Teddy’s first day on the job was as uneventful as any. They’d squeezed him in with the weekly batch, trailing two days behind the rest of em’. In the spectrum of beginners it’s a negligible deficit. He kept his head down like a good and proper boyo, nodded along when our newly appointed Cleric of Capitalism, Eric, delivered the gospel. When I worked my previous stint at Yukuhama Telecom Surpreme Ltd. wee little Eric was a floorman, his performance outshone by the girth of his tummeh. He had a funny shape about him, like a perfectly geometrical sphere propped up on two stilts. My first move when Teddy got clocked into the production line was to haggle for us to sit next to each other, and naturally, given my position within the company, on nod n’ greet terms with CEO Williams, I thought it was a sealed deal. A mere formality. Yet Fadhi, resolutely, declined. That’s Eric’s boy, I got no say innit. No special treatment. And I would’ve probably swallowed it as such if he didn’t add something along the line of policy, can’t risk the numbers going down. Like I’d start declining if I was actually enjoying my time. And then there was the other thing. Me and Benny were set up like royalty, having pulled away massively in the competition, like Barcelona and Real Madrid, rest of the lot only in there to pad the league. Our brothers and sisters on the floor loathed us. Not outright, not a cheeky fuck you in the hallway, spit on the ground. But the air had changed.
Sometimes I’d come back from a break to find that my notes had been shuffled. My calls were frequently invaded by low clicking noises, indicating that someone had tuned in. People were desperate to keep their jobs—I got that part. Copy profit and get profitable. Todo had arranged it so that the first thing you saw when you walked through the doors was me and Benny. Right next to the coffee machine, the fruit basket, the loo, the works! Every time there was a meeting they had to walk past us. It was a simple trick, a lowly one that didn’t seem to impact the numbers one bit. Now and then we’d join in on the meetings for giggles. When shit was really bad Fadhi or Cortez would force us both in there. They played one of our calls for all to hear, and we’d get to go through it bit by bit, dissecting the stampede to victory. But they weren’t morons about it. They only picked the proper clean calls.
The week sped along with little to no interactions. Lunch with Teddy and the halfwits he’d befriended, cigarettes with Teddy and the Gang, smirks for Teddy way over in the corner when I paraded up to the whiteboard to register my sales. Ali got fired for harassing the customers. Another one lost on the thin blue line. Management thought they’d done him in – that they came out on top. But Ali being Ali, he casually strolled in the next day with a suited up dork who apparently was a union lawyer. So they sat down to negotiate the terms of Ali’s termination, and mutually agreed upon a three month notice period. However, the silver lining of the deal was that Todo International had to pay his hourly wage when he went off on job interviews, including his expenses for transport. How the hell he managed to pull that off, I’ll never know. Shortly after they concluded the meeting, he darted off in a taxi for two hours, came back, then went off in another after lunch. It became his daily routine.
Come Thursday I’d called it early, leaning steady on a neat little row of lines up on the whiteboard. When I’d drawn the last one I went over to Teddy who spun circles in his chair, apparently between calls.
“An hour til’ closing and here he is, spinning away. They’re getting every dime’s worth investing in you I tell ya,” I said, planting myself on his desk.
“I dunno how you stand it Max. I really don’t. It’s literal torture.”
“You just gotta zone out miboy. Read the script, let yer yap do all the work. Thinking is the ticket to fatigue, and you wanna atleast cash out a month’s worth of hours before getting there.”
“Yeah? And why would I wanna do that?”
“There’s probably a good answer for that. Are they treatin’ you alright? Can I get you anything? A shiatsu?”
“There’s no way I’m lasting a month in this—Hi this is Theodore calling I hope I’m not disturbing…”
“You fucked it,” I said, shook my head.
Looking out over the landscape of cubicles and dividers, a surr of numb voices intermingled to form a chorus as bleak as static noise. Way over by the entrance Benny got up, clocking out early yet again, searched for me. I waved at him. He waved back, signaled for smokes. I shook my head like no-go, kissed my lips with index and middle cocked like a gun, fired away over the maelstrom. Every pair of eyes revealed just how empty their owners were. On other jobs you jump a mile come weekend. Here you start running the numbers, pushing digits into the machine. All throughout the weekend you’re waiting for the processors to churn your inputs, sketching up the imaginary slip of paper declaring your future at the company—your future in life. Some of my colleagues had spouses, children, mortgages. Most didn’t. Most were young shits like Teddy and I, scraping up for dope-money and kebaps.
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“Well you have a good one! In the middle of dinner," Teddy said, turning to me. "Who the hell eats now?”
“Don’t ask that man.”
“Ask what?”
“If you’re intruding. Of-fucking-course you’re intruding. That’s the whole point. Listen, next week you’ll sit in with me, take notes, speed-run this silly little nub gauntlet. I’ll arrange it boyo, and then you’ll start pandering in no time.”
As something kicked my leg and said Hi, you’re Max right, Teddy caught another one. The girl took her headphones off. Definitely no mortgage, probably a dropout. “Can I sit in too?”
“Well shit, if it was up to me you could all sit in. One big rat’s nest with cables criss-crossing all over the place, calling as one for the greater good.”
“What?”
“I dunno. Maybe, I guess.”
“Cool!” And off she went, back on the line. Newcomers ruled this part of the office, as far from all the amenities as possible, furthest travel distance to everything. It was the bottom of the horizontal pyramid. Sharply dressed youngins swung like a pendulum between nervous excitement and absolute dread. Like they'd realized you had to belong to a different subspecies of human to pull off a sale, that someone had made grave mistakes putting them on the payroll. It was a real drag on morale.
“... You don’t have us as a provider? Are you sure? My file here says that you do.”
“Hang up Teddy.”
“What? No, I’m not talking to you. It was my colleague, please hold. What do you want Max?”
“Hang up.”
“Ehm, there seems to be some technical problems. I’ll send someone!”
Eric, Teddy’s team leader, waddled out from the shitter looking real sweaty. Our eyes met, and he was noticably flustered. Like the worst thing imaginable had taken place in his squatting absence. I ignored.
“Don’t turn around now Teddy. Eric’s coming over and he doesn’t look too content.”
“Go figure. He’s been shitting for half an hour.”
“Geesh.”
“I gotta get started again or he’ll be pissed. Real hot-headed fucker. Fired a girl on the spot yesterday, before she even logged in. I’ll see you tomorrow?”
“We’re off tomorrow Freddy.”
“We are?”
“Friday’s off.”
“Nobody told me. You wanna do something?”
“No can do. Nan’s dibsed the entire weekend.”
“Oh. Well, wait until I get off? Grab some smokes on the way home?”
I nodded and started through the maze of padded dividers, chairs on wheels and legs of occupants, heading for my own corner of the universe to read. Eric was rapidly on the approach, taking skippy little steps as fast as his dimensions allowed. When we crossed somewhere in the middle of the officescape, he panted, stains of sweat visible through the same niveau of cheap shirt Cortez wore. The longer I looked the more they seemed to be the same person, parts of the same entity. It felt eerily odd.
“What… were you talking to them about?” he asked with much difficulty.
“I dunno Stasi, I forgot zhe recorder. Are you okay there? Need a timeout?”
“Fuck… you. Don’t come near my people. Got it? They’re mine.”
“What in the actual fuck Eric? You know, only mediocre sellers get promoted to team leaders. Expendable people, yeah? Don’t let it get to you.”
“They’re mine,” he repeated, leaning on an empty desk. “You think you’re hot shit? Well I know too Max. I know all about your little deal. Don’t come near my people. There’s nothing in the world that you should teach them.”
“Come on,” I said, eyes rolling. “Put Teddy next to me on Monday. I’ll make him a star in a week.” I glanced over at the whiteboard, and then back at Eric. “Not a single sale this week huh? Let a brother help out. Land some numbers. Bossman will think it was all you.”
“Are you thick?”
“No? Do you need a doughnut? Is your blood sugar low?”
“You’re disallowed,” he said, then leaning his perspiring face towards me, whispering, turning more than one curious head around. “They’re not allowed to listen in. Not a single syllable will be learned from you. When this ship is on the right path again, they’ll sack you. You fucking disgust me.”
A thin smirk cut across the puff in his face, cheeks squeezed together under eyebrows tensed to look like some comic book caricature of a villain sumo wrestler. Before I could say anything, he waddled on, yelling some incomprehensible mess into the static void.