Someone at the workplace singled me out this week for the fact that he sees me walk and walk the walk around the office every day. He sees me getting my steps in and he commended me for it. I don’t know who he is or from what vantage point he witnessed me doing it but it’s true, I walk at least 10,000 steps every workday. You never see me in the breakroom because all my downtime is spent walking.
I recognized this person but, as is typical for me, I don’t know who he is or what he does here. I don’t know who much of anybody here is. (That sentence feels like a disaster but I’ll leave it be, in the spirit of littering the textual landscape with unconnected chain links.) One of the first things I tried to access on the company intranet was the org chart. The link to it has never worked. I sorta-kinda know who a few of the poobahs are but for the most part I have no idea who is in charge or who I should be trying to impress if I was thus inclined toward sycophantry.
Of course this derives somewhat from my first year or so here, when ambitions of staying with the company were muted. They still are. I don’t want to be here forever, and I have legitimate reasons for feeling that way. It’s not just the poverty wages. It goes deeper than that. But not knowing who anybody is in the heirarchy of things is consistent with my initial attitude about this job as a low-level hack. I get hung up, perhaps to my detriment, on rank, and where I stand in the organization. I am at the absolute bottom of the food chain, the lickspittle entry-level piece of shit that would be first to get fired if it saved the job of even one do-nothing career lifer.
But getting back to the dude who commended me for my walking, I don’t know what he does here but I have often imagined that the security crew sits in a bunker somewhere and watches me do my thousands of steps on surveillance cameras. “There he goes again,” they might say. “Look at him go.” “Why doesn’t he get a life?”
…
I’m still angry at that dude who shit next to me that time. It’s been a couple of weeks, I think, but any time I see that guy I think “fuck you, who does that, who has the option to shit in a stall that is not next to anybody and instead chooses the stall right next to somebody who is still shitting and will be wiping their ass within moments?” I wiped my ass in anger that day, and I felt certain he sat in silence, stillness, listening to the crinkling, wet-and-dry sounds of my tightened hand shoving wads of toilet paper into my asshole, cleaning every last speck of shit and burrowing deeper than probably necessary. He would have sat in his stall, peacefully, critiquing and analyzing my technique based only on the sounds made. Maybe he was miked up, with a field recorder and nature microphone, performing forensiz research by picking up every texture of the soundscape that is the mandatory task of wiping one’s ass. Who the fuck does that?
…
I might attempt to contact a woman who mysteriously showed up on my web browser’s auto complete last night. She used to work here. I don’t know if she got fired or quit but she’s been gone for maybe a year. I don’t know if she would remember me now. She used to put her hands on me and call me “handsome.” It felt uncomfortable at first, this being a workplace and all. But I sized her up and thought OK, this could be something. It never was but I remembered how she talked to me like that, flirty and flattering. Few if any women in my life have ever approached me like that, or invoked flattery. It’s not like I’m starved for it but it felt nice, and different. I give compliments very awkwardly. I assume such talk will be rejected, laughed at, and passed around for mockery.
But I think it’s best to leave her alone. Web searches for her turn up a sordid past, which is not necessarily a red flag. Everyone makes mistakes. But I eat bruised bananas just the same as the perfect ones.
