3-Day Novel 2010 (Part 2)
2. The Cold Open
It is the night of January 22, 2009...
...and the faint sound of ice pellets hitting the large windows of the office is growing louder. Within can be heard the whirring of the HVAC system--a steady drone at the edge of only one awareness, the awareness of the person left here seven minutes before closing. He is preparing his exit. The scarf is laid out on his desk, taken out of the coat sleeve on the rack only seconds ago, and he is searching the other sleeve for his gloves, unaware, until just this moment that the gloves had fallen into the grey-brown goop at the roots of the coat tree.
He is cold. The pilled-up wool sweater, in conjunction with the HVAC system is not enough to fight the creeping chill. He knows why. The agency cannot afford to pay for an inspection this month. Not for a couple of weeks, until the emergency grant money comes through. He knows this because he is privy to the workplace email exchanges on this topic. Privy, somehow, even though he bears no managerial decision-making responsibility. Maybe because he is an affected party, having to sit here during the dead hours in the full blast of January. Or maybe it was a typical organizational oversight.
He is folding his newspaper into his backpack and decides to maximize the Microsoft Outlook window before shutting down the computer. Something at the edge of his awareness twitches: something is different. A few hundred milliseconds later he has identified the problem: three new emails. Three resumes, in just before the submission deadline
Balls! And I’m back to being personally involved in this goddamn joke of a nothing-doing pseudo-job. My third-person detachment is snapped in two, or three, or whatever. This means I have to print this shit out, collate it, staple it, date-stamp it and enter it in the log. “So the managers can have an easier time.” Yeah. So they can save themselves the 600 milliseconds it takes to write one word on the front of the resume. But no! I provide them with a nice checklist, where they can check off “Yes”, “No”, or “Maybe”. Processing these will take me between 6 and 10 minutes, depending on the precise formatting of the attachments. (For unfathomable reasons, PDFs are the bane of my existence.)
You may have noticed, gentle reader, that I do not want to be in this place any longer than absolutely necessary. Getting out right on the dot is a stupid little game I play with myself, a game of timing my preparatory actions just so everything converges on that ring of my cell phone alarm. And this has ruined everything. Though stupid, I feel as though I’ve lost the day, as though I’ve been crowded out by the wailing, hungry ghost-mouths of the unemployed. But whatever.
I am heartened to find that only two of the resumes have attachments, and those two have one attachment each. This is a great boon. I get greatly annoyed at those who split cover letters and resumes into different files. No thought to the ergonomics of lowly administrative support workers. I may be able to get out on time if I perform my actions in my scarf and coat and keep the gloves in my outer pocket. Hope is rekindled.
I print the first and third resumes--the ones with the attachments mercifully in .doc format, and I print out the body of the email for the third. I am actually struck by the ineptness of that third resume. Some acquired sense of exactness, of punctiliousness, of white-collar propriety is struck dumb by the audacity of this woman at flaunting the rules. But whatever.
Bullshit actions performed, I manage to leave only one minute late. As I lock up the building, and the deathly cold creeps under my layers, and as my body shivers violently, spasmodically (for I have been sitting for the last four hours), I reflect on how none of those three have a chance of actually getting the job, because even if the online posting wasn’t just there as an exercise in appearing fair (which is unlikely), and if they managed to stand out from the 300 other resumes I have received, none of those three had the necessary conjunction of qualifications: being beefy, white and a man. Because this job, the “doorperson” (another futile attempt at political correctness) for the homeless drop-in, requires just that. Oh, not because I work at a sexist organization, but because the prevalence of racist, sexist, angry assholes in the swelling ranks of homeless make women or visible minority doorpeople’s jobs impossible, even here.
I should probably say something about my workplace. It is not a typical office. It’s a reception area for the Reverend Denison Community Space, a basement that extends two stories down and three lots out, with entry from this nondescript bay-and-gable house on Augusta Avenue stuck between two now-shuttered tapas restaurants, harbingers of the inevitable gentrification of the Kensington Market neighbourhood. (Unless we never recover from our current credit clusterfuck.)
This place’s eponymous founder--Reverend Denison: priest, social justice activist, psychiatrist, atheist--had sunk his inheritance into digging out the vast basement that now serves more than 400 people per day. He has been credited with keeping the area affordable for all the usual generators of diversity because of the milling crowds of the destitute scared off the more dillettantish bohemians, the vanguard of gentrification.
Forgive me, but these reflections/descriptions are leaving me profoundly unmoved. This would be a good time to return to third-person narration, the only thing that makes me feel important anymore.
Consider: "The human mind does not boggle at multiple realizability. It does not balk at the open, indefinite vistas of the future. And it does not consider the otherwise crushing weight of the past."
It is the night of January 22, 2009...
...and the faint sound of ice pellets hitting the large windows of the office is growing louder. Within can be heard the whirring of the HVAC system--a steady drone at the edge of only one awareness, the awareness of the person left here seven minutes before closing. He is preparing his exit. The scarf is laid out on his desk, taken out of the coat sleeve on the rack only seconds ago, and he is searching the other sleeve for his gloves, unaware, until just this moment that the gloves had fallen into the grey-brown goop at the roots of the coat tree.
He is cold. The pilled-up wool sweater, in conjunction with the HVAC system is not enough to fight the creeping chill. He knows why. The agency cannot afford to pay for an inspection this month. Not for a couple of weeks, until the emergency grant money comes through. He knows this because he is privy to the workplace email exchanges on this topic. Privy, somehow, even though he bears no managerial decision-making responsibility. Maybe because he is an affected party, having to sit here during the dead hours in the full blast of January. Or maybe it was a typical organizational oversight.
He is folding his newspaper into his backpack and decides to maximize the Microsoft Outlook window before shutting down the computer. Something at the edge of his awareness twitches: something is different. A few hundred milliseconds later he has identified the problem: three new emails. Three resumes, in just before the submission deadline
Balls! And I’m back to being personally involved in this goddamn joke of a nothing-doing pseudo-job. My third-person detachment is snapped in two, or three, or whatever. This means I have to print this shit out, collate it, staple it, date-stamp it and enter it in the log. “So the managers can have an easier time.” Yeah. So they can save themselves the 600 milliseconds it takes to write one word on the front of the resume. But no! I provide them with a nice checklist, where they can check off “Yes”, “No”, or “Maybe”. Processing these will take me between 6 and 10 minutes, depending on the precise formatting of the attachments. (For unfathomable reasons, PDFs are the bane of my existence.)
You may have noticed, gentle reader, that I do not want to be in this place any longer than absolutely necessary. Getting out right on the dot is a stupid little game I play with myself, a game of timing my preparatory actions just so everything converges on that ring of my cell phone alarm. And this has ruined everything. Though stupid, I feel as though I’ve lost the day, as though I’ve been crowded out by the wailing, hungry ghost-mouths of the unemployed. But whatever.
I am heartened to find that only two of the resumes have attachments, and those two have one attachment each. This is a great boon. I get greatly annoyed at those who split cover letters and resumes into different files. No thought to the ergonomics of lowly administrative support workers. I may be able to get out on time if I perform my actions in my scarf and coat and keep the gloves in my outer pocket. Hope is rekindled.
I print the first and third resumes--the ones with the attachments mercifully in .doc format, and I print out the body of the email for the third. I am actually struck by the ineptness of that third resume. Some acquired sense of exactness, of punctiliousness, of white-collar propriety is struck dumb by the audacity of this woman at flaunting the rules. But whatever.
Bullshit actions performed, I manage to leave only one minute late. As I lock up the building, and the deathly cold creeps under my layers, and as my body shivers violently, spasmodically (for I have been sitting for the last four hours), I reflect on how none of those three have a chance of actually getting the job, because even if the online posting wasn’t just there as an exercise in appearing fair (which is unlikely), and if they managed to stand out from the 300 other resumes I have received, none of those three had the necessary conjunction of qualifications: being beefy, white and a man. Because this job, the “doorperson” (another futile attempt at political correctness) for the homeless drop-in, requires just that. Oh, not because I work at a sexist organization, but because the prevalence of racist, sexist, angry assholes in the swelling ranks of homeless make women or visible minority doorpeople’s jobs impossible, even here.
I should probably say something about my workplace. It is not a typical office. It’s a reception area for the Reverend Denison Community Space, a basement that extends two stories down and three lots out, with entry from this nondescript bay-and-gable house on Augusta Avenue stuck between two now-shuttered tapas restaurants, harbingers of the inevitable gentrification of the Kensington Market neighbourhood. (Unless we never recover from our current credit clusterfuck.)
This place’s eponymous founder--Reverend Denison: priest, social justice activist, psychiatrist, atheist--had sunk his inheritance into digging out the vast basement that now serves more than 400 people per day. He has been credited with keeping the area affordable for all the usual generators of diversity because of the milling crowds of the destitute scared off the more dillettantish bohemians, the vanguard of gentrification.
Forgive me, but these reflections/descriptions are leaving me profoundly unmoved. This would be a good time to return to third-person narration, the only thing that makes me feel important anymore.
Consider: "The human mind does not boggle at multiple realizability. It does not balk at the open, indefinite vistas of the future. And it does not consider the otherwise crushing weight of the past."
posted by A. D. at 10:45 PM
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