Officemate

The eighth floor was small enough that we all knew each other by name, but large enough that you wouldn’t run into someone for a week or two. One such person was Claudia Burke who worked in design, whose desk I had visited in the fall and by spring I couldn’t remember how to get there. It was a sign that the company was doing well—all that extra space per capita. If I’d wandered for long enough I’d have stumbled down the right series of hallways, I’m sure, but loitering was discouraged and in winter everyone kept to themselves for the most part, anyway. Claudia and I both grew up in Maryland so we’d shared stories of crab soup and bad traffic before settling into a more generic unfamiliarity that underlies any commonalities of place and circumstance. Because really what’s the difference between onion and crab soup or traffic in Maryland and Michigan? She might as well have been Hungarian.

Things would have stayed that way if it weren’t for a series of emails. Patrick Osteen in publicity kicked off April by sending out a shameless plug—in the guise of a company plug we’d been trained to read—for a podcast he was working on, a kind of comedic retelling of historical events in which he and a bunch of his friends from theatre school acted out characters like Henry VIII and Joan of Arc. I could feel the whole floor opening the clip at once, the simultaneous moves on mouse pads, like a choreographed bit of office performance art. And then the collective feeling of being duped and, come to think of it, having been unwittingly conditioned, by publicity, no less. Finally, the communal consumption of a response sent Reply All from a junior-level designer named Claudia:

No one wants to have her day interrupted by an advertisement for your pet project. Please accept your own irrelevance. The rest of us do.

On the other side of my cubicle sat a woman named Roseanne. She’d been working there for a decade. She liked to grow basil and rosemary at her desk with a UV lamp she bought off an infomercial. She was a superstitious woman, or at least pretended to be, claiming certain books or entire buildings were cursed with the conviction of someone who takes great pleasure and pride in the fluctuations of her intuition.

Inconsistencies were breezed over with the confidence of a preacher, as when she cleansed her new apartment with—among other remedies—salt at the base of doorframes, and then denounced the negligence of her landlord when she awoke one morning to an infestation of plant-eating, salt-starved ants. Well, formerly salt-starved.

In spite of myself, I enjoyed her histrionics and the pitch of her voice, buoyed by certainty. She slept better than I did, ants aside. She was also a reliable gossip. She slipped me notes through the gap in our adjoining walls that said things like Annie Cole spotted napping on toilet seat and When my pen runs out of ink I’m quitting.

After the email from Claudia she sent over a new one: Hero or false prophet?

I wanted to see what else might happen on my computer screen; it seemed like the beginning of something, the sudden mutation in a stagnant code that sets a new status quo in motion, one defined by unfiltered communication and the public airing of grievances; a virtual bloodletting built on years of accumulated repression, psychic tension caused by the ritual splitting of self and work-self. At last they must be merged! The Great Claudian Reckoning.

But there was nothing. No responses, no sides taken, no more shots fired. Roseanne munched on a granola bar and sent through another message with a circular series of small arrows and the word buffering.

I flipped it over and wrote, in response to her question: They’re only heroes once they’re dead.

Or did I mean artists. There was something artful about that email, at least more so than Retroacted, the podcast. A refreshing agreement between verb and feminine subject, for one, and the assumption of her place in a united front. After another moment of digital silence I thought they might have suspended the server so I sent an email to myself: “I am a neutral party.” I jumped when it came through. My boss asked me once if I have a problem with short-term memory. I like to think of it as being forward-thinking, I said, but I knew that was hardly the truth.

A week passed. Elevator rides were normal enough. Some joint recognition of unpleasant smells, gentle chatter about the building’s resident peregrine falcon, a recent sighting—supposedly—though I suspected that when deprived of wildlife, the indoor mind was more likely to make falcons out of pigeons. Granted, very large ones. A man named Colin Paley said to me “so much for mass extinction.” I just smiled. I wondered what Claudia would think.

I found Roseanne standing still in front of the pillar that greeted us as we passed through the eighth floor’s front doors. After marveling at the anachronistic tilt of her sliced-off bob, I realized she was considering a sign posted there, printed in a bold sans serif with little adornment save for a small image of a computer screen containing an open mouth, emitting those lines suggesting speech.

Forum on Communication in the Digital Age: Listservs, Hangouts, and Chats

How Mass and Instant Contact Impacts Our Work Environment

Every Tuesday at 10 AM in May & June

Mandatory attendance at one session per month

Roseanne and I walked to our desks, allowing others a closer look.

“I can’t remember the title,” she said. “Not catchy.”

“Funny, the analog format of the announcement,” I said. “Given the content.”

We were back in our positions, wall between us.

Much about life there felt far from mass or instant. Sue Powers—my boss—took a week to respond to a client about a lunch. The mailroom never knew when someone changed jobs, and intraoffice signings disappeared between floors like someone was secretly stuffing contracts down the elevator shafts. Company policy was disseminated at a tectonic pace. Notes were passed through cubicle walls lined with what looked like hotel carpeting. But employees did check their email with compulsive regularity.

We were encouraged to have our work email synced with our personal phones, to avoid the stress and inefficiency caused by the shock of a full inbox encountered en masse. Our superiors preferred us accustomed to the slow trickle, to a buzz at nine in the evening reminding us of just how hard they worked and asking us to please excuse any typos. This made Claudia’s outburst all the more unsettling. Our running to-do list in our pockets now marred by that word: irrelevant. She couldn’t have picked one more devastating. Sure, Patrick’s podcast was uninspired, childish, a nuisance, but some—myself included—might have taken that as an indication of our own potential in comparison. Raced home to “polish” and “refine”—begin—what we had to share, the real work.

I spent those days checking off my tasks, screening Sue’s calls, putting together a surprise party for an old friend, now a lawyer, moving back to New York: irrelevant. The little literary journal I was planning to start with my roommate Peter: more than irrelevant. Unlikely.

But we had a little seed money and a mission statement and a logo—oh, the logo! Peter and I had fun most of all with that bite-sized representation of whatever it was we hoped to achieve. For everything that words could elaborate, it was a symbol people really wanted, one that could embody a common cause or feeling without the bother of articulation. We were proud of that joint thought, too (though I was pretty sure I’d thought it first). And doesn’t that have to do with abbreviation, emojis, memes? We decided we’d write the inaugural piece about it: Digital Iconography and the Written Vernacular.

It could probably be boiled down to a small image of a computer screen containing an open mouth…emitting those lines suggesting speech.

My lawyer friend didn’t end up moving to New York, after all—she had known for weeks without telling me. I suffered through a surprise party rendered pointless, full of would-be critics. Had all the creators fled the city and left behind a pool of commentators? I heard two different people use the word “middling.” On Sunday Peter lounged for hours in our windowless living room, playing his new PlayStation 4. I felt like we were the kind of people who in moments of revelation jotted down a title, a concept, even just a word—Legacy, Loyalty, Self!—to stand in for a jumble of insight, and then let the act of commemorating the moment satisfy our desire to produce; the feeling alone was enough. We, too, really just wanted the symbols on the weekends, and then to return to being told what to do.

“Doesn’t it strike you as ironic now, coming from her?” I typed on Monday morning to Roseanne about Claudia.

“How do you mean?” wrote Roseanne, who daily occupied a blinking corner of my screen that often seemed more like her than the unseen person behind the wall.

“Do you send an email like that to accept your own irrelevance?”

“I thought we were on her side.”

“That’s when I thought it was about honesty.”

“What’s it about now?”

“Bitterness,” I wrote.

“Don’t knock it till you try it,” she responded, with a licking-lips face. Did anyone bother to make the faces they transmitted? Or did the laughter, smirks, and kisses mask a bank of blank expressions?

Anyway, Roseanne’s wasn’t the sort of bitterness I was imagining. Sure, she reminded me constantly of her boss’s inability to construct a sentence without a misplaced apostrophe, and she regularly lamented how the company would rather spring for three trading-card candidates with exaggerated pedigrees over the course of three years than promote one qualified employee internally. But this was the sort of contextual bitterness that at least operated within the confines of its host’s chosen conditions: office gripes for an office life. In Claudia I suspected—or projected—a broader resentment, a disdain for the station to which we all found ourselves tethered and an accompanying contempt for anyone who pretended that they were creatively unrestrained.

Sue needed customer engagement analysis that day for a client, a beermaker. They’d recently rolled out a virtual reality experience at music festivals across the country, a part of their new brand activation strategy and Sue’s big idea.

On Sue’s trading card, that would be her special ability: VR. It’s all she talked about. Her version of a disseminated podcast or homegrown literary journal was a compulsion to share articles that confirmed her theory of VR’s effectiveness for far-flung purposes, the most recent being psychological (for overcoming abuse, or the desire to inflict it), according to an article she could pass off as required reading when in reality having someone waft hops under your nose during a virtual tour of a brewery was about as cathartic as a trip to the dry cleaner.

I should clarify that as an assistant I wasn’t experienced enough to do the analyzing, just the making of such analysis presentable and pretty. But I wasn’t doing that either, I was searching the internet for some proof of my own theory, about Claudia—the killjoy. I couldn’t find her anywhere, no quick evidence of her hypocrisy like frequent, public political rants or a photo series of her new living room gallery wall. Maybe she was just as silent and complacent as she professed to be.

“A-he-hem.”

I hated that fake throat-clearing. It reminded me of my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Mitchell, whom I'd made no conscious effort to remember. But it's the ones with the tics who stick with you.

I could see Sue’s reflection in my computer screen, her squished features mingling with the results of a search for “Claudia Burke New York City Graphic Designer Web Designer”. It was sinister the way all our cubicles faced inward so we could be snuck up on like schoolchildren looking slack-jawed in the wrong direction.

Sue told me to keep my eye on the ball. My year review was in two weeks, remember. Try to ignore the petty stuff, office gossip. The petty stuff, I wanted to say, it makes me feel alive.

Clicks and coughs reminded me that there were plenty of invisible witnesses to my reprimand. Roseanne, never one to miss an opportunity, sent over a link: an article that ranked the happiest and unhappiest jobs, as reported by a sample of two thousand employees with enough time, energy, or desperation to respond to such a survey. It brought to mind when doctors ask you how much pain you’re in, from one to ten—does no pain mean you’re happy?

Marketing manager was number one in the happiest column. Roseanne must have thought that’s what I aspired to, one rung up.

“So all of this is the best-case scenario?” I asked. She laughed so hard she cried. At least, her blinking corner did.

––

I found Claudia eventually. She had a website full of her digital art that was curiously or intentionally hard to find. It was pretty good stuff, playful but with a cynical edge. There was one cartoon that had a woman trying to reach the center of a web of tangled barbed wire—drops of blood scattered at her feet—where a little box sat waiting, labeled with the word “aha!”

Another had a proud-looking corgi on stilts, heading right toward a series of potholes.

How could I hate a cynic? A cynic who plays the game. You could buy prints of these pieces on Etsy, thirty-nine ninety-five. So I did.

I felt strangely like a bully and an admirer at once.

My annual review resulted in a fifteen hundred dollar raise and a new, insistent question: what is it you want to focus on? Sue asked it like I had my pick of subjects—“you tell me, what is it you want to focus on here?” Well, I thought, I’d spent that entire morning ruminating on the word podcast. Patrick Osteen and his podcast. Everyone on the subway with their wireless ear buds, listening to a favored podcast, iPod broadcast. It had snuck its way into the language like a vigorous, invasive shrub, preventing other slower garden growers. A shrub that was making somebody a lot of money. I had no other word for that type of programming, nothing that anyone would recognize. My very perception was branded. Was that what our clients wanted?

Sue gave me a look like she thought I might have forgotten the question. I hated her for how stupid she thought I was.

“I’ll have to think more about what I think about that one,” I said stupidly.

My bumbling notwithstanding, I felt a slight, tingly elation for the rest of the workday at the thought of my raise, and spent every other minute listing off what I could purchase with my extra thirty bucks a week. Two candles. A new houseplant. A subscription to the Times. I could topple a couple paywalls, eat a few more burgers out. Try bison. Become a small-dollar campaign contributor. Help conserve the bison. Take a cab ride across the bridge, stick my head out the window. Roseanne was in a meeting—I wanted to tell somebody!

But I’d soon burned up the reward’s modest fuel and fell back to my set-point, slow-going happiness, i.e., unhappiness. When would the next bump be, I thought, and wasn’t it just an adjustment for inflation?

That night as Peter alternated between guttural and maniacal mouth sounds that passed as language to his online gaming friends, I lay in my lofted bed, tending to my sadness. Putting words to it, wishing there was someone to hear them out loud. It started in my center and spread outward. It felt like the world was shimmery, but in a bad way, like a disturbing hologram or opening your eyes underwater. It felt like my parents were dead, but they were just fine, living their comfortable lives in Annapolis. Me, I was clawing at life, dangling like from a climbing wall, surprise and I can’t find my footing, miss a peg and I’d have to start all over again at the bottom, always looming large down there.

I chose to attend the first communication forum on the first Tuesday in May and arrived five minutes before ten because I was tired of thinking about beer before lunch. Roseanne wouldn’t come with me because she wanted to know what to expect beforehand, and I was her personal scout. “I’m no good caught off guard,” she said. “I draw attention to myself.” And yet, after many years, Sue and others in offices around us never seemed to remember Roseanne’s name—so I didn’t know what to believe.

The forum was on the second floor, unclaimed territory that had the air of new construction and desperate, constant disinfecting, as if no attempt at renovation could attract a permanent tenant. An easel presented itself as the elevator doors opened, holding a sign with an arrow on it, pointing to the only room in use. I felt I was at a hotel conference on spiritual self-help, and that this arrow was directing me toward assured improvements in my tragic personality.

I wasn’t the earliest. Three men in different shades of blue button-down were seated in the back row, and I marveled at the enduring appeal of appearing so removed. Appealing enough to arrive early, even, to ensure the necessary distance. Two of them were having an unnecessarily heated discussion about Universal Basic Income.

“Were the Bush tax-cuts paid for?” said the lightest blue shirt, like a baby blue. “Was the Iraq war paid for?”

“Yeah, I also read that article,” said navy.

The third guy was turquoise and looked at me hopefully like I might provide some insight that made this debate worth having but all I could think of was, one, I thought I knew everyone that worked here and, two, what did these men tell their bosses they wanted to focus on. Income inequality?

Plus this was the sort of glib ideological dispute that made me want to insult people personally, so I sat in the very front and turned my attention to the woman preparing to guide me to a more enlightened version of myself. I recognized her, at least—she was high up in HR and occasionally sent emails about professional development seminars and the difference between efficiency and productivity. She probably knew things like whether remote working was a good idea or a bad idea and how well my job could be executed by a creatively inclined robot. She winked at me and I remembered that her name was Lydia. She knew what she was doing.

I rummaged for my phone, forgetting that I had left it at my desk on purpose, the better to sit and wonder at the feed of my own consciousness in the morning, before the daily incidents demanded their fill of fixation. So I stared ahead at Lydia as she tinkered on her laptop. Her movements were relaxed and deliberate, like time expanded to fit them. Behind me it contracted—babble, babble—like rapids before a clear, blue pool. I was the observer, like in some Einsteinian thought experiment, and as the men continued their tug of war it reminded me of my parents at dinnertime—playacting, it seemed to me in retrospect, for their children, a captive audience. Stretching the rope so my mother ended further left and my father further right than when they started. My whole life I’d felt like someone was expecting me to take notes. In conversation I should put them to the test, lest Michael from Finance—whoever—prove his own to be more thorough. In which case I might have to resort to personal experience and feelings, god forbid, and risk being written off as frivolous or a gossip.

I hadn’t noticed the room filling up with tired, quiet people until I saw a pink-painted toe out of the corner of my eye. I turned to see the whole arched foot, the red-rubbed knee and paisley skirt, the crossed arms and pursed lips of Claudia Burke.

As my heart sped up it occurred to me that this is what I’d been hoping for. I wanted to be in the center of the action. Swap time debating decisions and trends made elsewhere for the chance to witness some consequential shit right here—something limbic and dilating. Something I’d remember without writing it down in my phone. Claudia didn’t look at me and I wondered whether over the course of the past few weeks she had come to inhabit a defensive shell, the kind to protect against exactly my sort, barely an acquaintance. Had an eerie quiet descended around her, pierced occasionally by sidelong looks? Did she talk about it on the phone with her mother, an old friend, her long-distance partner in San Diego? Had she been sleeping poorly, plagued by dreams with pointing fingers?

Lydia, too, registered Claudia’s presence, I saw it in the blink of an eye—but this was her work, the business of people, no time to dwell. The room was brimming now, people standing, frustrated. Half the company, in theory, with certain exceptions, I assumed, for the one percent. Lydia began.

She put up a slide with a quote from Plato, one I’d seen before in some 101, I think, about the dangers of writing:

For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom.

She gave us a condescending amount of time to read it. Next to me, Claudia sighed, reminding me how much a simple exhale could say, the expelled air very much a part of her, carrying her mood with it, her disinterest mingling with the atmosphere of the room, with the air I then took in.

“I want you to imagine everyone you’ve communicated with at work this week,” Lydia said. “Clients, colleagues, superiors, support staff, employees of other departments.” She gave us a slick moment and a sly smile. “Your regulars, I’ll call them.”

“And now I want you to imagine everything you’ve said to them. In person, on the phone, email, chat, all of it, as if it were recorded and put on display for all your regulars to see.”

“I think I can see what you’re thinking…disturbing? Invasive? Not to mention impossible!” she said. “Who can remember everything they’ve said to people? Why on earth do we have all this technology if not to keep track of it for us?”

Her casual demeanor began to register as unfair, a privilege of her position: the wink, the denim, the costume jewelry. She assumed a folksy inflection. It all seemed to say, if you speak the right language, you can use it however you want, you can even attribute a shared response to an audience of bleary, ten a.m. faces; why, you can plain make things up! My own eyelids were heavy with annoyance when, surprise, she called on me.

“Sam,” she said. “Think fast. Tell me the most recent work communication you can remember.”

I felt important, surveilled, complicit, like everyone must have thought I’d rehearsed for this bit. But I couldn’t very well just sit there saying nothing.

“Um, this morning I said hello to my boss when she got in and she asked if Jodi from Xbox called and I said no not yet so she told me to email her assistant saying that we were good to go for the new launch date.”

She smiled, somehow satisfied. “Thank you, Sam.”

I felt unimportant, known, frivolous. That was what my interactions were like: I could have killed her for the reminder. Somehow when I’d held the outline of my days in my mind without bothering with the shading, they had seemed to amount to more than the stick-figure drawings of a child they’d just been revealed to be.

“In person you’re giving much more context to what you communicate,” Lydia continued as she changed the slide to a picture of two men and two women in an unlikely circle in the middle of a hallway somewhere, each with a different stance, like a catalogue of tempers. “Your tone, body language, eye contact, gesture. All your senses are engaged—it’s a fuller picture of a person’s mental state, one you’re much more likely to remember. It’s hard to make a truly lasting impression over e-mail, after all.” Hadn’t recent events proved otherwise?

“But sometimes we don’t want all that interference,” she said. “We just want the information, uniform, sequential, crystal clear.” A slide with squiggly, telepathic lines between two computers, no people in sight. “Sometimes you want your interactions to be quick, light, a reminder in a chat box, a question about a system.” And then that damn computer with a mouth, laughing this time. Ha, ha! It reminded me of Roseanne. My little laughing computer. “Not every interaction can be approached in the same way.”

“But pretty soon you’ve got so many different forms of communication operating at once that you forget how different their purposes are. What you’ve said to whom and in what context, with what voice. You succumb to what I call switch failure.”

I got the impression Lydia was the kind of person who was mostly fulfilled by her job, whose hobbies were just that, not buried or budding aspirations.

I could see her writing her company bio in an earnest third person—she takes her coffee black as midnight on a moonless night. She can be found walking the streets of New York and falling head over heels with every dog she meets. She enjoys swimming and jumping and licking and smiling.

“I want you to remember this: Audience, Timing, Objective, Material. These are the ATOMs of your communication, your most essential components. Remind yourself, from mode to mode, meeting to meeting, internal to external, friend to stranger, Slack chat to sensitive message: ATOM. Responding to a disappointing project update with five cc’s after coming from an emotional face-to-face? Take a minute: ATOM. And while we’re on the subject of cc’s…”

Claudia got up and left.

I couldn’t speak to objective, but her audience was rapt, her timing was impeccable, and her material was succinct and effective. By saying nothing at all, she left a stronger trace than if she’d made some explicit declaration: the squeak of the chair’s metal feet was a little squeakier, the turn of the door handle more deliberate, the clop of her shoes down the hall practically reverberated. It was small evidence of the principle that giving less gets you more, even when leaving a room. Oh, how I wished I’d said something so swift and withholding in response to Lydia’s question that it left everyone wondering at the gaps in my answer like they stared after Claudia. I wished I could assert my freedom like that, my unwillingness to play the cubicled pupil. But time passed, the squeak no longer echoed, the handle righted itself, Claudia had made her point, and I was still glued to my chair.

Lydia was flustered by the interruption but quickly recovered.

“Ask yourself,” she said, attempting to regain our attention. “What does this person really need to know?”

––

By the end of the week I got up the courage to find my way to Claudia’s desk. Every time I passed an office I seemed to immediately attract the distracted gaze of its inhabitant. I couldn’t imagine getting any work done if I had to look for the source of every passing footstep. Whichever way you sat there was no avoiding other people.

I was getting close, I thought, as I approached the end of a hallway. Yes, wasn’t design just on the other side of this sharp left turn? Nimble hands manipulating arcane software, visual thinkers with a keen sense of space as a broad platform on which to convince consumers with more than just a narrow channel of words, those sad shadows. Voices mingled there, out of reach and overlapping: interference, you could call it. Something about mattress firmness…“like I’m sleeping on a wooden plank…” That’s how the speaker liked it. I couldn’t tell if she was kidding, if that lilt was ironic or playfully sincere, couldn’t quite perceive this person’s mental state. It seemed like she might be experiencing switch failure, a term Peter had taken to immediately once I recounted it, applying it to any inconvenient symptom of modern life, any moment that revealed a seam: we both needed the shower in the morning or a joke about dying alone didn’t turn out to be funny. Switch Failure. Meanwhile I couldn’t stop thinking of other one-liners to contradict Lydia’s philosophies of professionalism: writing’s an elixir not of memory, but of reminding…but the faintest ink is better than the best memory!

“Hello. Who are you?”

My body was ahead of me, since apparently I’d continued walking and landed in the thick of a pod of designers’ cubicles. The one on the left was the cube I’d come for, but instead of Claudia I found a smaller-boned, fair-haired girl with sincere eye contact and an ironic mouth, like I’d done something hilarious by appearing, didn’t I agree? Her nameplate was still empty but she’d made herself known in other ways—one of those “Buddha boards” for drawing with water and a bamboo brush sat where Claudia had kept a black and white analog clock. I remembered it now that it was gone.

“Oh, I’m no one,” I said, and kept on walking, so she could share a little more about her sleeping habits, paint a little picture of herself on the communal Buddha board before her new colleagues had to go back to work and it gradually disappeared.

––

The following Monday Peter called for me while I was lying on my bed and staring at the nearby ceiling, ignoring a text message from my lawyer friend and instead trying to think of people who began their careers late in life. Alan Rickman wasn’t an acting success until he was in his forties. And there was the president’s old secretary on the West Wing. Ray Kroc was—no, bad example. Grandma Moses?

“Sam!” I ignored him, so he did it again.

“Something came for you,” he said without looking over his shoulder, but hearing the annoyed plod of my presence. I never got packages, but there was my name in curly red letters.

I brought it up to my bed to unbox and unwrap, popping a few small bubbles in the process. In my lap was a framed digital print. My eyes were quick to follow its story: a cubicle in grayscale, abandoned; an accordion of Post-it notes, unraveled by the breeze of a quick exit; a wide eye peeking through a carpeted crack; and a small sign made of driftwood, hanging lazily off the back of a desk chair. Gone Fishing.

It wasn’t what I ordered, and in the bottom right-hand corner she’d written a small “1/1.”