Personal Days Read Free Page B

pizzeria around the corner from his office had raised its prices by a quarter. Her therapist used pizza as an inflation barometer, and set his fee at one hundred times the price of a slice, which was now at two bucks, exclusive of toppings.
    Jenny later concludes that her life coach uses bagel prices to set her fee.
    The grand tour
    Sometimes one of us will have a visitor. If it’s his or her first time to the building, we’ll say,
Do you want the grand tour?
like it’s our new apartment. Actually, it’s always the guest’s first time. No one ever comes back if they can help it, possibly due to overhearing someone like Laars shouting
You are not going to believe the size of this roach.
    After braving or ignoring a sermon from the Holy Roller security guard, and taking the leisurely elevator up, the visitor walks straight into the middle of a labyrinth. Without a reliable guide, he or she can wander vast tracts of lunar workscape before seeing a window. Lizzie remembers her first day on the job: Stepping into this feng-shui-proof layout, heading straight to the bathroom, and crying.
    Most of us spend our days at a desk in one of the two archipelagoes of cubicle clusters. The desks have not been at capacity for over a year now, and so we let our stuff sprawl, colonizing adjacent work spaces, hanging a satchel in one, a jacket in another.
    A few of us have our own little rooms. Even though everybody could probably snag one at this point, given that staff is dwindling, the Sprout gets very agitated at any such request.
That doesn’t work with my comfort level right now.
Better to play it safe. Some of these rooms look out on the back of another office building. We wave to the workers there if our gazes happen to meet, and they wave back. That’s as far as it goes.
    Jonah has a room with a
door,
but no window. Crease has two desks, on opposite ends of the floor.
    The college of noncompetitive running
    People put too many things on the bulletin board. Bizarre newspaper items, notices for group shows exhibiting the disgruntled visual expressions of friends of friends, ironically saucy or inscrutable postcards.
Wish you were beer.
    Laars polices this corkboard commotion, giving everything a week before tearing it down. Schedules, announcements, responsibilities: These weigh on his spirit. When Laars started with us—six months, nine months, a year ago?—he was full of pep, but we managed to squeeze it out of him.
    Laars occasionally gives off an Ivy League vibe, but he actually went to a small liberal arts college called Aorta or something. None of us have heard of it, a school in the Pacific Northwest that doesn’t have grades or even pass-fail. It emphasizes feelings rather than performance. On the website you see pictures of a guy with the eraser tip of his pencil resting on his lip, two girls running noncompetitively—one’s wearing jeans—on a weedy-looking track, a white guy with an Afro reading under a tree.
    Multiple-desk syndrome
    I’ve got it down to under a minute,
says Crease, and as with a lot of what he says, we need a moment to figure out what he’s referring to.
Forty-seven seconds.
He means the traveling time between his two desks. In his mind, everyone is always thinking about him, worrying over Crease minutiae.
    Last year Jason got fired, right in the middle of a project. No one saw it coming. Crease, who was not on the same team, was told to take over
—Step up to the plate,
per the Sprout—but was never told exactly what needed to be done. He had to figure it out on the fly.
Baptism by fire,
as the Sprout, and later Crease himself, put it.
    With no time to move all of Jason’s folders and meticulously organized report bins to his own desk, Crease commuted from one side of the office to the other, doing the Jason work until 2 and his own until he left at 7, at 8, at 9.
    When the project was over he started moving his own stuff from his original desk to Jason’s—the same model, but with