Company - Max Barry [22]
Like a pregnancy. Sitting on the toilet seat, she clenches her hands into balls. Roger has turned out to be not a clean sale; there is a support issue. Things will happen to her if she stays pregnant, she knows. Zephyr Holdings is not exactly baby friendly. It is not pregnant-sales-rep friendly, either. Accounts will be reassigned. Plans will exclude her. She will lose the customers she loves. Management will discuss her: Did you hear? Elizabeth got pregnant. It's a pity. She was a good rep.
“Did I tell you about my plan?” Freddy says, shrugging off his jacket. He goes to hang it on the coat stand, then stops and looks at Jones.
“What?”
“I don't want to seem petty, but you've taken my hook.”
“Your hook?”
“It's not like it's a big deal,” Freddy says, but thin lines of anxiety are spreading across his face. His feet shift nervously. “It's just that's the hook I've used the whole time I've been here.”
“Well, if it's not a big deal . . .” Jones says, feeling perverse.
Freddy's hands tighten on his jacket collar.
“Okay, I'll move my jacket.”
“Thanks.” Freddy gushes relief. “It's just a funny thing, you know, you get, well, not exactly attached to these things, but used to them.”
Jones finds the idea of becoming emotionally involved with a hook profoundly disturbing. He hopes he never becomes sentimental about inanimate objects in the workplace.
Freddy wanders into his cubicle and sits down. “Anyway, my plan. Last week I filed an application for disability.”
“Disability? For what?”
“Stupidity.”
“Stupidity!”
“Think about it. If I'm born stupid, is that my fault? No, I'm just an honest, hardworking Joe, doing my stupid best. And the company can't sack people who have a disability. It's a fact.”
“Wow. That's clever.”
“Thanks.” He smiles. “See, you just need to know how to work the company.”
Jones sits. He is interested in finding out how the company works. But there's something wrong with his computer. “Freddy . . . can you connect to the network?”
“Ah . . . hey, no.”
“Damn, that's a pain.”
Freddy rises slowly to his feet. “Wendell . . . the day Wendell got canned, Elizabeth tried to e-mail him and it bounced back.”
“So?”
“This is what they do just before they fire you. They cancel your account. They don't let you—” His hands dance about in the air. “There was an incident a few years ago, a guy in Public Relations got told he was fired, and he walked straight back to his desk and e-mailed a video of his boss giving a blow job to the whole company.” He sees Jones's expression. “I mean, he e-mailed the whole company. The video was just of those two people.”
“Oh, thank God.”
“But the point is it's an early-warning system. I wasn't thinking with Wendell, I didn't realize . . .”
“You think we're being sacked?”
Freddy walks briskly to Megan's empty desk and grabs her mouse.
“Well?”
“The same.” Freddy hurries past, into West Berlin. After a minute, he calls over the divider, “The reps too! No one can connect!”
“So it's just a network problem,” Jones says.
“No. No.” Freddy's head pops over the Berlin Partition, his face pale and moonlike. “It's happened! It's finally happened! The department's being outsourced!”
Training Sales is not being outsourced. Throughout the building, employees try fruitlessly to log on to the network. They click their mice. They hammer at their keyboards. Finally, they pick up their phones and dial the IT help desk. Their calls race through the wiring of the Zephyr building to the nineteenth floor. There, rows of cubicles stand mute and empty. The lights are off. Office chairs sit vacant. Nothing moves. On empty desks, so thoroughly cleaned that you would think no one had ever used them, the phones ring and ring.
Elizabeth is missing and no one dares to disturb Sydney, so Roger takes charge. He orders Freddy and Jones on an exploratory mission to establish whether the whole building has lost its network connection (which would be good news), or just Training Sales (very bad). First stop is level 15, Infrastructure Management and Infrastructure Maintenance, both of which are