to look like a cloud. The engraving was in an overly serifed script that made it difficult to read.

Harold Bishop
Division 6185
Employee of the Month
April 2006

Thanks for your hard work!

Stuck to the plaque was the white post-it, embossed at the top From the Desk of Robert Smithson. Mr. Smithson's haphazard scrawl was even more difficult to read than the engraving on the plaque.

Harold,

Congratulations! You've earned this one! Tried calling
you at home to congratulate you but couldn't get
through. Maybe your personnel profile needs updating?
Look forward to meeting you on my annual swing through
the Division.

Keep up the good work!
Bob

Harold had no idea who Robert Smithson was. A quick check of the corporate directory revealed him to be the Division Manager, a post he had occupied for four years. Harold had no expectation of seeing him on this year's "annual swing through the Division."

The detested beep of new e-mail brought his attention back to the computer. As much as he liked getting e-mail, a new order arriving so close to the end of his day did nothing to brighten his mood. It was from the new office in Detroit as well. It hadn’t surprised him when Detroit was announced as the site of the company’s newest processing center. Office space and labor had to be cheap, and there were probably other financial incentives offered by the city as well. He imagined corporate surveyors in spotless bespoke suits wandering through the shadows of idled factories, their tasseled shoes stepping between smoldering car hulks, dangling jobs like candy before hungry children, smiling from ear to ear at the margins they could achieve. He supposed it was good to have new jobs there, but new jobs meant new people, and new people meant mistakes. However much he might have relaxed about the security of his position, he couldn’t afford to let a mistake get by him, lest his job wind up in Detroit.

He took a little over an hour to sort out the mess the new coordinator had made. Terrible, he thought, but better than last week. Soon they would have the hang of things, and their jobs would process as quickly as the ones from Birmingham and El Paso. As he scrolled the message to reach the ‘submit order’ link he found a note at the bottom of the transmission: "Still figuring this system out... please call me." Harold glanced at the dusty phone next to his computer and the red digits on his whiteboard. "As if," he thought. He logged out of the system and turned off the humming fluorescent lights. The red LED’s on the clock showed 3:07, illuminating the plastic Employee of the Month award he’d received in the mail, turning it into a little red rain cloud hovering in silence just above his desk. In the dim light cast beyond, the digits of The Streak looked black.

***

He stepped outside into the dark quiet of the early morning. Harold enjoyed the walk back to his apartment. He would have shunned the confinement and the company of the city buses even if they were running at this hour. The streets were practically empty, and the few night owls he might encounter certainly weren’t social, which suited him. They would pass each other in silence, hands jammed into pockets, shoulders stooped against a light rain whether it was falling or not. Heads down, eyes acknowledging only the sidewalk in front of them, they were each their own little iceberg, passing largely unseen in the night. For all practical purposes, they had no faces, only feet.

Turning the corner onto his block, the neon glow from the convenience store pulled his head up. It was the only source of groceries he could count on to be open at a time that fit his inverted schedule. Even better, the woman behind the register overnight spoke no English, and she knew Harold spoke no Spanish. Their transactions took place wordlessly, the electronic sounds of the register barely audible over the music from her radio. The blue LED’s of the price display formed their only communication. Harold could think of nothing appetizing in his refrigerator and decided to stop in.

It didn’t take him long to settle on a few items for dinner. He was no cook and preferred to stick to pre-packaged meals. Anything he could heat in a microwave was ideal. If it involved more preparation than “lift plastic film and stir,” he was probably in over his head. In a pinch, Harold could assemble a decent sandwich, but that was about it. He grabbed a few frozen dinners, a loaf of bread, a bottle of diet soda, and headed for the register and the silent old woman.

Only after he had placed his basket on the counter and reached for his wallet did he notice the young girl in the corner. She was stacking bars of soap on the shelf, back turned to the register. The song on the radio finished and the speakers broadcast only the crackle of distant lightning. The young woman's head rose, the beeping of the keystrokes alerting her to the presence of a customer. She rose and dusted off her hands, walking quickly toward the counter. Harold froze, his stomach tightening. Instinct told him to turn and run, but icy panic cemented his feet to the floor. He stood there, watching the scene before him unfold with an odd detachment. His suddenly sweating hands glued themselves to the leather of his wallet, making him fumble to extract his money.

She spoke quickly in Spanish as she slipped around the corner and behind the counter. Harold understood none of it but could sense the older woman’s relief as she put down his loaf of bread and sighed heavily, slowly climbing down off her stool behind the register and shuffling off. Harold stared at the young woman, vaguely aware that his slack face and wide eyes must make him look comic at best, perhaps frightening. But she seemed strangely oblivious to his presence, given he was the reason she was standing there. Her attention seemed to be focused on the older woman as she walked away, through a metal swinging door into the back of the shop and out of Harold’s sight. He eventually retrieved two $20 bills and placed them mechanically on the counter. She switched her attention to them long enough to place them in the register, immediately shifting her gaze back beyond the swinging door. She counted Harold’s change without looking and placed it on the counter, unaware of his shaking outstretched hand, then quickly followed the old woman.

Harold stood staring at the money for a moment. The sudden return of the music startled him back to reality. He realized he was alone with the blaring radio and the swinging door. He wasn’t breathing. She hadn’t spoken to him. He scooped his change up quickly and shoved it in his pocket with one hand while the other grabbed his plastic bag. He rushed out the door and into the welcome, silent anonymity of the dark.

By the time he reached his apartment his breathing was returning to normal. He couldn’t believe his luck. He shuffled into the kitchen and dropped his bag in the sink. She hadn’t spoken to him, not a word. Not even “Have a nice day.” He stared at the stack of envelopes on the counter. Something from the phone company was on top. Probably an offer for a discount if he would re-establish telephone service, he thought. She hadn’t even spoken an empty pleasantry. The Streak was intact. On Monday he would write 427.

______________________________________
Jeremy Hendrix has delusions of quitting his day job. He stores his junk at Non-Addictive Sleep Aid and hangs around a bit at storiesmania.net.

posted 03.24.08.

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