“When I work, I work hard,” I told him. “And when I play, I play hard.” And then, sternly, I added, “There’s only one thing I do softly, and that’s pet kittens.” It was true, I reflected. You can’t pet a kitten hard, otherwise it will get up and walk away. And it may never come back. Kittens are such fickle animals. But I wasn’t petting any kittens. Matter of fact, there weren’t any kittens within a few miles of where we were. Not any cute ones, anyway. Maybe a few scraggly strays, wondering the alleys like false prophets, shunned from their village, this world. I was in the dugout, talking to my boss, who was now my coach, who on Monday would cease being my coach and return to being my boss. We were “psyching each other out,” as it were. I could tell he was psyched. He was eyeing Bellcom’s dugout, muttering to himself “your profit margins may be bigger than ours, but our baseball is going to rock you like a, uh…” “Hurricane?” I asked. “a, uh, a ROCKING CHAIR!” He concluded, loudly, without even seeming to notice me. He was bad at metaphors. “What about a rocking chair?” Asked Perry, who worked in the programming department; who I tended to avoid without really knowing why. “That’s how bad they’re going to get spanked!” Yelled the coach, my boss, who was usually so conditioned by upper-management manuals to never say anything negative. I don’t think that Stephen Covey ever used the phrase “spanked” to refer to defeat in his long, categorizing, over-simplifying life. “They’re going to get spanked as bad as a rocking chair?” Asked Perry, frowning. “Worse than that, baby!” Answered the coach. I think I might have accidentally over-psyched him out.
The Paradigm Shifts
My office is in a tall building just west of Michigan Avenue. Looking out the large, curtainless window, I see only more buildings. Sure, the existence of Lake Michigan is near, somewhere east, but visible only to a select few of our staff. I am not one of those few. Below me—far, far below—are streets filled with people walking to work, restless, stressed, avoiding eye contact with each other. I’ve only seriously considered jumping out of that window once or twice. Most of the time, it’s just a passing inclination; a source of wondrous amusement. Would those people on the ground stop to help this still warm corpse? Or would they continue about their business, the witnessing of a suicide becoming nothing more than a footnote in their demanding and inexhaustible days? I wonder these types of things when I have the time. Usually, I’m too busy. I develop software for a multinational corporation called Delible Technologies, Inc. We come form a long tradition of removing prefixes and distorting words. When I became bored in school as a kid, I would raise my hand to go to the bathroom. I never really had to go, but it was a good excuse to walk around outside for a bit. I find myself, 33 years old, trying to start a family of my own, and I’m doing the same types of things. I’ll take cigarette breaks, though I don’t smoke. I’ll only fill my coffee halfway up, so I’ll have to keep refilling. I cost my company hundreds of dollars doing these things, but it’s hard to feel bad—on an average day, I make them over a thousand.
Leadership is a Relationship
We were at a “team building” meeting, though all of us were just sitting around, talking about our pathetic lives. Sometimes we compare misery. “I got four hours of sleep last night,” I heard someone say. “Four hours! That’s more sleep than I’ve had in the last week. Hell, every week since that damn kid of mine entered this world,” someone else responded. I could sort of sympathize, though I’ve taken care to get around 6 hours every night since my wife had our first kid. I’m already paranoid about my boy. I obsessively try to observe any deficiencies. When talking with other newly-made fathers, I notice Jordan doesn’t seem to stack up. Of course, I lie about his first words— “He said ‘papa!’” “Sounded more like ‘Papel.’ Maybe he’s trying to understand the hierarchies of Catholicism.” “No, no. That was definitely Papa.” “Even so, who the hell refers to their father as ‘papa,’ anyways? Did we just give birth to Huckleberry Finn? And even if he did say it, he was pointing at the DVD Player.” —usually telling people he has a fairly extensive vocabulary, and can often link words together. And I omit things like his insufficient ability to walk. “Your kid,” said Perry, turning to me, “was he really named after Number 23?” “Well, sort of,” I answered. “My wife really likes the bible and I really like the Bulls. It was a great compromise.” “That’s great!” mused Perry, laughing a little too loudly. His laughter was cut short by our boss, still wearing his baseball cap, entering the room with a large trophy. “You guys know what this is?” He asked. “It’s a fuckin’ trophy,” answered Dave, the loudmouthed encoder who I often referred to as The Sailor. Though, I think his only experience with the sea would be as the third letter in his favorite word. “No Dave,” answered the boss. “This trophy is not currently engaging in intercourse.” He looked around the room, clobbering us over the head with his perceived cleverness of the witty riposte. “But it will be on display at the receptionist’s desk, so all who enter can see our triumph over Bellcom last Saturday.” “So wait,” interjected Chris, who hated just about everything except role playing games and chess. “You bought a trophy for our marginal win against a team who cared almost as little as most of us about the game?” “Yes,” answered the boss, sternly. He pretended not to care, but I could tell by the way he flung the trophy to the side of the table that something had been crushed within him. We are all way too cynical to fall for these Team Work metaphors. It must be frustrating.
They are not Bosses, They are Role Models
“It must be frustrating,” she said to me when I got home, three hours too late—one stuck at work, two stuck at a bar. She had deep blue veins emerging from her forehead, above hockey-puck circles beneath her eyes. Her hair was thinned, like an addict’s, and her clothes were stained with baby food and baby secretion. If I did not love her, I would be scared of her. Actually, I am scared of her, which makes me question my— “These are sacrifices I’m making, though. We’re both—” My thought transformed into a fragment that needed no finish. She understood. When you’ve known someone so well for so long, you just start to understand. She nodded, sighed, ran her unwashed hands through her unwashed hair, then slapped them back down at her sides. She was thinking, I could tell, the same thing as me. Jordan was supposed to be a new beginning—a bucket for the love we had grown tired of pouring on each other—but had turned into something so much more devastating. With our love, we poured our work, our money, our time—we poured each other into that bucket. And now we were trapped. Two characters in search of an exit. This morning, I donned my black slacks and Hawaiian shirt—Hawaiian shirt Fridays—and stumbled down the stairs, half awake. Sarah was walking about the kitchen in fast forward; hovering around Jordan, in his high chair, like a moon orbiting a planet. I stopped to fill my plastic coffee cup, had a meaningless exchange, kissed my son goodbye, and went out to my car. My car is black and ding-free. Or is it ding-resistant? Either way, the meaning is the same. There will be no dings. All dings shall be left behind. As I drive, I wonder what happened to my coffee. Did I forget it? Did I leave it somewhere? The radio spews baseball statistics, which prompts my anger. The unveiling truth of the fallibility of the Cubs becomes dissonant with my perception. At bars, I had sworn they were the team of the new millennium. I had put my faith in these aging bastions of physical ability. And now they’re injured and defeated and broken. The stats betray me. The math disproves my devotion. As I park and leave my car behind me, I notice my coffee cup, upright on the hood. Had I driven with it there the entire time? What a spectacle I must have made on the road. And for the cup to remain, without falling off into the roadside abyss—what a feat. I grab the cup, inspect it, and take it with me into work.
Rewards and Setbacks
I spend more time attempting to program than I do actually programming. It’s a series of experiments—trial, error, coffee break—with limitless parameters. The code language is so ridiculous and unsatisfying; no one has really determined just how far it can take us. Sometimes, in theory, we can transform and relate our ideas into a working code. Usually, though, like with any language, we fail miserably. Right now, I am failing miserably. And if my failure wasn’t enough, someone decided to take the last of the coffee without brewing any more, so in addition to my lack of coffee, our office now has a lack of coffee pot, due to the explosion. You know, the explosion that happens when a hot, empty pot of coffee rests on a hot burner for a long period of time. I thought everyone knew about that. Evidently, I was wrong. I’ve picked up my empty cup at least six times. My hand, trained to believe it was half full—it’s always half full—shot into the air every time I picked up the cup. For the last ten years, I’ve been almost sure that I would eventually go insane. I’m beginning to see traces of truth in this assertion. I attempt to rid myself of these thoughts and return to my programming—an attempt to attempt—until I spot the boss walking towards my office, in his over-sized, off-white Hawaiian shirt, with what looks like a giant prison key. There was a time when I didn’t dread these sights. There was a time when I fell in love with my code language; a zest for the freshness, the bright horizons technology could bring. But those days have been strangled and wrung-out by the hands of routine until I— He slaps the stack of papers on my desk and says, “looks like another late one.” He tries to smile sympathetically—he knows he’s hurting me—but it comes off more as guilt. He knows. He knows he is complicit in the continual destruction of my will at the hands of Corporate America. And he knows that, with the foundations of my future, my family, already starting to show fault lines, I have no choice but to sigh through a fake smile, stick a paperweight on the papers, and divert my vision back to the blue glow of my computer. He’s a nice enough guy, loyal and honest, but I hate him, hate the symbol that comes with him. He knows this, too. But he can’t blame me anymore than I blame him. His shoes squeak only slightly as he saunters off into the long corridors of the technological era. I remain, motionless, staring above my computer through the window. The buildings—thirty story prisons—distort the horizon in unnamable ways. The sun has already somersaulted behind cityscape and I’ll never be able to tell when it actually falls below the earth’s line. I want to run from these buildings, let this cyber-existence fall to ruin, leaving me ding-resistant; ding-free. I want to pet kittens or raise my hand to go to the bathroom, but there are some things that must be sacrificed. I have weekends and holidays, I suppose—tiny slivers of life peering through my expanse of obligation. Days when I don’t have to fight just to keep my family alive. Days when I can look at my wife and realize I no longer love her. I don’t want to forego the pain of living in favor of becoming a machine’s machine. I don’t want to worry that my despair is a financial liability. I only wish I can start living, but I can’t determine these things. I can only drop my head slowly, with the weight of a world I cannot experience, and continue my attempts in a language foreign even to me. A Character. In search of an exit.
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