The Ignored

time she finished her shower, I was dead asleep.

Three

Assistant Coordinator of Interoffice Procedures and Phase II Documentation.

Despite the implications of my rather pretentious title, I turned out to be little more than a glorified clerk, typing memos that needed to be typed, proofreading instruction sheets that needed to be proofread, doing the jobs the Coordinator of Interoffice Procedures and Phase II Documentation didn’t want to assign to a secretary and didn’t want to do himself.

That first assignment was either an aberration, or else I’d failed so miserably at it that Stewart was not willing to risk having me work on a real job again.

I was afraid to ask which.

I tried talking to Derek the first few days, saying hello when I arrived in the morning, good-bye when I left for home, occasionally attempting to start a conversation at other times throughout the day. But all of my efforts were met with the same stony silence, and I soon gave up. Technically, we were office mates, but our relationship was even more impersonal than that. We shared the same work space.

Period.

The depressing thing was that it was not just Derek. No one, it seemed, wanted to speak to me. I did not know why this was. I was new and knew no one, and in an effort to become acquainted with my coworkers, I tried nodding or waving to other employees I passed in the halls, saying “Hi,” “Good morning,” “How are you?”, but more often than not, I was met with blank looks, my greetings ignored. Every so often, someone would wave back, smile slightly, or say hello, but that was the exception rather than the rule, and pretty damn rare.

Among the computer programmers, my presence was barely tolerated. I was not required to deal with them on a regular basis, but several times those first few days I had to go over to their area and either deliver copies of memos or pick up papers to be proofread, and they made clear their disdain for me by ignoring me and treating me as though I were a slave — an emotionless, personalityless automaton there only to do my professional duty.

Every so often, I would meet one of them in the break room, and I always tried to break the ice and establish some sort of one-on-one relationship, but my attempts invariably failed. I talked twice to Stacy Kerrin, the blond woman, and I gathered from reading between the lines of what she said and what she didn’t say that my predecessor had been well-liked within the department. Apparently, he had maintained friendships with many of the programmers outside of work and had seen them on a social basis. She spoke of him fondly, as an equal.

But I was clearly a second-class citizen.

I wanted to feel superior to these people, should have been able to feel superior — they were dorks and nerds, geeks to a man — but I found myself feeling uncomfortably out of place around them and even slightly intimidated. In the real world they might be losers, but here in their world they were the norm and I was the outcast.

I took to spending most of my breaks at my desk, alone.

On Friday, Stewart had assigned me to correct the grammar on an old chapter of the department Standards Manual, and I spent at least an hour trying to get the paper aligned in the printer. I was supposed to have the assignment finished before noon, and I had to wait until all of the pages were printed before leaving, so I was late for lunch.

It was twelve-thirty by the time I xeroxed the chapter, placed a copy on Stewart’s desk, and finally went outside.

The two BMWs that had flanked my car this morning were gone, and I pulled out easily. The Buick was almost out of gas, and there was no gas station between here and the freeway, so I decided to try the other direction. I figured I’d find a Shell or a Texaco or something at one of the intersections.

Ten minutes later, I was hopelessly lost.

I’d never really driven through Irvine before. I’d driven past it on my way to San Diego, I’d passed through a corner of it on my way to the beach, but I’d never driven in it. I didn’t know the city, and as I headed south on Emery, I was amazed by its monochromatic sameness. I drove for miles without encountering a store, gas station, or shopping center of any kind. There was only row upon row of identical two-story tan houses behind a seemingly endless brown brick wall. I passed four stoplights, then turned at the fifth. None of the street names were recognizable to me, and I continued turning, right and left and right and left, hoping to find a gas station, or at least a liquor store where I could ask directions to a gas station, but there was only that brown brick wall, lining both sides of every street. It was like some labyrinthian science fiction city, and I was getting worried because my gas gauge was now definitely on E, but there was also a part of me that found this exciting. I’d never seen anything like it before. Irvine was a planned community, with businesses all in one area, residences in another, farmland in another, and apparently stores and gas stations in another. Something about that appealed to me, and though I was afraid of running out of gas, I also felt strangely comfortable here. The mazelike uniformity of the streets and the buildings fascinated me, and seemed to me somehow wondrous.

Finally I did find an Arco, deceptively disguised in an unobtrusive corner building the same brown brick as the wall, and I got my gas and asked the attendant how to get back to Emery. The directions were surprisingly easy — I hadn’t gone as far afield as I thought — and I thanked him, and drove off.

I returned to work feeling lighter and happier for my little noontime jaunt.

I promised myself I’d spend more of my lunch hours exploring Irvine.

The days dragged.

My job was mind-numbingly boring, made even more so by the knowledge that it was completely useless. From what I could tell, Automated Interface would have had absolutely no trouble getting along without me. The corporation could have eliminated my position entirely and no one would have even noticed.

I mentioned this to Jane over dinner one night, and she tried to tell me that, when you got down to it, most jobs were useless. “What about the people who work for companies that make foot deodorant or those magnets that look like sandwiches and Oreo cookies? No one really needs that stuff. Those people’s jobs aren’t important.”

“Yeah, but people buy those things. People want those things.”

“People want computer things, too.”

“But I don’t even make computer things. I don’t design, produce, market, or sell — ”

“There are people with jobs like yours in every company.”

“That doesn’t make it okay.”

She looked at me. “What do you want to do? Go to Africa and feed starving children? I don’t think you’re the type.”

“I’m not saying that — ”

“What are you saying, then?”

I let it drop. I could not seem to articulate what I was trying to say. I felt useless and unimportant — guilty, I suppose, for taking home a paycheck when I wasn’t actually doing or accomplishing anything. It was a strange feeling, and not one I could easily explain to Jane, but it discomfited me and I was not able to ignore it.

Although I did not like my job, I did not hate it enough to quit. In the back of my mind was the idea that this was temporary, something to tide me over until I found the position I really wanted. I told myself this was a transitional phase between school and my real occupation.

But I had no idea what my “real” occupation would be.

One thing I quickly learned was that, in a major corporation, as much time is spent trying to look busy as is spent actually working. The week’s worth of assignments I was given each Monday I could have easily completed by Wednesday, but although workers in movies and on TV eagerly complete their assignments in record time and then ask for more work, impressing those higher up on the corporate ladder and elevating themselves through the ranks, it was made clear to me early on that such initiative in real life was not only not encouraged, it was frowned upon. The people surrounding me in the company hierarchy had asses to protect. They had, over the years, worked out what was for them a comfortable ratio of work to nonwork, and if I suddenly started cranking out