Solitary: 5

Pushing a heavy object at rest is more strenuous than maintaining one already rolling at a snail’s pace. In matters like this, momentum is decisive. The trick to accomplishing large tasks (or, more properly in Josh’s case, a large grouping of small tasks) is keeping yourself from perceiving its size. Horses trot in busy locales because of the blinders. Mr. LaRoi advised during the (a)CT orientation, “If there’s no end in sight, don’t look.” The uphill nature of the job reminded Josh of a nugget of baseball wisdom. (As a lonely, aimless youth, he was enthralled with sports.) In the playoffs, when a team was behind three-to-one in a best-of-seven series, everyone interviewed in the locker room, from the manager to the batboy, was quick to say more or less the same statement. “We’ve got to take it one game at a time, ya know? We’re not outta this thing yet. Ya can’t win three games at once.” Josh was slightly embarrassed to live through the truth of a pithy adage, as if life was always more complicated and nuanced than to be framed by an a cadre of simple-minded jocks. But it worked.

Considering the imposing burden of future toil was like taking in the Pacific. The untraversable distance turns your stomach. It puts you in your place, a teensy, diminutive, practically unobservable place. Letting the scale into your field of vision in this situation entailed decelerating (because of the anxiety), which fed into greater anxiety (because the stack kept piling up) and ultimately despair (because the top was out of sight). Being informed exacerbated the problem. It is a counterintuitive and unjust truth that drunks fair better in the automobile accidents they instigate. Their limber, gelatinous bodies are less vulnerable to breaks and snaps than the white-knuckled innocent who solidifies in fear of the impending collision. Knowledge had this ambivalent nature: it was good in the abstract but not always in the concrete. Sometimes ignorance was preferable. When Josh would err and think about how many more responses he needed to complete, he felt ill. How in the world am I going to get that done? So, he learned not to think—or at least he tried not to.

If you did not track your progress completion came as a surprise. Time vanished. Everything vanished except for the white background with the flow of little black characters. You were never sure it could be done until it was and you never understood how it could happen when it did. It was a quotidian miracle. Lowering your eyes widened your horizon.

A lazily strewn intraoffice report Josh once spied on Calloway’s desk documented 27% of new hires resigned after 30 days. This meant 27% of people preferred the murky waters of unemployment and bean-based diets to the First’s reservoir of discontent. The ugly truth was there were at least 8.5 hours to wade through to reach the other side of the work-river and drowning was the fate awaiting those who considered how far away they were (at least in the A.M.). Undergoing tedium is like aerobics. It was painful, but it prepares you for a marathon if you soldier on. After nearly a year of spending 1/3 of 5/7 of his days doing basically the same act, Josh boosted his endurance. He went forward and did his best to leave himself behind.

The keys were light and responsive underneath his fingertips. Nothing could touch him for a while. He did not feel the stiffness in his wrists. He did not notice the peel of laughter nearby or the swishing of passersby behind him. Josh went all out, nose to the grindstone. He typed and clicked frenziedly and tried his best not to get side-tracked. He was “in the zone.” He was a sluice. His eyes tracked back and forth, from one program to another, absorbing the required information and funneling it back out. It was like taking a shower. Words like drops pelted him, each too fast to be noticed. Large blocks of text capturing the most common-place, yet always heart-felt, sentiments and/or rationalizations could be inserted from a stock file Josh kept updated (a bit of initiative possible only in the first month of his employment). He typed and cut, typed and pasted, copied and emailed, mail merged and printed, saved and closed, folded and stuffed. With each, he felt a tiny swell of pleasure. All the while, the inbox diminished and the outbox enlarged.

Josh was assigned to the Personal Care Department. This ‘team’ of five (three customer service representatives and two clerical technicians) addressed all queries regarding personal hygiene and/or maintenance products including items whose ancillary purposes were personally hygienic and/or maintaining, such as the multi-purpose and versatile cotton ball. If a person developed a rash after using lotion, bled after flossing, or was lacerated underarm by a stick of deodorant (this happened with astounding frequency), Josh and his ‘teammates’ were deployed. Most of these issues were secondary to user-error. The underarm cuts, for instance, were usually caused by failure to remove the protective plastic cup from the unused item’s top. Through his employment, Josh learned that the quality of obviousness did not entail being understood by the general public. Obviousness entailed being readily understandable to people who would notice.

The process from Josh’s perspective went as followed. A customer, who was usually aggrieved, contacted Customers F1rst.* Customer services representatives (a.k.a., Customer Representatives, CRs, ‘reps’) were the first lines of defense and were the only ones tasked with actual live interactions. They split their time answering phone calls and fielding web-based customer contacts. CRs consulted warranty policies (written in a different division of Customers F1rst) and replied with the applicable loop-hole or catch. (In the unlikely event neither was found, reps were encouraged to supply the customer with a 15 digit Claim Code and transfer him/her to an unassigned extension with an uncheckable voicemail.) Each of these events became the subjects of query summaries (a.k.a., Customer Interaction Reports, CIRs, ‘sirs’), detailing contact information, Product Code(s), Date(s) of Incident(s), and miscellaneous high points revealed in these interactions. CIRs were temporarily stored in public folders on First servers in .docx format to be manipulated by Clerical technicians (a.k.a., CTs, C-techs) into Response Affirmations (a.k.a., RAs, dittos, ‘affs’). Affs were the fruit of Josh’s labor.

* - As the back-page blurbs and reverse side labels clearly stated, First’s hotlines and mailboxes were open to both ‘Comments and Concerns’. Only the comparatively massive (and oddly named) Edible Department ever received any positive feedback (usually praise written in part by elementary school students who were naïve enough to thank people they did not know for things they enjoyed). Most of the people (i.e., customers) who took the time out of their apparently ‘busy’ days were pissed and largely unreasonable. The fact that they in essence sought recompense from another for their own mistake, blaming gravity for a fall as it were, was lost on them. The scenario was similar to a jerk who choked at a restaurant and ranted and raved for a discount, all the while neglecting the blatant truth that it’s not the manager’s fault he didn’t chew your food (and it’s definitely is not the chef’s or the bus boy’s either). They were wantonly belligerent, primed to yell (or use all caps), curse [or use emoticons (which did not have the same effect)], and occasionally depress the red button atop an air-horn they kept nearby in case, into the telephone’s receiver (or embed Trojans in an attachment with an urgent title).