New Hope For Small Men: Chapter 22

by Grant Bailie

He was on days again. It had taken him the entire three-day weekend to recover and even then he still felt a little out of it. He refilled his coffee cup several times at the coffee maker, making small talk with his coworkers there. He did not dislike his coworkers but he did not understand them much and had little in common to talk about. He took the train instead of driving. He did not own a TV. Mostly what they asked him that day was where he had been and he told them he had been on nights. But the coffee seemed to have no effect, and he developed a slight headache somewhere just behind his eyes.

Bree was back at the desk next to his. Her hair was black now instead of blue, and she wore a short skirt that was striped instead of plaid. The manager did not seem to mind and came by her desk often to tell her what a good job she was doing.

And she was doing a good job. She had settled in and seemed almost like one of them now

She asked Robert how he had been doing and he told her he had been doing fine. She asked him how he liked third shift and he told her not much. He asked her how she liked the job so far and she said she liked it OK — it was a job, but as jobs went this one was no worse than another.

They answered their calls and she knew by now how to fill out every box and screen by herself. The day passed. They took a cigarette break together and smoked mostly in silence and put out their cigarettes in the flowerpot.

“You seem pretty quiet today,” she said.

“I’m still pretty tired,” he said.

And that was mostly it. He mentioned that her hair had changed and she told him that she did that often and that there was not a color that she had not tried and would not try again.

They returned to their desks and answered more calls. There was still trouble in sector seven. There was a growing concern for sector twelve where six calls of interference on several channels had been reported. Repairmen had been dispatched and would be there within the week.

Robert made several sales calls but nobody was interested.

“Everything going OK here, Bree?” the manager asked.

“Just fine, Dan,” she said.

Robert thought: she calls him Dan. She calls him Dan. It upset him more than it should have — not a great deal, but more than it should have, and he made it a point not to speak to her during the next few odd moments of silence, though what point he was making exactly even he could not say. She called him Dan. He did not call him anything and thought of him as only the manager.

Robert received a call from someone. Bree received a call from someone else. They spoke their individual conversations and filled out the appropriate screens and he watched her knees as she crossed her legs and he thought the usual things.

The manager made his marks on the board, with the name Bree just above Robert’s, and no mysterious symbols in common.

They had a cigarette together outside the door, when their shift was over.

“You sure everything is OK?” she said. “You seem really quiet.”

“I’m fine,” he said. “It just takes a while for me to adjust from third shift.”

“I know what you mean,” she said. “I did it for a little while. In college. Working for a call center at a bank. It nearly killed me.”

“Plus,” he said. “It’s very noisy where I live, so it’s hard for me to get to sleep.”

“I can understand that.”

They started walking to the train.

They took the train.

He got off at his stop. He walked to his apartment and went to bed. And while he tried to sleep, he could not help but think that a day had been wasted. More so, even, than all his other days.

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