understanding when (gang of 13, part five)

don’t you don’t you wish you’d
never
ever
met her
--“Rid of Me”, PJ Harvey, 1993

I keep a rough list of key dates in my life in my head. The list has two tiers, kinda like the real name/hidden name doppleganger with T.S. Eliot’s cats. A lot of people do this, and my version isn’t much different. There’s the open list, which includes the first time I got drunk (June 28, 1985), the time I first got laid (Somewhere between Halloween and November 1, 1988), and eventually the day I get married or the birth of my first child (I’m assuming the latter is still TBD). A PowerPoint slide’s worth of charting my progress along the manhood trail.

There’s a second list, of course, about a half-dozen points in time when I arrived at one of life’s either/ors, I made a personal choice, and the consequences played out shortly afterward. And most, if not all, of these pivots have spurred an endtable-high stack of journal scribblings, ruminations over who knows how many rusty nails until 1:30 in the morning, and endless grist for the ongoing, Saramagoean monologue running in my head. All of that less mature energy expended toward a sole purpose, working backward. And toward the crucial moment of one of these days, and about five minutes right before I stopped pondering the ifs, picked the horse and rode it. And asking, in retro, always the same simple question. The one we learn at five when the logic starts to kick in. Why.

I’d arrive at why later. But during the time I’m describing here, I was more regularly occupied by the upbeat, hopeful question of when. When do I get my big break in my career? When will I have enough money to buy decent furniture to replace the junky hand-me-downs I have now? When I spend $15-20 a day for lunch, will I still have enough to take a girl out on Friday or Saturday night? If and when that girl even bothers to notice me?

My head was crowded by such pressing whens at my first major gig in downtown Rain Town, situated in the Obelisk, a massive, imposing tower that anchors, and literally looks down over the rest of the skyline. A major status symbol of cosmopolitan upgrade for the city’s image, the Obelisk was little more than a symbol of my arrival into a real career after about six years of renting videotapes, sorting mail, and typing dictation. If the job paid, and was meaningless, I probably did it at one point or another between 1992 and 1997.

Other people at the consulting firm had whens of their own to sort out. Like Jennifer, the office’s receptionist. She was about 24, didn’t have a degree, and had arrived at the office a year before me, after several years at the front desk of a South End auto dealership. Five years of dealing with Type A jackass car salesmen gave her a really hard edge, which revealed itself in the form of fairly sharp mouth. Most of the time this was a convenient outlet to channel frustrations on halfwitted deliverypersons who were lost. My guess is that Jennifer spent a considerable amount of time at that front desk wondering when another opening would avail itself. And when she couldn't come up with an answer, she’d take it out on the 28-year old neophyte who’d effectively (and I stress unknowingly) landed the job she’d coveted for a year.

After five days of pretending nice, Jennifer decided to make me her personal whipping post, a decision she acted upon just about every time I walked by her desk. Since she was situated four feet from the front door, this happened at least five times a day. Sometimes she’d tell me my fly was wide open when it wasn’t, sometimes she’d send a fax to my phone and set the fax to redial, so I’d get anywhere from ten to twenty phone calls a day from the fax’s signal. Sometimes she’d wait until day’s end to tell me proofs of a print job I’d ordered arrived at 9:30 that morning. Sometimes my coffee mug would wind up in the garbage can, until one day it just simply disappeared. The only thing missing was the stapler stuck in Jell-O, but thankfully my time with Jennifer predates The Office by a good eight years.

Strangely, I never thought to report Jennifer to Mary, her supervisor. Engaging Mary about any kind of office business came at a price. If she wasn’t worrying over whether her 14-year old daughter was using protection, my own complaints were drowned out by Mary fretting about her status as the office’s de facto black sheep. A status that was irrevocably cast in stone after it became public knowledge she was sleeping with Cletus, the office manager.

I opted instead for Business Communications 101, by attempting to eliminate Jennifer as a hostile by winning her over as a friend. Two birds, I thought. My attempts were sincere – frankly, she was the only other person in the office under 40 and who might have had some similar interests, and I was still at a point where I was pretty desperate open-minded in making new friends.

But this only heated the iron. When she wasn’t ignoring me, or putting me on hold for imaginary, eight-minute calls that came through the switchboard (I never figured out how she did could get the board to ring on cue with her hands still free), I’d wind up on verbal carousels like this one:

“Hey Jennifer, I’m still pretty new here, and I know you’ve worked with everyone here for a while. I don’t know if it’s worth a cup of coffee or slice of pizza to you, but I’d really like to chat with you about what the different groups do here, and what you’ve learned.”

She rolled her eyes. “Why would I want to tell you any of that?”

“I, uh…I don’t know. I figured we were on the same team and we might work together on a project sometime and—”

“We’re not on the same team. You go figure that out yourself; that’s why your bosses hired you away from [Heavily Raided Rival Company].” She waved her hand at a spot on the wall, where my desk was on the other side.

I tilted my head. “Can I be honest with you? I’m not sure what issue you might have with me, but if I did something or said something to hurt your feelings, you know, I’m really sorry. I have put my foot in my mouth before, so if it is that, I am truly sorry.”

She tilted her head in mirror angle, and answered in sing-song. “Can I be honest with you? It’s not you, it’s me. I just decided from Day 1 that I didn’t like you.”

My face turned mauve. I walked away. “Well, if you change your mind, I’m around the corner.”

“Oh hey, this came for you.” She threw a small box at me, nearly taking off my head with it. I barely caught it in time. It was a book I’d ordered from amazon.com. I looked at the postmark; it’d arrived about two weeks earlier. This may not seem like a big deal for my East Coast readers, but amazon.com’s headquarters were still over at Beacon Hill, my office was downtown, the distance between the two is about four miles, and, well… figure it out.

Now, I am thankful to Jennifer for her hostility. Working with an overt bitch early in your career opens your eyes to a few benefits. For example, locking up your computer every time you step away from your desk, or identifying where all of the side office doors are in case you simply want to leave early and don’t want anyone to know. I focused on the apprentice work I was hired to do, started learning a few programs, and basically stayed at my desk most of the time. Ironically, I developed a rep for being the quietest person in the office.

A larger when loomed in the office, this one among several of the department heads. It took a while for that to become obvious to me, however. But about three months after I was hired, I noticed that a lot of people would stop talking when I entered the room, inadvertently barging in on a bitchfest while looking for fresh bags of tea.

Or I’d be on the elevator, ignored by John H. and Lynda (Head of Legal) standing in front of me, the latter complaining to the former in that always-flimsy Pronoun Code: She was getting out of control, and maybe she was too rough for her job to begin with, Lynda said. But we gave her plenty of time, and if she’s still acting this way to us, how often is she still acting out on them? It doesn’t take a Fibonacci to crack the code, and after accidentally hearing a couple more convos like this one, I figured out that the higher-ups were rallying each other to determine the best way to corner Mary and ask her, point blank, When will you fire Jennifer?

A week later, I walked by the main conference room on the way to get a Dr. Pepper, and saw Jennifer and Mary yelling at each other. Thank God for soundproofing. Then four days went by and no one was at the front desk, although it may have been longer. As I said, I was regularly using the side doors by now.

A few days later, I chanced it and walked through the front door for once, and saw a new person sitting at the front desk. I didn’t get a good look at her, her head was buried in the office procedural manual. I put two and two together, and while I cheered in my head that Jennifer had been canned, I also decided to stay away, waiting to find out whether the replacement was halfway cool, or simply another Jennifer.

I lost track of time that day proofing a compensation analysis for Ed, who sat across from me. Mary came by and knocked quietly on my cube wall. I was Exhibit 6 in what was the basic walkaround for New Girl.

“…and this is Sonny, he’s in Communications with Steve and Martha. Sonny, this is Mildred, who will be filling in at the front desk as Jennifer’s replacement.”

I barely looked up; I really wanted to get Ed’s analysis done so I could go back to reading Ebert reviews online. “Welcome, we don’t bite much, I promise,” I said dryly.

Both of them laughed, office light style. “Do you think you’ll have anything for her to help out on?”

I wasn’t really listening. “Uh, there might be a fax coming in from the Swifty Printing guys, but beyond that, I should be good but—” I turned away from my work mid-sentence and for the first time finally looked at my new co-worker.

Mildred was a somewhat slender drink of the low end of tall, with smooth, medium brown skin, your classic Latina looker. She had friendly, easygoing brown eyes. Her light brown hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail, and it was easy to see that her hair was very curly tight ringlets. Kinda like a more bookish version of Jessica Alba. But even that’s not right, Alba’s kinda fake and this girl definitely had some kind of substance about her, she seemed grounded and—

Ah, jaysus I’ll get to the point; my first impression of Mildred was that she was really, really hot. And man, would I like to see that hair out of the ponytail. finish what you were saying dumbass

“—but if something comes up I’ll give you a buzz.”

“Okay, sounds good. Nice to meet you.”

“Yeah, sure. Welcome to the funhouse.”

I finished the rest of the presentation and wound up doing a couple of other things for Steve, including sitting in on a phone conference with one of his clients. By four o’clock, I was waiting for the clock to get to five, and after 40 reviews, I’d had enough of reading Roger Ebert. I was literally sitting at my desk and seeing how long I could hold my breath.

“Excuse me, Sonny?”

“Yeah?” I turned around. It was Mildred.

“Here’s the fax from Swifty. I think they need some help with their faxing,” I was looking at the fax, and clearly Swifty had let the dumb clerk at their end send the pages face side up. I was looking at four blank pages with Swifty’s telephone number on the edge of all of them.

“Looks like they let Max get his hands on the fax machine again.”

“Huh?”

“Ah, they’ve got this one guy who always makes this mistake. Good guy who doesn’t understand anything outside of a printing press. I’ll call them and pick it up on my way home. But thanks anyhow.”

“Oh, you don’t have to do that. I saw the number on there and I called them for you, and told them to flip the pages over and resend.”

Check out the proactivity on the Hot Girl! “Well, um, cool! Thanks for doing that! I appreciate it. I’m going to leave in a few minutes—” stop talking now “—but you can leave it here on top of the blank pages or on my chair if it comes in. Although actually, you can just put it in my in box, which is behind you at the front desk.” And now she thinks you’re a micromanager. Good one, boss.

“Okay, but really, I don’t mind. There’s nothing to do up front anyhow.”

“Sure, sure, it’s pretty quiet here. I’m sorry, what was your name again?” I offered my hand.

“Mildred Alvarez.” She took it. Soft hands, which I quickly rated at three and a half hubbas.

“Well, thank you very much, Ms. Alvarez. If you want to bring it to me, that’s fine, but I know where the in-boxes are.” She smiled and walked away, and I went back to holding my breath for five more minutes. Ten minutes later, I nodded to her as I walked out the front door and she gave me a little smile as I did, her tiny dimples being a nice accent. Damn.

Okay, so…yeah, of course I already knew what her name was. Like other guys who rely on dopey earnestness as their primary form of sex appeal, I was mainly interested in talking to her for just a little while longer. I was also quite relieved that the front desk had done a complete 180. The hotness factor was an added bonus, but hey at least for the time being I could walk through the front door again without instinctually putting my hands in front of my junk, like players on the soccer pitch before the penalty kick.

I rode the 13 home that night. I thought about a variety of things, but mainly I daydreamed about Mildred. I plotted more casual-not-obvious reasons to go up to the front desk now and again, and eventually segue into something like, hey, there’s a cool Mediterranean joint a couple of blocks away. I always go there by myself, it’d be nice to have some company…care to join me?

It’d take a little while for things to play out, naturally. There’s only so many times anyone can linger around the desk of another, talk about binder clips or faxes before it gets weird. Try it sometime, and see if you can beat my record of three minutes. But I didn’t mind that too much; I’m a good listener, maybe she’ll say something that lends an inroad. And any anxiety was tempered by the new question now running on internal infinite loop, When will I see her again? and bookended with the answer…tomorrow, boyo, you need only make it to tomorrow. Sleep, coffee, hot girl. My next 24 hours were a perfect circle.

The question I should have considered was, in a city filled with smart, well-educated attractive women, why this girl?

Why Mildred?

And why not Sasha?

The gang of 13 yarn continues here. The yarn, which believe it or not I started all the way back in August, starts here, for those who want to/care to catch up.