Dead End Job (15 page)

I saw no other option besides both physically having to dig through boxes of files and accessing and sorting through both Sarah and Ari’s email inboxes trying to find clues on the status of their various projects, which without help was going take hours if not days to accomplish. To make matters worse, I opened my calendar and found that I had multiple meeting requests dotting my day’s schedule: one with the office’s Administrative Manager, Chelsea Minton, one with Emily from HR, and one with Dr. Michael Castro, the new grief counselor. Plus, I had a weekly billing meeting, a budget discussion with Elaine, and a conference call with the Administrative Assistants out of the Denver office. There was no way in hell I was going to get all of this done in eight hours.

By 8:40 I’d managed to type up some emails and send them off to our IT team, requesting access to both Sarah’s and Ari’s inboxes, outboxes and network drives. By then several members of our group started filing in, and inevitably the further flood of questions and requests started coming. I tried my best to ignore everyone, but out of the corner of my eye I could see the two Associates conferring together quietly in the cubicle a row behind mine. Sure enough, a few minutes later they marched together over to my cubicle and demanded answers as to what kind of additional workload and longer hours they could be expecting. Maya, completely pissed off, led the charge and had a crazy look in her eye like she wanted to hit something. Poor Priti followed behind her, and stood quietly with her tiny arms wrapped around her thin petite body, hugging herself and blinking back tears.

“I’m sorry ladies,” I apologized, trying to think of what to say that would deflect their aggression away from me and onto someone else. “I wish I could tell you, but honestly I don’t know what kind of workloads to expect. I am hoping to know within the day or over the next couple of days.”

They looked at me skeptically. “Well that’s not going to work for us,” Maya snapped. “We need to know now!” She was purple-faced and yelling at this point. Priti peeked out from behind her nodding but shaking like a Chihuahua. 

“Look,” I began. Now I was getting pissed off too. This was not my fault and I certainly didn’t have the answers they were looking for. “I’m really sorry guys. I wish I could give you answers now, but the truth is that I don’t know what’s going on either. I have all of these emails and I’m really not even sure where to start.” I pointed to my computer monitor, which displayed that I had 132 unread emails.

Maya approached my computer and pointed at one email that Elaine had sent at 1:43am on Saturday night, the title of which was “I’m confuzed.”

“What the fuck is that? Elaine is so fucking crazy,” she said, not mincing words. I knew that now she understood that we were on the same side.

“Seriously,” I replied, trying to get her to focus her anger onto Elaine, where it belonged. “I have at least ten like that.”

“Look Louisa, what you need to do is tell Elaine that
I
can’t take any more shit off of anyone’s plate right now. I am so fucking busy right now and I really can’t deal with this- I’m five fucking seconds away from a total fucking meltdown. Jesus Christ! Fuck!”

I nodded. “I swear I’ll do my best. You know how Elaine gets.”

“Yeah, you do that. Tell her that she can’t dump anymore shit onto Priti either.” Maya turned to point at Priti, who was still hugging herself, for effect. “This girl has been working seventy fucking hours a week for the last month with no overtime pay. She has no fucking life.”

Priti looked at me with her big brown eyes and furiously nodded her head. Because she was complete overachiever at work, she was constantly stressed out and seemed to get even thinner and thinner with each passing fiscal quarter. I was pretty sure that she was only in her mid-twenties but already her dark black hair was starting to show signs of grey. Elaine had no understanding that Priti was actually an American who has never even been to India and insisted on constantly asking about the menu items from the local Kosher Indian restaurant we were forced to order from for almost every office meeting (“Maaahhkkk! Ask Priti about which sauce to get with the Pakoras”). Priti, having already given up trying to explain her ethnicity to Elaine, now just played along and always recommended the tamarind sauce. It was embarrassing.

“Seriously, I’ll try,” I replied. I didn’t know what to say, but I sincerely felt bad for both of them—I knew that they already did the lion’s share of the work for the principles, just without the pay grade or title. However, the current situation meant regardless of what I said, they would both be getting quite a few more hours added to their workloads. Maya and Priti knew this too, even though they didn’t want to admit it to themselves. After venting to me, they had both calmed down enough wander away from my desk and eventually get back to the piles of work in each of their cubes.

When I headed back to my desk I was feeling more prepared to take on my monster task. I was making myself a checklist of things to look for when one of the analysts, Nathan, showed up to help. I sent him into Ari’s office and told him to pull all of Ari’s files and to use his best effort to sort them in piles.

I took on the same task in Sarah’s office. Martin even noticed my general state of panic and half-heartedly offered to help me via IM. I considered it, but thought about Sarah’s cluttered files and decided that it would be better as a one-person job. 

When I approached the closed door I could smell the bleach and chemical cleaners from the outside—it seemed that the SPD had gathered sufficient evidence and documented the crime scene enough so that over the weekend the office could be professionally cleaned. The other two analysts Laura and Michelle stared at me as I took a few cleansing breaths and mentally pumped myself up before I cracked the door.

When I entered the room the horror of the last week’s events had been completely erased: it looked as sterile and ordinary as any other high-rise office. There were none of the drawings by Sarah’s children or family portraits scattered in frames about the room, and her normal clutter of Post-It notes had been piled neatly in a small stack at the corner of the desk. I took a step in and looked directly to the left of the door where all of Sarah’s personal belongings had been packed away. The two file boxes were sealed with clear plastic packing tape and labeled: “Sarah Lieber: Personal Effects.”

Behind the desk, the area where the floor that had been soaked with blood not five days ago had been re-carpeted with the same large, contrasting dark and light grey block pattern that covered the work area of the building’s entire 29th floor. My nostrils stung with the harsh fumes of cleaning agents as I stood for a moment, bracing myself for the task at hand. It was incredibly creepy, but also kind of amazing that the horrible act committed just last week had been completely erased from this tiny sterile space with a piece of commercial carpeting and a rag doused in bleach. I shuddered, trying to clear my head of the recurring image of Sarah’s dead body, crumpled on the floor of this space and instead concentrate on the task at hand. 

When I pulled opened a couple of the file cabinets, the sterile atmosphere gave way to the homey and scattered sense of Sarah’s old office. Her massive files were spread out among the drawers-typed documents and papers hand-written in Sarah’s loose scrawl scattered here and there. As I reached in and touched her precious files, I felt myself shaking my head, and the strange feeling of my eyebrows crumpling together involuntarily. “No, no, no, no, no,” I said, quietly, and didn’t even feel myself crying until the tears started to stream lightly down my cheeks, falling into the drawer in a steady river, staining a corner of one of the files a dark yellow. After a few minutes of sadness I pulled myself together with a deep sigh, wiping my runny nose on my sleeve. I slowly turned around and sat down in the desk chair, then rolling it over to the cabinet, put my head down and went about sorting and separating.

Eventually I whipped together a spreadsheet that broke down all of the projects and various associated tasks. Using guesswork, I calculated hours and workload for each one and created a column called “Assignee” which Elaine would no doubt inefficiently and arbitrarily fill in sometime today, completely fucking over one or more of our group’s employees. I sighed deeply and sent it off to her.

Sure enough when I got back from my afternoon meeting with Emily from HR (during which I sat nervously and got sweaty armpits as she nodded noncommittally and took notes on my “experience” over the last few days), Elaine had completed and returned the spreadsheet. Well, kind of: she had Mark print it out, scrawled the name “Maya” with a green sharpie on all of the columns except one where she put “Priti” and then had Mark put it on my chair. I knew that Maya was going to have a stage five meltdown when she saw her new list of “tasks” and I also knew that I was going to have to be the one to talk to her about it. I took a deep breath and got up to walk over to her desk. Might as well deal with this sooner rather than later.

“Hey Maya,” I called out to her as casually as I could when I was still five steps away from her cube. “I got this list back from Elaine and I wanted to go over it with you.”

Her head snapped up from her computer screen and her nostrils flared widely as she sucked in a deep breath through her nose. By that point I had reached the edge of her cube, but when I saw the state she was in at last minute I chose to stand behind the carpeted partition in Priti’s cube, leaving a buffer between her and myself.

“Let me see that shit,” she demanded. She snatched at the paper I that I was holding. I stood helplessly as she un-folded the document. Her face turned from pale pink to red, then to deep purple. She was shaking in anger when she imploded. “ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?” I took a quick look over my right shoulder in the direction of Elaine’s office-thankfully the door was shut. “This is complete BULLSHIT! I am going to kill that bitch!!!”

By this point the rest of the office couldn’t have ignored Maya’s freak out even if they tried. Priti got up to in an attempt to calm her down. Nathan was shaking his head wildly in the cube across from Maya, either disapproving of Maya’s yelling, Elaine’s idiocy, or a combination of both. Laura, Clark and Michelle stood up in their cubes to stare over in our direction, all of them looking completely shocked. I even saw Martin’s head pop up from the other side of the room. Jenny and Michael had both opened their office doors and were peeking out into the hallway.

“Maya, try to calm down,” I said, scanning the room of shocked faces. “I am sure we can find someone to help you with this stuff – you know how Elaine is. She wasn’t thinking.” I could not believe I was defending Elaine, but I didn’t want Maya to do something crazy and get fired.

“That dumb cunt!” Maya said, this time a little bit quieter, despair taking over the anger in her voice. “I swear she is trying to ruin my life.”

“You’re totally right.” I didn’t really agree with her that Elaine was “trying to ruin her life” but I certainly did share in the sentiment that Elaine was lazy, inconsiderate and unfair. “But listen, I know you don’t mean it but really don’t think you should joke around about killing co-workers right now, you’re going to freak people out. Think about it,” I told her, as I gestured towards the other employees with my head.

As Maya looked around the room everyone quickly turned away or ducked back into their office to avoid her. The poor thing looked totally defeated as she slowly sat down in her desk chair. The anger had drained out of her with the realization that she had made a scene, and I could see her taking a couple of deep breaths, trying to regain some shred of dignity. When she slowly looked up to me she said, this time in a normal volume, “Fine, I’ll work on this stuff, but I’ll need your help making sure it all gets done. I can’t do this shit alone.”

“I’m sorry Maya, this really sucks for you” I said. I meant it and even though I didn’t really know what I could do to assist her, I tried my best to assure her by saying: “I will help you as much as I possibly can.”

I didn’t have too much time to worry about Maya, however; as soon as I got back to my desk I received a meeting reminder for my 3:30 PM “grief in the workplace” appointment with Dr. Michael Castro. I didn’t even have time to take an Ativan before the meeting, so I was petrified when I shut the door behind me in the tiny client room that Dr. Castro had transformed into a makeshift office.

“Oh hello Louisa, please sit down.” Dr. Castro sat back in a large, heavy-looking brown leather chair that had obviously been brought in specifically for him. I sat down slowly in one of the decidedly much less fancy standard black vinyl Merit chairs across from him, separated from him by the wide, deep espresso-colored conference table and took a deep breath. I knew from experience that this interaction was going to go one of two ways: I was either going to panic and go straight into what my friends called the “Louisa show” where I could not shut the fuck up and talked as much as possible, trying to control the situation as to avoid vomiting or pooping myself. Or I would go completely catatonic, avoid eye contact and mumble robotic responses while staring at the carpet and counting down the minutes until I could leave. With me and therapy it was always one of the two, and it was always a total crap-shoot.

“Let’s begin by you telling me how you think you’ve been coping with everything that’s happened here at Merit over the last week,” he began. I noticed that Dr. Castro’s voice was deep and velvety, with a hypnotic quality.

“Well, I am not really sure,” I answered, which was the truth. He brought up a very good point though. “How
should
I be feeling?” I added.

“There’s no right or wrong way to feel after a trauma,” he smiled. “Everyone processes these events differently. Some people will be angry, some afraid. Some people enter a state of shock and feel absolutely nothing. However, even though the mind pushes the emotions away as a coping mechanism, it’s almost always a temporary fix. Most of my patients discover that strong feelings related to traumatic events can pop up in their lives at the most unexpected and inconvenient times. That’s why we try to address and deal with your emotional state as soon as possible, so you can learn tools to help you cope at that moment when you do have a breakdown.”