Pink Slip Party Read Free

it?” says the woman in front of me with the potted plant.
    “That they have jobs and we don’t?” I say.
    “Exactly,” she says and sighs.
    A tall, sloped-shouldered man in a white short-sleeved collared shirt and a tie, the uniform of a lower midlevel supervisor, pulls the two workers apart. He tells them to “Take five” just like my middle-school gym coach.
    “Wind knocked out of you, eh, McGregor? Take five. Put your arms over your head and breathe deep.”
    I hated gym. Every time we played a sport involving a ball, I always got hit in the stomach with it. It was like there was a tracking device inside. Ooof. Every time. It’s no wonder then that my Pavlovian Response to physical exertion is acute stomach pain and difficulty breathing.
    “Come on people, let’s move,” the reedy man up front is saying. He has quite an overbite. “Everyone that’s just been laid off, go to the right. Everyone who’s been fired, left.”
    I go to the right. The low-level manager with the buck teeth eyes me suspiciously. Perhaps I look like I’ve been fired. Maybe I look guilty.
    I fill out more forms than are necessary to donate a kidney.
    I am jostled from window to window, like a nerdy party guest no one wants to talk to. The clerks have stickers instead of stamps, and fingernails longer than mechanical pencils. They smack gum irreverently as they glare at the back of their supervisor.
    I look at the floor and try not to make eye contact.
    “You need the blue form,” says the grandmotherly woman behind counter number two.
    “I have the blue form,” I say.
    “Not that blue form. This blue form,” she says holding up a form that looks exactly the same.
    “But isn’t that the same?”
    “Look, miss, would you hurry it up?” says a man who smells like onions standing behind me.
    “Step out of line,” commands the woman behind the glass partition.
    Just like that, I am bumped out of line, and back to the table with the forms at the back.
    It is almost five before I am finally, officially, registered for unemployment. They say it may be two weeks before I get my first check. I ask the woman behind the glass if this includes pay for the three hours I’ve stood in line. She doesn’t think this is funny and frowns at me.
    When I was fourteen, my mom thought I should audition for Saturday Night Live. She’d said so when I was younger and I’d make her laugh by sticking Pixie Stix up my nose and pretending to be a walrus. She thought I was a natural comedian. Then I went out into the real world and found that lots of people have mothers who think they should be on Saturday Night Live.
    It was the same feeling going into the working world. Discovering that you are not special, even if your mother thinks you are. You are expendable. Your worth is calculated by hourly rates and vacation time. You are not a person. You are no more than a series of numbers. A cell in a spreadsheet. A glint in a beancounter’s eye. Your whole existence fits into a neat series of ones and zeros.
    *   *   *
    As I’m leaving the unemployment office, I nearly bump into a girl coming in. She’s wearing entirely black, with silver eye shadow and a ring through her nose. Her hair is tied in two blond knots on either side of her head, and her T-shirt has a face, not a smiley and not a frown, either — indifference, and so I peg her as a techie. There’s something about her that looks vaguely familiar, and then it hits me: She used to work at Maximum Office.
    “Maximum Office, right?” I ask her.
    The girl nods. “Yeah, I worked there,” she says. “I was the system administrator before the cocksuckers laid me off last week.” She studies me, then extends her hand. “I’m Missy.”
    “And I’m Jane,” I say.
    “You’re the one who was sleeping with the Midwest Division VP,” Missy blurts.
    I turn bright red. I think everyone in the office knew. It’s why I couldn’t pass a water cooler without hearing hushed whispers and