I've measured out my life with coffee spoons
Where the fuck had it come from?
A flash of memory, of him buying the gun, even trying it at the range, burst in his mind, but he knew it couldn't be memory, because it had never happened. So why did it feel like memory? Well, man, a voice said, what do you call it when you can't tell memory from fantasy? That's right. A psychotic break.
Shit.
“Sir, are you there? Hello?”
The rep on the line sounded like he would know what to do with a mystery gun in his work bag. Gradie took down another series of numbers and got off the call.
An email chimed in Gradie’s headset, and a notification popped up on the screen. Meeting in 15 minutes
Did they know about the gun? The idea that management had found out he had a gun and decided the best thing to do was have a meeting, while in some ways realistic, was unlikely. So, what was the meeting about? He was on time today!
Ten minutes evaporated and the five-minute reminder came up on his screen. He spent every second fanning his shirt, wiping off sweat, and putting his bag in a hundred different places. Finally, he stuck it in the bottom drawer. It felt like a burial.
He walked down the aisle of cubicles towards the office in the back wall, trying not to lock eyes with anyone. He envied them, dealing with the same mundane issues as every other day. Rude callers, shitty lunch, accounts fucked up by another unit, maybe a write-up. It felt like walking through a place no longer meant for him, like dreaming of a house long since sold.
He promised himself, with about ten feet left of the aisle, that if he got out of this, if he got rid of the gun without getting arrested or fired, he would change things. He would come into work every day and be the best fucking worker in the building, make supervisor in a month and never give anyone a reason to call him into a surprise meeting.
In the office, his senior manager Holly sat behind a big L shaped desk, his supervisor Matt leaned on a bookshelf, and his team lead Martina sat close enough to touch.
“Good morning Gradie. How are you?” she said.
“Good, thanks.”
“Well—”
“How are you?” he said, before he realized they were moving on.
“Oh, I’m doing well. It’s Friday, so can’t complain...” She smiled at the room, but dropped it when she looked back at Gradie. He had been trying to remember if it was more common for people to get fired on Fridays.
“Well, as you know, this meeting is about your performance.” She continued.
“Oh—”
“Did you not see the meeting request? It said performance meeting,” like coaxing a child toward the name of a shape.
“No, well, I saw the request,” He had stared at the box so long he forgot to read it.
“Oh, ok. Well, before we start, I just want to tell you, you’re not in trouble. This is just a meeting to develop a plan to help you improve.”
It sounded like a well-worn prayer. He wondered if it had been someone at his office who flipped out in a performance meeting. Or someone so far away and so long ago that all that was left of the incident was a policy of assuring employees they weren’t being terminated as soon as possible. A kind of corporate superstition.
“So, can you think of any distractions, anything lately that might be affecting your work?” Martina looked at him like he was about to make some grand confession.
“I don’t know. No.”
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
“Are you on your phone?”
He caught his smile before it was fully formed and turned it into a thoughtful grimace.
“No.” Every single employee was on their phone constantly, from temps to managers. The idea that this wasn’t the case seemed to Gradie to be another one of those managerial superstitions, like the sanctity of stat reports or the righteous pursuit of “engagement.”
“Ok,” Holly flipped through some papers. “Do you know what your metrics are for the month, Gradie?”
He didn’t, but they had printed out the spreadsheet they emailed at the end of every week and handed it to him. He had no idea how to decipher it. They helped him.
“Your productivity month to date is as at sixty-four percent.” Martina pointed out, pen aimed at the highlighted number. “The goal for the team is eighty, and the team average is eighty-three. We would like to see ninety, ideally, but…”
It felt like being told you have cancer. They were trying to keep everything friendly, but underneath it all was a grim understanding. If the numbers don’t improve, you’re outta here.
“And here is your average time on the phone, collections, accounts per hour, average time between accounts…”
For every metric, Matt gave an innocent reason the number might be down.
“Looks like you’re taking some time after a call, maybe getting your notes together… You might be holding too long…”
“Matt’s been giving a lot of things it could be,” Holly said. “But I wanna know what you think it is. What’s keeping you from making stats?”
He usually hated these meetings, his entire future hanging on a razor’s edge in a back office, numbers on a spreadsheet threatening to send him crashing into unemployment and ruin. But today, compared to the fear of being caught with a handgun at work, it was oddly comforting. One last chance to re-live a part of his life he had thought was gone forever. He played along.
“Uh, this new campaign—” “The accounts have a lot of touches—” “This week has been—” It felt like dancing for quarters. Holly saved him.
“Your metrics have been down for two months now, Gradie.”
He just looked at her, enjoying the silence.
“Alright, how about this.” She stacked the papers together in a motion of finality. “Let's go over what we’ve been seeing. Martina?”
Martina jolted and locked eyes with Gradie. For a moment, it felt like she was the one with her job on the line, asking Gradie for a helping hand. After a quick glance at Holly, she sat up straight and slipped back into her designated role.
“Ok, Gradie, since this new campaign rolled out, we’ve been doing some monitoring, and we noticed some periods of inaction throughout the day.”
They all looked at him like this was supposed to awaken a realization. The word monitoring bounced around in his head, trying to find somewhere to stick.
“Like what?”
“We’ll, there are times, fifteen seconds, or up to five minutes, where you don’t take any action on the account. The cursor doesn’t even move.”
Another waiting silence that they all expected him to fill somehow. Martina leaned in, trying to look in charge. Holly struggled to keep her eyelids above the midline. Matt looked like he had just turned Gradie in the cops for his own good, but was now wracked with guilt. Gradie just sat there.
Martina tapped the open page on the desk. A spreadsheet with one collum dedicated to “inactive time”, the boxes filled with 15s, 45s, 3m28s, and on and on. Gradie pretended to study it, and suddenly, the banality of it all reached up and slapped him in the face.
Is this my life now? Justifying myself 15 seconds at a time?
He tensed up, ready to spring out the door, and remembered the gun. If he quit, would they check his bag? Make sure he wasn’t stealing anything? They let the silence stretch, waiting for him.
Gradie thought about his poems, sketches, directionless daydreaming. All the things he had grabbed at like a shipwrecked sailor clawing at driftwood. All the things that had slipped through his fingers, taken by the current of time. Maybe it was the hours, days, now years, he had spent at this job, or maybe the gun at his desk, waiting like a time bomb to take out everything he was now struggling to preserve. Or maybe he just couldn’t think of another excuse, but his next words were something like honesty.
“Sometimes I just space out.”
There was another silence. Martina opened her mouth and closed it. Matt shifted on the bookshelf.
“Space out?” Holly said.
“Yea, like I just start thinking about something else.”
“Like what?”
He had run out of honesty.
“I don’t know.”
There was another pause.
“Well, maybe you need to think about whether this is the job for you,” Holly said.
Gradie managed a nod. Did she realize she was saying that buying groceries and paying rent might not be his thing?
“No. I like the job.”
“Well, Gradie, if that’s the case, we’re going to put you on a thirty-day plan. Martina and Matt are going to monitor your performance, meet with you weekly…”
They went over it all and Gradie watched them as if from a distance. None of it had anything to do with him anymore. If some deity snapped his fingers and swapped their job titles, they would act like completely different people. He pictured Holly leaning up against the bookshelf, slipping him excuses, Matt calling him on his bullshit…
Suddenly, they were done. Gradie stood up to leave and thought of the gun.
“Oh, I forgot. Something came up. I need to leave early today.”
Holly started to laugh, but caught herself.
“I’ll have to check the calendar,” said Martina.
Back at his desk, Holly’s words looped in his head. The idea that this job wasn’t “for him” had been so obvious he had never really thought about it. Like most long hidden truths, it was terrifying, and the fear was strangely familiar.