Danger and Intrigue

So as I was on my way to the bathroom at work this morning, I noticed this girl with a backpack use her keycard to enter a door in the hallway I had never seen opened before. She disappeared inside so quickly I couldn’t even get a glimpse inside. And I thought, what if she’s going to a super-secret spy-type job that is housed in this building, unbeknownst to the other residents? That would be cool. For a while last year and the year before, I watched Alias, and the first time viewers saw Sydney go to her new spy headquarters we saw her go down into the subway, walk along the track into a tunnel, through one of those airlock-type metal doors that said “No entry” or something, and end up in a damp, dark, dingy, and (to our eyes) seldom-used electrical room. She flipped the right combination of fuses in the rusty fuse box, and voila! A door opened up for her to walk into the shiny new, white tile and glass intelligence headquarters. How awesome would that be? This place that’s completely overlooked, apparently forgotten, turns out to be the key to everything? So mundane you can hide it right under people’s noses. Like Orion’s belt in Men in Black.

I actually won at poker last night. It was a banner day! I put in $10 and left with $22. It was lots of fun. Much giggling. I like it when the weekend starts on a Wednesday.

Want to hear a story about corporate red tape, messed up priorities, and protocol? No? How about a story about a chair?

See, the chair that they give us in our cubes is really uncomfortable. Not at first, but then it starts to cause pain. After a few weeks, I couldn’t sit in it anymore because it hurt my back and hips so bad. I would kneel on the floor to use the computer, or stand, lie on the floor, or sit cross-legged on the counter to do my work. Obviously, I couldn’t get much done that way. So I asked the boss’s secretary if she thought I could get a new chair. No, she said. I would need a doctor’s note testifying to the fact that it was "medically necessary" for me to get a new chair. And this company being what it is, it doesn’t give me health insurance, so I would have to pay $200 or whatever it is for a doctor’s visit just to get a note so they could send it to the right people who would then dip into the company funds to bestow upon me the privilege of a chair that doesn’t cause me physical pain. This sounded like bullshit to me, so I asked if there was anything else around that would work—-a box, an upside-down bucket, a dining room chair, anything. I didn’t care what it was, just so long as it wasn’t the black chair that hurt. See, I wasn’t picky, right? No, she said, but maybe I could switch my chair for one of the fancy conference room chairs. . . however, that would have to be “off the record,” wink, wink.

I did that, and hallelujah, for 3 weeks I wasn’t in pain. But then yesterday, a gray-shirted mailroom/facilities guy came by and noticed my chair was different from everyone else’s. He said I had to put it back in the conference room because it was “his job” to make sure everything was in its place. No amount of patient explanation could change his mind. He even brought his supervisor lady down to tell me, and they both basically said, yeah, that sucks, but all of our chairs have to match up pretty and your pain is a price you should be willing to pay for that aesthetic. I felt like crying because I was basically being told, “Go have an 8-hour time-out in the pain chair now, because we say so.”

After an afternoon of getting no work done because I was standing up the whole time, I decided to e-mail my story to another secretary, the one who does time sheets and new hires, because she seemed like a lady that knew what was going on. I went by her cube today to see if she’d had a chance to read my e-mail, and she told me that she herself had fought the same battle this summer and eventually gave up, because they wouldn’t give her a new chair. And she had been in a car accident and herniated a disc in her back as well as some other things that forced her to need physical therapy, and still, they had no sympathy for her. She ended up having to do like I did, steal chairs when no one was looking. She was much better at it than me: "Oh you took one of the green conference room chairs? Oh no, you can't be doin' that. . . You've gotta find one less conspicuous. . . and you have to switch it back at the end of the day so no one notices. . ." She told me she would ask around about a new chair for me, and see if, now that there’s two of us, it will make a difference to the powers that be (powers that shouldn’t be?). But then she also took me around the whole office and pointed out the pros and cons of each of the 3 stray chairs on the floor and whispered to me how I might go about obtaining one. At this point I felt like I was doing some black market drug deal, or, at the very least, considering buying some illegal tropical birds. I knew I had work to do today and couldn’t do it standing up, so instead of waiting for glaciers to cut the red tape, I decided to make a run for it, and steal the best candidate, a blue wire chair in a small back conference room that didn’t match any of the other chairs. I planned out my escape route, knowing that if any gray-shirted facilities person saw me, I’d lose my prize. I look around, don’t see any gray shirts, and then grab the chair. I get about halfway back to my cube, walking as quickly as I can, with the chair bouncing noisily against my nametag, yet I don’t have the time to stop to fix it, when I realize I’m going to have to pass the copy room, and there might be a facilities person in there. As I hurry past, my pen slips out of my hand, and I think to myself, “Man down! Man down!” But then quickly I push on as I think “We can’t stop, man, no time! Get to safety! Save yourselves!!!” And so I kept on, leaving my red pen conspicuously in the middle of the hall, but I didn’t care. I made it back to my cube without further incident, and am happy to report that I am now typing you, calmly, victoriously, from a pain-free chair. That I had to steal. Because it doesn’t match. Which messes up the mojo more than an employee being in pain. But I'm not bitter.

I do have some work to do now so I'll get on that. I hope you liked my story. No dictionary references today, in honor of Christy.