the modern office: clutter as a moat, your desk a fortress

“I’m just used to being an overachiever,” Valerie’s saying to Edgar, “you’re an overachiever, too, I can tell. Have you gotten into trouble even once since you’ve been here?”

“Mmmm…not really…,” he offers, after looking away to ponder the matter a second.

He took a little too long to answer that one, so she wonders what kind of incident he’s withholding. Surely nothing too extreme, because he really does seem to be majorly into his job here and, as she was telling one of her friends the other day, who was asking what this Edgar character did here, “he’s, like, the invisible guy, holding things together on the back end.” But there’s something there, for sure, although it’s impossible to even speculate what.

Still, she has already learned plenty about him through the art of omission. As in, leaving the office one day to return to her desk, and replaying some recent conversations in her head, and realizing that he had actually told her nothing. He’s very skillful at deflection, in fluidly shifting a conversation elsewhere. So much so that a person, such as she, doesn’t even realize he’s doing it until much later, if at all. But this is an admirable trait, if frustrating on occasion. But like Valerie has asked around enough and related the tale herself to coworkers, the night of the lost keys and the ass push through the window, to the extent she can recognize that Edgar had not breathed a word of this incident to anyone. Whereas with most guys — all modesty aside, here — would consider that among their recent if not career highlights, right? So she has to respect this. It also makes her that much more comfortable in relating to him, from the safety of this so-called therapy chair on the other side of his desk, a recent altercation with Barbara next door.

“Sometimes I feel like smashing her in the face with a block of wood,” Valerie admits.

This feeling only overtakes Valerie every once in a great while, however. She mostly gets along with the woman, and even halfway likes her. And of the remaining half, manages to at least empathize with her, what, at least forty-nine percent of the time. Valerie thinks she’s been pretty even-handed and level-headed about entire situation, really, considering that Barbara’s clearly a little flaky and neurotic…but the thing about dealing with someone suffering from these specific disorders is that by default, their being flaky and neurotic almost guarantees that you will never get to the bottom of what makes them so flaky and neurotic.

So yes, you mostly just try to understand, and get along as best you can with someone, in this tiny pressurized cabin of one office corner, two desks facing opposing directions with their backs to one another. She is over that whole sheer cape business, but to cite other, ongoing examples, there’s the whole performance art aspect to Barbara’s daily vitamin taking. It doesn’t matter if they’re the only two people in this room, although she certainly appears to amp up the ritual even more when others are present.

There is the elaborate pulling of the bottles from the top right drawer of her desk, one by one, and placing them in a row upon the surface. As though no one had ever witnessed such strange, exotic materials in an all-natural market where the vitamin department is one of their top-selling categories. Then unscrewing the lids, each of them in turn, setting these aside. Then picking up the first bottle with her left hand to carefully tilt it and permit one vitamin capsule to tumble into her right palm, at which point she swings that arm dramatically outward, while simultaneously bending her head backwards as far as it will naturally do so while seated in her chair, and sticking her tongue out, as she bends that right arm at the elbow and places the vitamin upon the extended tongue. Head remaining in its tilted back position, she reaches for the organic, agave sweetened tea bottle nearby, and tips a drop or two into her mouth, which she swishes for a moment before swallowing, shaking her head as though surprised at the taste. And then moving onto the second vitamin bottle, et al. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

She’s guessing this overly demonstrative show is a cry for help of some sort, an overwhelming need Barbara has to draw attention to herself. But if so, who among them is above such a stunt? The specific theatrics may differ, yet everyone has this same basic need. And Valerie might admit to being one of those snickering when Barbara brought her eighty year old dad to the office Christmas party, but it wasn’t as though she had a date, either — and this is coming from someone with a quote unquote joke of a boyfriend. So while to some extent feeling sad for Barbara, believing that she must be lonely, they’re all located somewhere on this spectrum, aren’t they?

Or maybe Barbara was just hoping this elaborate show with the vitamins would work as a conversation starter? If so, then technically this worked at least once. Well, sort of. Actually it hadn’t worked as a conversation starter at all, because Barbara had broached the topic herself. But at least the elaborate show with the vitamins, if nothing else, may have established her as someone knowledgeable about vitamins, therefore it wouldn’t be (as) weird if she recommended any. But yes, there was that morning where Valerie had come in both red-eyed from crying and stressed to the eyeballs, because her kid had been doing backflips in a park and hit his head on a rock, requiring a trip to the emergency room, and Barbara had taken one look at her, recommended she try a little kava kava root.

When you really think about it, it’s amazing that anyone gets any work done. Not just here, but in the modern landscape, period. Office, retail, you name it. Because the distractions almost outweigh a person’s ability to combat them, even among the best, who are continually, actively battling such. It’s like she was complimenting Edgar the other day on his ability to focus despite a litany of distractions. He replied that he actually isn’t that incredible at focusing, but he realized at some point that he either has to completely pay attention to someone talking, or completely pay attention to his work, because he can’t do both. He just can’t do it. And this isn’t all that remarkable, really, he says, for he believes that nobody is good at this. They only think that they are.

So there could be something to this theory, who knows. But though the open office concept is all the current rage, which means it has a litany of detractors as well, it’s not as though whatever you’d call this arrangement here is any better. She and Barbara with their assigned desks in the back corner of this room, with another pair nose to nose in the middle, one of which Dale has claimed, the other open to whomever else happens to be in the room and needing it, with a fifth desk up front by the door with that computer everyone uses, to check emails or send orders or screw around on the internet or even that weird old deli program from the 90s that Edgar has to pull up often.

The complications aren’t always work related, either, which certain managerial figures — even at a progressively less and less hippie-centric establishment such as this — still want to treat like some dirty secret, even though everyone is dealing with this stuff and it can’t help but intrude upon your job. You’re on your way to work, and get a call from your son’s teacher, which, one look at the phone number and it’s obviously probably not good, because they were on a field trip and he somehow already managed to crack his skull open trying to show some other kids that he could do a back flip, but instead landed head first on a gigantic boulder.

So she has to turn around and retrieve the impulsive lad, of course, take him to the emergency room. Whereupon, after he is stitched up and shuffled through a series of tests, they wrap his head in a giant blue bandage and send them on their merry way. Presently he sits in the community room playing video games on his portable Nintendo gadget, but who knows how long that diversion will hold sway over his preciously short attention span. Which means she’ll be stuck entertaining and rustling up lunch at some point, because the actual work work beckons in between and there’s no time to man the phone lines trying to rustle up a babysitter.

And this is just one day. A bit extreme, maybe, but not that extreme. She’s used to excelling at everything she does, yet is also extremely sensitive and admittedly doesn’t take criticism well. As in, is likely to burst into tears at the slightest provocation, even if venting about theoretical violence to others backstage, long after the scene has ended, like the little monologue about hitting Barbara in the face. Kind of like the day she brought in that CD of her friend’s band, wishing to play it for everyone, only to discover Felix had disabled the drives in everyone’s computer yet again. Like, what, the dude has never heard of Pandora, or Spotify? What is this accomplishing? Is he paranoid that one of the four computer literate people here might burn data files to a disc?

It’s surely just stress that’s got her so on edge. The kava kava experiment in truth did absolutely nothing, might have in fact amped her up even more, as crazy as that sounds, if that’s even possible. But the work itself isn’t necessarily a problem. The work is perfectly manageable and, if being truthful, often considerably dull. It’s steering this vehicle through a rapidly shifting landscape of external threats that’s the tricky part, like one of those street racing games her son likes to play — not just your life away from work, and the distractions here, while on the clock, but the politics, and maybe the occasional stab at passive entertainment to keep your morale up under threat of losing your mind to those other factors.

So yes they have little tally marks on a sheet of paper taped to the wall right now, in her corner of this office, concerning Mike Sewell’s pants. Christie Marsh first brought it to her attention, and since then, they’ve continually updated this with a fresh slash for eight days running. Of course, how many consecutive days he was wearing these prior to their observation remains unknown. But the key interesting point here is that they are girls’ jeans, with a bright gold Baby Fat label on the back, impossible to miss, and yes he has worn them to work now for in excess of a week now, consecutively.

It’s a discovery so flummoxing that nobody even has a good theory as to what this means. To the extent that anybody whatsoever was paying much attention to the guy, he wasn’t known as any sort of chronic clothing repeater prior to this. So either they weren’t paying attention before, and he was recycling his outfits to a disturbing extent, or…he just started this, because he believes these Baby Fat girls’ jeans are so slick. If true, this in turn can only apparently mean that he bought them, or…maybe he wants to imply that someone bought them for him? Or that, which is Valerie’s gut feeling, he is hoping to send off some preposterous signal that a woman of similar proportions left these at his house? She thinks you can kind of tell this the way he turns and smirks over his shoulder whenever anyone walks past, while he’s stocking dairy, as if he believes everyone is admiring and talking about his jeans. Which, well, he’s sort of half right, but even with that half not at all in the way he thinks.

Still, even the combined discussions about this, during one slower than average day, wouldn’t add up to five minutes. Otherwise, if here, it’s knuckles down. The social media posts, scheduled mostly on Hoot Suite, and the quick little piece per day they expect on the website — it doesn’t have to be much, three or four paragraphs might suffice, outside of the occasional hot, in-depth topic they wish her to promote — and a fresh recipe a week for the sidebar, soups of the day listed for Southside and Palmyra both. Compiling stuff here and there for the eventual employee newsletter, once a month, and the sudden blast of information uploaded, emailed to any subscribers, for their monthly ads. Also, Dale has somehow managed to commandeer her and Barbara as his underlings for the occasional oddball projects, typically whenever there’s a major event coming up, which often require working an isolated Saturday or Sunday. And while she’s aware that he has a solid reputation with this company, Dale is not exactly overabundantly nice to her or Barbara during these occasions.

Somewhere along the line you manage to dip out for fifteen to grab a quick bite. Being rung up by that really sweet seeming cashier, the young black girl Monique, after agreeing it’s sad you never seem to have any interaction outside of this, who laughs and observes that the burrito and yogurt pairing you’ve chosen seems to be “a really weird combination,” which is the same thing Willie stammers when he almost crashes into her, flying around a corner in the hall. Then she’s at her desk and not even fifteen minutes later a breathless Harry is barging into the managers’ office, to stand beside her desk, and, halfway panicked acting, ask her if she can give him a list right this second of every gluten free item in their computer system.

She is midbite but never quite completes it, as her mouth hangs open, attempting to cobble together a response. Why he needs it this instant, and why in the world he would think she’s the person to ask for this information, are among the most pressing questions off the top of her head, but she’s thinking of a more tactful way to figure out what this is all about. She really doesn’t get this place.