Living Things

Instance 8: A Night at the Office (the first)

At a quarter to midnight, two faces were aglow in the light of their computer monitors. The rest of the office’s overhead fluorescent lights were turned off, not because for any benefit of saving electricity, but because the two who remained there were vampires at heart, and couldn’t stand glare. Their keystrokes echoed in the dim halls. KevCan was playing a fine selection of 80s New Wave, courtesy of some illicit file sharing system on the Internet.

Huffy said, “I don’t think Bob will like you using Napster on your machine.”

“Is Bob here?” KevCan asked rhetorically.

“No,” said Huffy.

“Well, then, how can he mind?”

The deadlines that kept the two of them there working late into the night, without the recourse of getting paid overtime, was a stress that was going to break Huffy, but KevCan seemed to strive on it. Still, Huffy was concerned, because he’d seen some of the wreckage from KevCan’s predecessor, who had suffered from back pain and headaches until he left for a more stressful but much more rewarding job in the city. “Is Bob interviewing anyone else to help?” he asked KevCan.

“Yeah, but no one seems to be working out.”

“They really should hire anyone. This grunt work could be done by a monkey.”

The grunt work that Huffy was referring to consisted of taking copy written by someone, somewhere, that had to be transferred on to Web sites. The grunt work was something that Huffy ended up doing, simply because he could, and his martyr-complex kept him at jobs he found needlessly frustrating. KevCan would have dedicated the time to doing it, but he really did have hundreds of other things to worry about, so Huffy took the job, waiting for the non-existent accolades that he didn’t deserve.

“You could go,” KevCan said.

“You should go,” Huffy replied. “If you keep doing the overtime, without any sort of compensation, they’ll expect you to keep doing it. Make Bob get you someone else.”

“What are you doing here then?” KevCan asked. He paused typing to search and download the next few songs that he wanted to hear.

“I’ve got nothing else to do,” Huffy said. And it was true. He lived alone, had two sometime girlfriends who didn’t really seem to like him all that much, but possibly were in love with him. At this point, the two women were firmly in the “Huffy is a jerk,” phase of the relationships. This may have had something to do with his unrequited infatuation with Princess, or, more likely, he was often a jerk. He would have just gone home and used his computer there anyway. He might as well have some company. “Anyway, I want to buy tickets to see Beck.”

This wasn’t an answer to KevCan’s question as such, but the two lapsed into silence again. Both typed and listened to music as the day ended in their time zone.