Trouble in The Office

NON-FICTION FICTION

(I discovered this story while I was cleaning my computer files. I don’t know how and exactly when I wrote it, but I must have been an estimator then. Looks like I was terribly bored that time… -- christie)


Hi. My name is Alisha. My mother said she named me after her favorite singer in the sixties. There was one time I wanted to find out if I could really sing. So I looked for this Alisha singer from the music archives I had to dig up in the magazine section of the public library. Well, I guess I’d never be famous. Never read Alisha in those old magazines.

Anyway, I’m not really going to tell you about me. But I will tell you about my work.

I sit all on day in front of the computer eight hours a day. Five days a week. My cubicle is small but just right for me sized 4 ft. by 4 ft. It’s a perfect square as seen from the top, but it has one corner cut away so I have a place for my ergo chair and my PC. You can say it’s a almost a diamond when I get to position myself in it. Two sides of this cube are lined with one and a half foot wide planks two feet long. They serve as my work desk where I put on my computer monitor and keyboard, a desk calendar, mirror, a picture frame with me in it, and some files standing upright in a file container. I also have my trusty phone of which I spend a lot of time arguing with co-workers on numbers. (I forecast sales, by the way. I really like numbers.)

Every morning I come to the office at ten to eight a.m., and I put my handbag and file carry-alls in a secret compartment in my desk drawer. I pull out the rubbing alcohol and start wiping dust and dirt that may have settled on my desk and computer during the night. I also clean my phone extra well because I wouldn’t know who might have used it when I got out of the office yesterday.

Once I had a nightmare about germs getting so many like the ones you see in that safeguard soap commercial. They were all over my phone and the bad part was, my phone was ringing an important call so I had to pick it up. I didn’t have alcohol with me so all the germs went into my ear and then swarmed into my eye that I could actually see the germs multiplying in my brain.

I check my calendar for meetings that are lined up for the day. I also make sure that the upper rightmost corner of it is aligned with the corner of my desk, because I want to make sure that it doesn’t take up any more space than it needs.

I pick up my picture frame with me in it, and take a look at it also, everyday. I wonder if my expression in the picture has changed… it was taken when I was at the beach with my mom, and I was so grumpy at that time I didn’t want to have my picture taken. Besides, the sun was in my eye and I couldn’t get to smile the kind of smile that has all my teeth showing.

I love the beach.

When I put back the picture frame it’s 45 degrees with one side of my cubicle. I wanted it that way so that it greets visitors and shows my favorite beach when people pass by my place.

I have three other co-workers who are really close by, and they have exactly the same sized cubicles I have, only that their entrances differ from mine. I think it was really a smart thing for the cubicle assembler to do this, to have our seats positioned differently. It’s become easy to get in and out of our area.

All four of us are sales forecasters, but we compute for different categories of baby products. Cherry, a really nice pregnant woman, computes the sales of baby bottles that have different sizes. Natalie, a girl who has stayed with the company we worked for seven years with the same job, computes the sales of baby carriers and cribs. Villie, is a big woman and almost like a man, and she computes for the sales of baby clothes.

I notice that Villie is also neat with her things and puts her files back into the right folder, but she doesn’t use alcohol like I do. When she borrows my stapler, I clean it with alcohol immediately because it has touched her desk and microscopic virus may be in the staple bullets.

Cherry doesn’t really care about way her papers are disarranged on her table, but I think it goes with her not pressing her toothpaste tube at the end of the tube. She presses it in the middle. I saw her do that when I was brushing my teeth in the ladies’ bathroom.

I can’t really say a lot about Natalie because she’s always out of the office. She logs in at 9.30 (which is the latest time that’s allowed), and takes a lunch at 11.30 am. She comes back at around 2 pm. Most of the time our bosses would be looking for her because they need some important sales figures on the cribs and they wouldn’t find her at her cubicle.

Villie likes to joke that Natalie must have watched the first showing of a movie of Keanu Reeves.

As for me, I’m really very shy around people, but I get really loud when I get angry. I handle baby toys, which is good because I like the new smart toys. They’re so soft and colorful. At the same time they help the baby develop his (if he’s a boy) or her (if she’s a girl) “life skills” like telling apart shapes and tying shoelaces.

Our group (the four of us) shares the twenty-first floor with the rest of the sales department. They’re pretty noisy because on the average they are 80% present, and that makes twenty nine other people on the floor, aside from us (the sales forecast group).

The sales people are noisy all the time, and there are always new people getting off the elevator. I can tell because our cubicles are the first ones you’ll see when you come up our floor. Sometimes visitors mistake us for receptionists and they always ask where Ms. Lieza’s or Ms. Cel’s or Mr. Roel’s place is. Of course we tell them where they are, but it does get pretty tiring when each of the seventeen Speech Power participants ask where the conference room is. On that day, I said “It’s down the hall at your left” fourteen times. The other three were answered by Cherry.

On Miss Number Ten I was beginning to get grumpy that I felt my neck tighten. I had to drink water and there wasn’t any in my glass so I asked Cherry to answer her for me while I go the drinking fountain. When I stood up and walked away from my cubicle, Ms. Number Ten shouted at me and told me that I was disrespectful and that the company should not have taken me in as a receptionist. Why was I turning my back on her, she said. That’s no way to treat a guest, etc. etc.

I turned to her and told her I was not a receptionist but a SALES FORECASTER.

I don’t know what happened to her but she quickly ran away and headed out of the building. Villie said the woman was pretty upset because I shouted at her.

“I was trying to explain!”

Cherry got my water glass and filled it and asked me to drink. But just before that Mr. Roel yelled from his cubicle that, “The entire sales department can hear you, Alisha!”

I didn’t realize that I was shouting at Ms. Number Ten already when I did. So I drank the whole glass of water and then refilled it with more. After that my neck became pretty okay and I was even nicer to Mr. Eleven, Mrs. Thirteen and Mr. Fourteen.

posted by Elyss @ 1:00 PM