New Hope For Small Men: Chapter 4

by Grant Bailie

The city was enormous. It stretched out, in a series of concrete boxes and cones, in all directions, with bridges that spanned three rivers reaching out like the fingers of a deformed hand into the suburbs beyond. Trains ran through the city, rumbling along tracks that had been laid out a century before, and rusted and warped now, needing to have bits of them replaced on a nearly daily basis.

Robert took one of the trains to work and sometimes someone would get out of their seat when they saw him approaching, as if his size somehow warranted preferential seating. There would be a moment of embarrassment while they stood there, still not sure and Robert would nod to them that it was OK, that he did not mind standing, and the person would shrug and smile an apology and sit back down.

Mostly, though, the people on the train only avoided his eyes, as if they were not quite sure what to make of him, as if they could not quite decide if he was a member of a protected class or not. If there was no seat available, he would hang onto the low part of a pole while the train bumped and ground its way to its destination, he would bob and sway this way and that being careful not to look anyone in the eyes. He would gaze up at the ads above the train’s windows: ads for beer or vehicles or the train itself. Ads for health spas and shampoos and cigarettes. Or he would look out the window at the city sliding by — the buildings rising and falling, the vacant lots, the chain link fences.

Like the men outside his apartment window, Robert also worked for the cable company. He worked the phones. He sat at a desk in the back of a room full of desks and answered calls complaining of lost services or overcharges, or he made calls to customers inquiring if they would like to increase their services and charges.

Robert had a good phone voice and had been told that he sounded like a much taller man. Sometimes lonely women, hearing in his tones something they imagined to be desirable and missing from their life, would tell him their addresses and the times when their husbands would be away from home. At such times, Robert would usually begin to sweat, and would stammer his way through his prepared spiel on the premium channel package and the advantages of digital cable. The women would usually lose interest in him then, and whatever services he had to offer. Sometimes they hung up without even saying goodbye while he was still laying out the reasonable prices and Family Protection Plan included in the top of the line Full Adult Package.

Once, a woman whose voice had struck Robert as particularly young and pretty and musical — like the voice of a woman with black hair and red lips that formed naturally into a pout — had cried to him for more than half an hour about a boyfriend she had caught in bed with another woman. The boyfriend had not even pulled the sheets over their bodies as she walked in. He had not even bothered to put out the cigarette he was smoking after the illicit act he had clearly just committed, despite the fact that she had asked him numerous times not to smoke in the house, and he had just that morning said he was quitting anyway.

The boyfriend, in fact, blew three smoke rings in her direction and said: “Actually, I’m glad you’re here. There’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.”

Robert did not try to hang up on her or sell her a service beyond the standard package she was all ready receiving. He let her talk and sob and occasionally make a sound that struck Robert as the sound of someone smoking a cigarette.

And Robert was timed on his calls, and the services and extended plans he managed to sell were counted as well, and marked on a white-board in the front of the office.

Robert let the girl talk and cry and probably smoke, and even when she had given him the opportunity to end the call by saying, “I’m sorry. You’re probably busy, and here I am going on like a fool,” he said: “No. That’s OK. What did he do then?”

When she had finally hung up, she had not given him her name or number — though he had access to both — or invited him to come over because he was nice and sounded like a kind and taller man. Robert was grateful. He did not want to find out that she did not have black hair and red lips that pouted. He did not want to see the look on whatever face it was that opened the door when she looked down with disappointment at his unshaven face looking upward.

At the end of the day his manager had brought him to the front of the office and pointed at the white-board that monitored his calls and sales.

“Forty-seven minutes,” the manager had said. “Forty-seven minutes and you didn’t even switch her from analog to digital. I checked the records. We are not running advice to the lovelorn here, Robert, or helping them find their car keys or whatever it is you manage to do for forty-seven minutes when you are busy not upgrading them from analog to digital. It is not our purpose on earth to ease the pain and suffering of the lonely. We are here to sell cable.”

“She was having some trouble with her reception,” Robert said.

“Well, did you even ask if she wanted to upgrade her service?”

“It seemed like a bad time to ask her,” Robert said. “What with her reception problems and all.”

The manager made a mark on the white-board with a colored marker denoting the length of time on the call. Then he made another mark with a different colored marker denoting the services that had been sold or upgraded. Then he circled the two marks with a third color. The marks he made were not simply numbers, a “47” in blue or a “0” in red. The manager had his own system that only he understood involving squares and circles and triangles and occasionally an octagon or something else encircling the numbers and it had occurred to Robert more than once that it was the sort of language they taught gorillas or parrots or white mice.

Robert imagined the manager going home and dreaming about his system. He would wake up in the morning excited about a new color and shape that he had dreamt of and could add to the board to track some other feature of cable sales and service that had before now gone tragically unnoticed.

When the manager had a new symbol to introduce he would gather everyone to the front of the office and show them the new marker he had bought — purple or periwinkle or whatever — and explain to them the new symbol he was going to add to all the other symbols that crowded the board at the end of every day like an advanced physics problem, but an advanced physics problem for trained gorillas.

Often, he would demonstrate the new mark and color on the chart next to Robert’s name. Or he would write Robert’s name down on a completely blank board and say something like: “Say Robert here is on a call for twenty-minutes. Mrs. Smith’s cat is in the tree or her husband has left her or whatever.” The manager writes down the number twenty on the board. “And in that twenty minutes, while Mrs. Smith is crying about her cat or husband, lets say more than five calls are waiting in the queue.” He writes down a five. “Five people with service problems or, heaven forbid, a burning need to upgrade their services. Five valuable customers. Now should Robert’s twenty long minutes on the phone with Mrs. Smith and her cat be counted the same on a busy day as it is on that rare day when no one is waiting anxiously to tell us about a downed cable line or add the Happy Family Entertainment Package to their household? No. That wouldn’t be fair to you, it wouldn’t be fair to the customers and in some way, it would not even be fair to Robert.” And here he makes, with a flourish, his brand new shape in a brand new color around each of the numbers, and connects the shapes with an arrow or an arc or a dotted line. And he asks if there are any questions and there never are and all the workers return to their desks and phones and the waiting valuable customers.

Robert answered a call from a woman who was not receiving all of the channels she had paid for, and then another from woman who had spilled a vase full of water on the cable box, and then another from a man who did not say anything for a moment after Robert had answered, but then began to make the soft sounds of crying, though it was possible that the man was doing something else.

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