Tag: Office Culture

January 28th, 2024

Paula’s replacement appeared on the Monday of my second week — Yolanda, youthful, solid, Salvadorean, plump as a partridge, brisk and ruthless as a buzz saw. Dierdre’s already numbered days at H&C were now even fewer. Yolanda and Lara immediately put their heads together and the balance in the com room became overwhelmingly young, Hispanic, and hostile towards white-haired old gringas. They chattered in Spanish as Yolanda pinned up pictures of her own little girl and they traded stories about her boyfriend and Lara’s husband.

The situation in the com room deteriorated, the hostility between Dierdre and the other two becoming more and more palpable. One day, Dierdre flatly refused to do something when Lara asked her, saying, “Ask Yolanda or Jinx, they’ll do it,” then marched upstairs. Yolanda told me about this, her voice low and excited. According to her, Lara retreated into shocked silence at her computer, trying not to cry. After a few minutes Lara went off to speak quietly to Portia. I was very glad I wasn’t there. That was Dierdre’s last day.

Yolanda had a mordant streak, describing with relish a movie she’d seen with a graphic description of someone getting run over by a bus. She also went into gruesome detail about her own difficulties with her daughter’s birth while poor Lara, a first time mother, clapped her hands over her ears and cried out “No! It’s cruel! It’s cruel!”

In spite of this, Yolanda seemed vaguely phobic about death. When I was showing her the storeroom where the party supplies and toners are kept, she reacted with horror to a hunting trophy, a moth-eaten wild duck crucified on the shadowy back wall. Every time she had to go in there, she would shudderingly avoid looking at it. Later, as she was cleaning off Paula’s desk, a book fell from the top shelf, and she reacted with exaggerated wonder and fear. (The notion of Paula as a poltergeist was too ridiculous for me to even contemplate.)

I resisted the urge to tell Yolanda that sometimes, when I was alone in the com room, I would hear a faint “Quack, quack, quaaaaack” coming from the store-room.

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January 23rd, 2024

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.

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January 19th, 2024

Paula was a tall, thin handsome women in her fifties, with aviator glasses and blonde hair pulled back to the nape of her neck. When she wasn’t at her desk she could usually be found sitting on the outside table near the printing office, smoking a cigarette and talking to either Saffy or one of the women in Accounting. I had always thought of her as strong and sensible, the last person I would expect to die as she did.

Once the shock wore off, I wouldn’t say I felt anything deeply. That would be presumptuous. I’d not known Paula well enough. What I did feel was regret that it was someone I’d liked so much, and the sense that learning about it made things not quite right.

In Portia’s office with its glass walls and firmly shut glass door, I learned what had happened. Paula had gotten sick with the flu a couple of months before, and could not seem to shake it. She kept coughing, kept getting sick and having to stay home. They told her to see a doctor, and she told them she had, would even describe in elaborate detail what the doctor had said and what kind of treatment she was undergoing. Her last day of work had been the previous Tuesday. That night — or some night later that week, I don’t know which — her husband had driven her to the hospital, where she died.

“She was a smoker,” Portia said, her large, limpid eyes looking larger and even more limpid than usual. “And it affected her lungs.”

“And she hadn’t seen a doctor at all!,” she added. “Her husband told me she hadn’t seen one in over a year.”

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January 14th, 2024

A week ago, the Friday after my term at T M & S ended, James from Apple-One called me about returning to H&C, where I’d temped before. It was an emergency. Someone had died.

H&C is in Cow Hollow, a neighborhood west of Nob Hill and just south of the Marina. It’s a very blond area and H&C is a very blond company. That part of Union Street is a long line of boutiques, coffee shops, crafts stores, restaurants, all upscale, all patronized by slender, well-dressed, pale-skinned people, with either dogs, babies or cell phones, and sometimes all three. The one unshiny note is the Metro, a dying old movie palace whose single screen has marked it for extinction in spite of massive renovations and a window display on the old theater’s history.

I’d worked at H&C for a while last year in the rental department, replacing a very good, organized admin who had simply walked out after a couple of years. She’d left behind an excellent sytem for storing documents on her computer, a few anecdotes about her biker background, and a Grateful Dead sticker on the monitor. Her competence had made my job easy, but they’d plainly liked my work, because I’d returned a month later for another temping job, this time in what was called the “com room” run by Paula, with her long face and her blonde hair pulled back to the nape of her neck with a barrette.

The com room was in the back and upstairs rather than near the front with windows on Union. It was dark and cluttered rather than airy and light. It was also more stressful. Instead of the occasional customer sauntering in for easygoing talks over coffee with the rental agents, there were real estate agents — who are sales people — to serve and placate. As real estate agents, they were twitchier and easier to antagonize, with a tremendous appetite for forms, documents, brochures, and letters, all of which had to be changed at the last moment and run out yesterday.

I had the weekend to anxiously mull over who might have died. Obviously it was someone in admin, not an agent, and not one of the two rental brokers I’d worked with, who were both good-looking, self-assured women of a certain age. It might be Karla, the lovely, blonde-in-spirit admin in her twenties who worked in property management and loved nice clothes and expensive cars, or Shoshanna, the tall, forthright fiftyish woman from North Beach with short red hair and a colorful vocabulary. Or it could be quiet, well-grounded, dark-haired Saffy, who worked in the com room.

I walked to Cow Hollow Monday morning feeling increasingly queasy about finding out who had died. The thing to do, I decided as I came in sight of the building, was to go straight to the com room and talk to Paula. In the past I had always reported first to Portia, the office manager, but she usually didn’t arrive until 9:00, and it was 8:30 now. Paula had liked working with me, had even tried to sound me out about a permanent job, and I was pretty sure she was the one who’d requested me. Paula never minced words. She would give me the low-down on what had happened.

So I walked up the stairs to the com room, but nobody was there except an elderly woman I didn’t recognize, short, slope-shouldered, a bit lost looking. I wandered to the third floor, where all the agents had their desks, poured myself a cup of coffee in the little kitchenette there. Then I carried it downstairs to the com room, still occupied only by the elderly lady. It was she who told me Paula had died.

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January 9th, 2024

T, M & S is a sort of half-way house for laid-off upper executives, a place where they can immerse themselves in their natural habitat of city-view offices, good coffee, and deferential administrative assistants. Supposedly, it’s where they can mastermind their next assault on corporate America, churning out resumes and business cards and avoiding the humiliation of having calls from prospective employers answered by their children at home.

Tammy is the office manager. She’s a slender, blonde lesbian in her twenties, with a cute, boyish face that reminds me of the youngest boy in the old My Three Sons series — spectacled, round-chinned, wide-mouthed, and scrubbed. In defiance of all stereotypes of Bay Area lesbians, she is uninterested in politics, art, or foreign film. She likes blockbuster movies, and her favorite show is a prime-time soap opera called Providence.

Today, there were almost no clients at all. I spent the day playing solitaire, tallying up client visitations for December, and moving files around.

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Pam Troy

A Writer’s Website

Tag: Office Culture