The Ignored

note.”

Connor was staring at us. Even he seemed taken aback by the force of Stewart’s outburst.

“You are supposed to revise the manuals,” Stewart said. He spoke slowly and deliberately, angrily.

“Which part of the manuals?” I asked.

“Everything. If you had bothered to look through the books I left on your desk, you would have noticed that we no longer use that hardware system. I want you to revise those operator manuals so that they reflect our current system.”

“How do I do that?” I asked.

He stared at me. “You’re asking me how to do your job?”

Connor had grown increasingly uncomfortable, and he nodded toward me. “I’ll show you,” he offered.

I looked at him gratefully, smiling my thanks.

Stewart fixed the programmer with a disapproving glare but said nothing.

I followed Connor back to his cubicle.

It was easier than I’d thought it would be. Connor simply gave me a stack of manuals that had come with the computers Automated Interface had recently purchased. He told me to xerox them, put them in binders, then deliver them to the different departments within the company.

“You mean I’m just supposed to replace the old books with new ones?” I asked.

“Right.”

“How come Mr. Stewart told me to revise the manuals?”

“That’s just the way he talks.” The programmer tapped the cover of the top manual he’d given me. “Just make sure you return those to me when you’re through. I need them. You should find a distribution list somewhere in your desk that will tell you how many copies each department gets. Gabe always kept an up-to-date distribution list.”

Gabe. My predecessor. In addition to being friendly and outgoing, he’d apparently been well-organized and efficient as well.

“Thanks,” I told Connor.

“You’re welcome.”

I licked my lips. This was the first positive contact I’d actually had with one of my coworkers, and more than anything else I wanted to follow up on it. I wanted to build on this tentative base, to try and establish some sort of relationship with Connor. But I did not know how. I could have attempted to continue the conversation, I suppose. I could have asked him what he was working on. I could have tried to talk about something non-work related.

But I didn’t.

He turned back to his terminal, and I returned to my office.

I saw Connor later, near the Coke machine, and I smiled and waved at him as I entered the break room, but he ignored me, turned away, and, embarrassed, I quickly got my drink and left.

At lunch, I saw Connor leaving with Pam Greene. They didn’t see me, and I stood on the sidelines, watching them take the elevator down. I’d begun dreading lunch, feeling self-conscious about the fact that I always ate by myself. I would have much preferred working eight hours straight and getting off an hour earlier at the end of the day, not taking a lunch at all. I did not need sixty minutes each day to prove to me how I was regarded by my coworkers. I was depressed enough by the job as it was.

What depressed me further was the fact that everyone — everyone — seemed to have someone to eat with. Even someone like Derek, who as far as I could tell was almost universally reviled, had someone with whom he spent his lunch: a squat, toadlike man who worked someplace upstairs. I alone was alone. The secretaries who were nice to me during working hours all said good-bye and waved politely before abandoning me at lunchtime, not even bothering to ask if I would like to accompany them, perhaps assuming that I already had something to do with my lunch hour.

Perhaps not.

Whatever the reason, I was ignored, not invited, left to my own devices.

The secretaries, I must admit, did seem to be nicer to me than everyone else. Hope, our department secretary, always treated me well. She had the calm, kind, perpetually friendly air of a stereotypical grandmother, and she greeted me each day with a cheerful smile and a heartfelt “Hello!” She asked about my weekend plans on Friday afternoons; she asked how those plans turned out on Monday morning. She said good-bye to me each evening before I left.

Or course, she was equally nice to everyone within the department. She talked to everyone, seemed to like everyone, but that didn’t make her interest in me any less genuine or any less appreciated.

Likewise, Virginia and Lois, the women from the steno pool, were decent to me, friendly in a way that separated them from everyone else within our department.

Or within the building.

The guard in the lobby still paid no attention to me, although he seemed to be jovially familiar with everyone else who passed through the doors of Automated Interface.

To Jane, I continued to give a fairly neutral account of my days at work. I told her of my frustration with Stewart, complained about some of my bigger problems, but the day-to-day difficulties, my seeming inability to fit in with my fellow workers, the sense of social ostracism I felt, these things I kept to myself.

It was my cross to bear.

A week after I’d distributed the computer manuals, Stewart walked into my office, waving a sheet of blue interoffice memo paper. I was on break and reading the Times, but Stewart slammed down the memo on top of my newspaper. “Read that,” he demanded.

I read the memo. It was from the head of the accounting department and simply asked if we could send an extra copy of the computer manual since Accounting had recently received a new terminal. I looked up at Stewart. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll make another copy and send them a manual.”

“Not good enough,” Stewart said. “You should’ve sent them the correct number to begin with.”

“All I had to go on was Gabe’s distribution list,” I told him. “I didn’t know they’d gotten another computer.”

“It’s your job to know. You should have asked each department head how many copies he or she needed instead of relying on that outdated list. You screwed up, Jones.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“You’re sorry? This reflects on the whole department.” He picked up the memo. “I’m going to have to show this to Mr. Banks. I’ll let him decide on the proper course of action to take with you. In the meantime, get that manual to Accounting ASAP.”

“I will,” I said.

“You’d better.”

My workday went downhill from there.

Things did not improve when I got home. Jane was cooking hamburger casserole and watching an old rerun of M*A*S*H when I arrived. I’d always hated hamburger casserole, but I’d never told her so and it was not something she’d ever been able to figure out for herself.

I walked over to the TV and switched the channel. I liked M*A*S*H but I was a news junkie, and from the moment I got home until the start of prime time, I liked to watch the news. It made me nervous not to know what was going on in the world, to be oblivious to brewing disasters, but it didn’t seem to bother Jane at all. Even when the news was on, she paid attention only to movie reviews, and she preferred to watch reruns or films on cable.

It had been the source of many fights.

She knew my position, she knew how I felt, and I couldn’t help thinking that her choice of TV fare tonight was a direct provocation, an attempt to goad me. Usually, she had the news on when I came home. The fact that she didn’t this evening seemed to me to be a direct slap in the face.

I confronted her. “Why isn’t the news on?”

“I had a test today. I was tired. I wanted some light entertainment. I didn’t want to have to think.”

I understood how she felt, and I should have let it go, but I was still pissed off at Stewart, and I guess I had to take it out on somebody.

We got into it.