Personal Days Read Free Page A

office. The stationery reads like the fossil record. Syllables disappeared. Ampersands were added and later removed. In the mid-’90s everything was consolidated into a set of five initials, two of which don’t actually stand for anything. The vowelless result defies easy pronunciation, even by longtime employees. You say it a different way every time. This quality lends it a daunting preverbal power.
    Lately we hear that some Californians want to make us
their
easternmost outpost. We base this conjecture on an opaquely worded one-inch paragraph on the fifth business page of the
Times
that appeared last month.
    Think positive,
we tell ourselves. There’s no reason to believe that a new owner will be any worse than the current one. But when have things ever gotten better?
    We know that the Firings were just a taste of what’s in store, and like morbid climatologists tracking twisters, we anticipate their return. If something ominous happens—nasty memo, Coke machine empty two days in a row—we see it as a sign of our new owners’ impending arrival.
    At these times Pru likes to shriek,
The Californians!
    Jack II thinks the best thing would be for them to come in and clean house, install their own people. He says it’s unlikely any of us will survive.
Their mentality is totally different out west,
he says.
I mean, I should know.
He lived in San Diego for about a year after college, trying to be a comedy writer, despite the fact that he is neither outwardly funny nor humorous on the printed page.
    You are here
    Our office is located on what must be the least populated semi-wide street in all of Manhattan, a no-man’s-land just far enough from two fashionable neighborhoods to be considered part of neither. Wind gets stuck here. At twilight, crumpled newspapers scuttle across the pavement like giant crabs. Plastic bags advance in tumbleweed fashion. Sometimes it feels like the edge of the world.
    We occupy the middle three floors of a nine-floor building, at the uneasy intersection of two quasi-avenues, which merge without clear signage. Further complicating matters is the abundance of honorary street names for people you’ve never heard of. Rabbi S. Blankman Street? “Mama” O’Sullivan Road? Who were these colorful figures of yesteryear? Cabbies throw their hands up and think of turning in their medallions.
    The Starbucks just down the road, uncomfortably situated on a corner between a boarded-up bar and a boarded-up locksmith, looks like a bordello. We call it the Bad Starbucks for its low-impact saxophone music and an absence of natural light combined with doomed, possibly improvised original drinks like the Pimm’s cup chai.
    The Good Starbucks, two blocks farther in the opposite direction, also looks like a house of ill repute, but with better ventilation and more freebies, little paper cups of cake.
    We’re within five minutes of two subway stops, but at such illogical angles to them that we have difficulty instructing people how to get here:
You go left and then cut across the second parking lot, not the one that says PARK.
    To make it easier we tell them we’ll meet up by the newsstand right outside the subway station three blocks away. We ask them beforehand,
What will you be wearing?
We describe ourselves:
Glasses, dark shirt.
This could be anybody.
    Slice of life
    The Bad Starbucks is where Jenny sees her life coach every Thursday at 4. She doesn’t think we know, but we know.
    Laars wonders what the difference between a therapist and a life coach is.
    A life coach doesn’t have an office and isn’t accredited,
says Lizzie.
    Lizzie has been out of sorts these days, slumping at her desk, leg hopping like a jackhammer. She is between therapists right now. She used to see one way uptown. He was good but the commute was killing her. She’d get there late and then they would spend half the remaining time discussing the reasons behind her lateness.
    The real reason she stopped going, though, is because the