It’s a curse called the wereperson where, every full moon, after a gory
“Returning the Sword to the Stone” by Mark Leidner
and agonizing non-transformation, you remain who you are.
* * * *
On Sunday, June 27th, I punch out for lunch at 3:29 PM. The task I’m scheduled for at 4 PM is a group task, and I want to make sure I get there on time so that things don’t get backed up. So towards the end of lunch when I realize I have to use the bathroom, I decide to do that before my 30 minutes are up so that it won’t make me late for the group task.
Okay, wait, backing up. First, I’m being as vague as possible here both to avoid having to explain the mundane minutiae of my job and to (hopefully) avoid disclosing confidential info. Second, I get a contractually-obligated / legally-mandated unpaid lunch break every day, and it is a timekeeping policy violation to take less than 30 minutes.
So, I get up from lunch, fully intending to go to the bathroom and then punch back in. But I’m tired and distracted, and purely out of habit I go and punch in at the time clock. 3:55 PM. 4 minutes early.
Immediately realizing my mistake, I go to the nearest manager. “Hey, I just accidentally punched in early, do I just send an email to timekeeping to correct it?” “Yes,” says the manager. This apparently simple conversation over, I head to the bathroom. As I’m leaving, the aforementioned manager walks in and we have what, for me at least, is a very awkward conversation about working in the heat while he relieves himself at the urinal.
All this about the bathroom will be surprisingly important to the story.
* * *
On Monday, a job opening is posted for the position directly above mine. In March of 2020 I’d been psyching myself up to apply for it (as it was pretty much a given that the person currently in that job was about to get promoted). Then the pandemic started, at which point that job ceased to exist. After dealing with said pandemic the idea of applying for it doesn’t seem nearly as intimidating. It also helps that I’d worked pretty closely with the person who previously held the position. Which person is now my boss. And the one hiring for the position. And the position is largely focused on things he and I both know I’m good at.
So I spend a significant portion of my weekend (Tuesday and Wednesday) working on a cover letter (which I’m feeling pretty good about) and thinking about the interview (which I’m crapping my pants about).
In the course of this work I happen to be on our HR webportal thing to look up some info, and I notice on my timesheet that the Short Lunch is still flagged. “Huh,” I think, “That’s weird, timekeeping usually sorts this stuff out pretty quick.”
* * *
I get into work on Thursday and confirm that the flag is still there, and no email from timekeeping. So I mention this to my boss and he says he’ll look into it. About 20 minutes later he tells me to call HR (he tells me to call a specific person but for the purposes of this story I’m just going to refer to them as HR).
So I call HR. HR is like, hi so we’re going to be investigating you for possible Falsification of Timekeeping Records, a violation that can lead to discipline up to and including termination.
Ok.
So HR is heading over and will be here at about noon. As part of the investigation I have the right to consult with a union-appointed shop steward, and you bet your ass I’m going to do that. So I go to the shop steward and tell him the meeting’s happening at noon, and he says ok we’ll meet 10 minutes beforehand. Now, this makes sense, but it means that I spend the next 20 minutes or so trying to work while also having a wee bit of a panic attack.
Right before it’s time to meet with my shop steward, a new coworker asks me where they can get more tape. I don’t know if I can accurately describe what the next 5 minutes are like, but it involves me and this new person, who has no idea that I might be fired today, walking to three different locations trying to find tape, and roping in the shop steward along the way because he came over looking for me, and he and I trying to coordinate where/when we’re meeting while also helping this person, who probably didn’t think that asking for tape was going to be quite so complicated and is maybe confused as to why the two people helping them are so stressed out.
The tape having been found, I finally get to meet with the shop steward. I tell him the story, he says great, that’s perfect, you went to a manager and did what the manager said to do, just say that and nothing else. (“So I shouldn’t use the phrase ‘Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare’?” “…No.”) Basically, we’re in agreement that the key to my defense is that I did what a manager told me to do. Apparently, so the shop steward says, the reason why this is such a Big Deal is because it’s seen as me trying to change the timesheet in order to avoid discipline. Which, sure, that is technically, in a very narrow interpretation of events, arguably true. Just to reiterate: my job is potentially on the line because I accidentally punched in 4 minutes early and then tried to fix that mistake by doing what a manager told me to do.
So then we have the official meeting with HR. HR outlines the charge, reads me a thing about lying in an investigation and how that’s also bad, says…something else that I don’t think I can include here for confidentiality reasons, then asks, “So the question I have for you is: What did you do between 3:54 and 3:59?”
This is not exactly what I was expecting, but I tell her, I went to the manager, had that conversation, went to the bathroom, went back to work.
This concludes the investigation (well, my part of it, anyway).
HR says I’m free to go back to work and they probably won’t have a decision until tomorrow. I meet up with the shop steward afterward, he tells me it went as well as could be expected and to let him know as soon as I hear anything.
I just want to say here that my union is awesome, and having the shop steward there with me made the day survivable.
So I go back to work, still having a now somewhat larger panic attack. 3 hours later I check my email, with the fantasy in my head, despite HR saying I wouldn’t hear until tomorrow, that there would be an email in my inbox saying “Hey, it’s all good, you very obviously did nothing wrong.”
* * *
One time in high school, it was the week of Halloween and I was walking to the bus in the morning. At 7:15 or so it was still pretty dark, and there was nobody outside. As I passed by a house toward the end of my block I heard a dog start barking, but hey that’s what dogs do, so I didn’t pay it much mind.
Then it turned out the dog was actually outside. And it wasn’t on a leash or chain or anything. And it was very large. And didn’t seem to like me very much.
So the dog started following me down the block, barking and growling. I knew from having an Australian shepherd that probably the last thing I should do is start running, but I couldn’t help but pick up my pace a little anyway, and the dog was now starting to nip at me and growl quite menacingly.
There was no one around to help, turning around didn’t feel like an option even though it may arguably have been the best option (I was about 5 houses down from my own house after all), so I just kept going, and when I got to the end of the block I crossed the street, for some reason assuming that the dog would not also cross the street, as if it was some magic barrier. Like the dog was the Nazgul and the street was the Ford of Bruinen.
If there were even just a single car then maybe that would’ve worked, but there wasn’t, and the dog followed me across the street and down the next block.
I honestly don’t really remember what happened after that. I’m assuming at some point the dog just stopped following me (well, at this point following is maybe the wrong word since it was kind of just running all around me; herding might be accurate, though it felt more aggressive than that). It probably stood there and barked and growled for a bit and then presumably turned around and headed back home, leaving me with what I thought was a good Halloween story that it turned out no one cared about.
That had nothing to do with anything but I needed something here to build dramatic tension.
* * *
Reader, there was an email in my inbox.
I would not receive any discipline.
Because I went to the bathroom, and did not go back to work until 3:59.
I immediately run to the shop steward and tell him the news. He is slightly befuddled, but happy.
* * *
Oh, fun fact, even if I hadn’t been fired, if I’d received any discipline higher than a verbal warning I couldn’t apply for the job.
So that was also in the back of my head this whole time.
Until it started to get pushed out by other thoughts, like, “Interviewing for a position that we both know I’m qualified for is feeling less and less like something I want to put myself through,” and, “More responsibility sounds like more ways for me to risk huge consequences for tiny mistakes,” and, “Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck this.”
Applications are due next Wednesday. A decision that I was feeling pretty sure about just 24 hours ago is now feeling like the absolute last thing I want to do. It takes all week (and several pep talks from an extremely kind co-worker who has been urging me to apply since last year), but on Tuesday I finish the cover letter and submit the application.
* * *
Two weeks later it’s time for the interview. During this time I have been what one might call “a barely functioning stressed out husk of a human being.” My interview prep has been kind of piecemeal as I can only think about it for about 5 minutes at a time before I have to think about something else to avoid spiraling. This has been both bad for my preparation and bad for my general well-being.
(Also, there’s another position with the same title that they’re hiring for at a different location. A few hours before I get the email inviting me to interview I get another email saying that that other position has been filled, and the subject line is “<job title> at <location>” but the location gets cut off because of my window size, so basically even though I know that it’s probably for the other position I still have a slight heart attack when I see it.)
So I get to the interview 10 minutes early, and when the two people interviewing me get there it turns out I’m sitting on the side of the table they usually sit on, and I can’t tell if this is the worst possible way to start or if I accidentally did a power move, and then we get into the interview…and it actually is fine? And when I leave the interview feeling good, I don’t know how to feel about that.
See, this is the fourth interview I’ve had at this company. The first interview was for a part-time position. I thought that interview went pretty well. I didn’t get hired. I did get referred to another location that was hiring for a temporary full-time position. I thought that interview went pretty poorly. I got hired. Then I had to interview for the non-temporary version of the job I was already doing, and this time I have a reliable source that can confirm this interview did not go well. I got hired, because I was already doing the job and doing it well so the interview was kind of superfluous.
All of which is to say that statistically me feeling good about an interview does not correlate with me getting the job. And in this case it’s entirely possible that the only reason I felt good about the interview is because the stakes were so low. Like, if I don’t get this job, I still have a job, which was not the case with the three previous interviews. And the two people interviewing me are people I’ve worked with for almost four years, so at times it feels less like an interview and more like a conversation, which is great for my anxiety but is maybe giving me a false sense of security.
Still, later I’ll be explaining to my roommate how the interview was the most comfortable interview I’d ever had, and I’ll say, “It was the first time I felt like I deserved to be in that room.” Later still I’ll be told that they appreciated my thoughtfulness in both my cover letter and interview, that it showed I took my job (and potentially the job I was applying for) seriously. That I cared.
Because the fact is I do, for better and/or worse, tend to care about my job. Because I have to spend 35% of my waking hours there, and to not care (and there are certainly times when I don’t) would be to invite despair and nihilism (and it does). We talk about how capitalism forces us to sell our labor for less than its full value in order to pay rent, to pay utilities, to buy food. But it’s more insidious than that. I don’t care about my job because I think it makes the world a better place or because it utilizes my full intellectual, physical, and emotional faculties. I care in order to feel like I’m not completely wasting my life. I work to survive; I care to live. And it doesn’t get me paid more. (I did not say any of this in the interview.)
Back to the day of the interview. With great effort and the help of my roommates I’m able to not spend the rest of the day replaying the entire conversation in my mind and picking apart every single thing I said. Also I watch an episode of The Bob Newhart Show, and one of the characters is played by Peter Bonerz, which, man, that just makes my day. I live off that for like three hours. Peter. Bonerz.
(Peter Bonerz is an Emmy-nominated director of several big name sitcoms and is in no way deserving of ridicule, please don’t make fun of people for their objectively hilarious names.)
They’d said they’d make a decision by the end of the week, and it’s Wednesday, so I’m not going to be waiting long.
Nothing happens on Thursday.
Nothing continues to happen Friday morning. Then my boss asks if we can talk briefly in the main conference room, which I know is code for “I’m about to tell you whether you got the job or not.” The conference room is on the other side of the building, so I’ve got a solid two minutes to make peace with the outcome of this conversation, whatever it may be.
* * *
The summer before my senior year of high school, I went to this pre-college summer camp thing. It was a 1-2 week program that took place on a college campus, you stayed in the dorms and ate at the dining hall and whatnot, and you took classes with the professors. But it’s 1-2 weeks, so they’re not, you know, real classes. I only went for one week and was in two or three classes, but the only one I remember was the class on humor writing.
The professor was this washed up (and I use that in the most neutral, technical way possible) British humorist who really played against type by having us watch “The Parrot Sketch” on day 1. He also had us read one of his stories and it was, uh, it was fine. Not, you know, funny, but it was fine.
One of the assignments was to break off into pairs and write a sketch in like 30 minutes, and me and this other kid happened to be working in a room with a piano, and this was back when I actually had a few tunes memorized, so we wrote this sketch that I might post on here some day about this guy who shows up at a restaurant and gets mistaken for the piano player. It was fun.
At the end of the week we submitted a collection of what we’d written that week for the professor to judge. Mine consisted of: a satirical music review that I’d actually written in AP English earlier that year; a flash fiction story about a guy who realizes all his neighbors are ducks (also written earlier that year); the beginning of a story that is a blatant though not wholly unfunny rip-off of Douglas Adams; and a series of excruciatingly bad one(ish)-liners.
(The best of the lattermost, which as far as I can tell from googling it I did not steal, is: “When I was a kid, I’d always take the top bunk. That way, if there were monsters under the bed, I’d be warned by the screams of the person below me.” I didn’t have a bunk bed as a kid, and on the few occasions I had to sleep in a bunk bed I think it was a toss-up between the top, where I would be afraid of falling off, and the bottom, where I’d be afraid of the top bunk collapsing onto me.)
I got 1st runner-up, which reading these now feels generous but at the time felt like I was robbed (I don’t remember the winner’s material, maybe it was actually worse.) The winner got a book. Runner-ups didn’t get anything. Adding insult to injury, during the gathering that closed out the week the professor came up to me and said he’d re-read my collection and thought that maybe I should have won after all. Didn’t give me the prize though.
* * *
I’d had this line planned about taking the job because the zipper on my bag just broke and I needed a new one, but when my boss leads with, “I’d like to thank you again for coming in on your day off to interview, that was really helpful,” I’m immediately thinking I didn’t get it, so when he follows that up with, “and I’d like to officially offer you the job,” I’m so thrown that I can barely find the words, “I’ll take it.”
We go over what my new wage (okay so in this case caring will in fact get me paid more) and new schedule will be and when that will start (and how it means I’ll be scheduled for 8 days in a row to accommodate the switch), and he reminds me not to tell anyone until it’s been officially announced. The whole time I’m outwardly very calm—I’m not even sure if I smiled—and I think my boss was maybe expecting me to be more excited because the whole conversation just ends very awkwardly.
I end my week on Monday and it still hasn’t been officially announced, so I’ve just been sitting on this for 3.5 days. When I called my parents to tell them the news I was able to summon up a little more enthusiasm, but mostly it just hasn’t hit me yet.
Or, that’s how I’d been thinking of it, that because of the circumstances and it not being announced yet there’s this delayed reaction, and eventually I’ll be able to process it and have this momentous realization or whatever. I mean, this is the first job I’ve gotten where the minimum requirement was more than “Have a functioning human body and low sense of self-worth.” It seems like it should be a big deal.
But Wednesday morning I get to thinking about how there have been a number of times in my life where I’ve expected to just, kind of, become a new person. Like turning 18, or graduating school, or getting my first job, or moving out of my parent’s house. That somehow at the moment of these somewhat arbitrary junctures I would be magically transformed into the next version of myself. And what I realize is that it’s the other way round. Those moments don’t make me become who I am, those moments happen because I am who I am. I’m waiting to feel like the person who got a promotion, but I got the promotion because I’m already that person.
I think that should be inspiring, but it’s kind of depressing too, right?
* * *
Coda
I come in on Thursday to a smattering of hearty congratulations. There are a couple from managers I don’t really care about, a couple from coworkers that I do care about, and one from the guy whose name I don’t know who always uses my name when we greet each other in the hallway and makes me feel bad (not on purpose, he’s very nice). This latter was sent over email, though, so now I do actually know his name—this job is coming with perks already.
* * * *
Did you get what you wanted?
“Did You Get What You Wanted?” by Mal Blum
Or at least did you want what you got?
Certain of Eventual Failure 