H&C has been in its location on Union Street at least since the 1970s. It’s a series of offices that have been brutally gouged out of two buildings that were originally residential, and the result is a strange floorplan, with unexpected flights of stairs to accomodate floors that are only roughly on the same level. The offices still seem to be imprinted with the racial memory of being a home — a printing center with a phone niche in its little hallway, a bathroom that still seems to think it’s in someone’s apartment. The dim, sinister storage rooms have a haunted, abused feel to them as ex-kitchens and foyers.

The com room is an almost windowless little space cluttered with three computers, three printers, file cabinets, stacks of paper, boxes of brochures, and a postage machine. It opens onto a covered porch via a Dutch door for which there is probably a perfectly logical explanation dating back to when people lived rather than worked there. I can’t imagine what it would be.

The porch is reached by a flight of stairs from the first floor, and is itself a launching pad for three flights of wooden outside stairs, one leading up to the third floor sales department, one leading to the printing office, and another — which I have never seen used — leading up to apartments overhead.

My work as Paula’s temporary replacement was not difficult — just basic word processing, some scanning, some book binding, and the dull manual labor of compiling paperwork packets for the sales people. They are stored in carefully maintained, regimented, and numbered files, and Paula’s job seemed to have involved a great deal of running from floor to floor checking on the supply.

I didn’t mind this as much as I might have because I quickly realized that working in the com room was not going to be pleasant. Paula’s old assistant, Saffy, had left for dental hygienist school, replaced by Lara, twenty-three, thin except for her pregnancy, and very upset about Paula. She burst into tears twice on my first day. The elderly woman I’d met when I came in, Dierdre, was also fragile, but not for the same reasons. She had only been working as Saffy’s replacement for a week, and she was completely at sea with the basics of using a computer. Lara would give her a project, Dierdre would spend a very long time doing it, then bring it to Lara, who would take one look at it and have to visibly control her temper. Most of what poor Dierdre did, Lara had to do over again. It was painful to watch Lara’s rising irritation and Dierdre’s increasing timorousness and clumsiness. I did packets at every opportunity.