Deep and I used to go to lunch, and he always tried to explain to me how it works:
“Okay, so, the clients,” he would say, “they call into their account reps and book the time.”
He liked to start sentences with, okay, so. It was a habit he had picked up from the engineers. He thought it made him sound smarter, thought it made him sound like them, those code geeks, standing by the coffee machine, talking faster than he could think, every word a term of art, every sentence packed with logic, or small insights or a joke. He liked to stand near them, pretending to stir sugar into his coffee, listening in on them as if they were speaking a different language. A language of knowing something, a language of being an expert at something. A language of being something more than an hourly unit.
Okay, so, he said, they book the time, and then at the appointed hour, a switch in their implant chip kicks on and starts transferring their consciousness over. Perceptions, sensory data, all of it. Okay, so, then it goes first to an intermediate server for processing and then gets bundled with other jobs, and then a huge block of the stuff gets zapped over here, where it gets downloaded onto our servers and then dumped into our queue management system, which parcels out the individual jobs to all of us in the cubicle farm.
Okay, so, it’s all based on some kind of efficiency algorithm—our historical performance, our current emotional load. Sensors in our head assembly unit measure our stress levels, sweat composition, to see what we can handle. Okay?
(He would say, okay, when he was done. Like a professor. He wanted so badly to be an expert at something.)
I always appreciated Deepak trying to help me understand. But it’s just a job, I would say. I never really understood why Deep thought so much of those programmers, either. In the end, we’re all brains for hire. All I know is they seem to have gotten it down to a science. How much a human being can take in a given twelve-hour shift. Grief, embarrassment, humiliation, all different, of course, so they calibrate our schedules, mix it up, the timing and the order, and the end result is you leave work every day right about at your exact breaking point.
A lot of people smoke to take the edge off. I quit twelve years ago, so sometimes when I get home, I’m still shaking for a little bit. I sit on my couch and drink a beer and let it subside. Then I heat up some bread and lentils and read a newspaper or, if it’s too hot to stay inside, walk down to the street and eat my dinner there.
When I get to work the next morning, there’s a woman sitting in the cubicle across from mine. She’s young, at least a couple of years younger than me, looks right out of school. She has the new employee set-up kit laid out in front of her and is reading the trainee handbook. I think about saying hi, but who am I kidding, I am still me, so instead I just say nothing.
My first ticket of the day is a death bed. Death beds are not so common. They are hard to schedule—we require at least twenty-four hours advance booking, and usually clients don’t know far enough in advance when the ailing beloved one is going to go—so we don’t see these too often. But this isn’t regular death bed. It’s pull-the-plug.
They are pulling the plug on grandpa this morning.
I open the ticket.
I am holding grandpa’s hand.
I cry.
He squeezes my hand, one last burst of strength. It hurts. Then his hand goes limp and his arm falls away.
I cry, and also, I really cry. Meaning, not just as my client, but I start crying, too. Sometimes it happens. I don’t know why, exactly. Maybe because he was somebody’s grandpa. And he looked like a nice one, a nice man. Maybe something about the way his arm fell against the guard rail on the hospital bed. Maybe because I could sort of tell, when grandpa was looking at his grandson for the last time, looking into his eyes, looking around in there trying to find him, he didn’t find him, he found me instead, and he knew what had happened, and he didn’t even look mad. Just hurt.
I am at a funeral.
I am in a dentist’s chair.
I am in a queen-sized motel bed, feeling guilty.
I am quitting my job. This is a popular one. Clients like to avoid the awkwardness of quitting their jobs, so they set an appointment and walk into their bosses’ offices and tell them where they can stick this effing job, and right before their boss starts to reply, the switch kicks in and I get yelled at.
My teeth throb.
My kidneys seethe.
My lungs burn.
My heart aches.
On a bridge.
My heart aches on a bridge.
My heart aches on a cruise ship.
My heart aches on an airplane, taking off at night.
Some people think it’s not so great that we can do this. Personally, I don’t really see the problem. Press one to clear your conscience. Press two for fear of death. Consciousness is like anything else. I’m sure when someone figures out how to sell time itself, they’ll have infomercials for that, too.
I am at a funeral.
I am losing someone to cancer.
I am coping with something vague.
I am at a funeral.
I am at a funeral.
I am at a funeral.
Fourteen tickets today in twelve hours. Four half-hours and ten full.
On my way out, I can hear someone wailing and gnashing his teeth in his cubicle. He is near the edge. Deepak was always like that, too. I always told him, hey man, you have to let go a little. Just a little. Don’t let it get to you so much.
I peek my head to see if I can steal a glance at the new woman, but she is in the middle of a ticket. She appears to be suffering. She catches me looking at her. I look at my feet and keep shuffling past.
It used to be that the job wasn’t all pain and suffering. Rich American man outsources the nasty bits of his life. He is required to book by the hour or the day or some other time unit, but in an hour or two or twenty-four hours of unpleasantness, there are always going to be some parts of it that are not so bad. Maybe just boring. Maybe even not so bad. Maybe even more okay than not. Like if a guy books his colonoscopy and he hires us for two hours, but for the first eight minutes, he’s just sitting there in the waiting room, reading a magazine, enjoying the air conditioning, admiring someone’s legs. Or something. Anyway, it used to be that we would get the whole thing, so part of my job here could be boring or neutral or even sometimes kind of interesting.
But then the technology improved again and the packeting software was refined to filter out those intervals and collect them. Those bits, the extras, the slices of life that were left over were lopped off by the program, and smushed all together, into a kind of reconstituted life slab. Like American baloney lunchmeat. A life-loaf. They take the slabs and process them and sell them as prepackaged lives.
I’ve had my eye on one for a while, at a secondhand shop that’s on my way home from work. Not ideal, but it’s something to work for.
So now, what’s left over, what we get to feel at work, it’s all pretty much just pure undiluted badness. The only thing left that can be a surprise is when, even in the middle of badness, there is something not so awful mixed in there. Like the relief in the middle of a funeral, or sometimes when you get someone who is really religious, not just religious, but a true believer, then mixed in with the sadness and loss at a funeral, you get faith, and you get to try different flavors, depending on the believer. You get the big foot on your chest, or you get the back of your head on fire. (A cold fire, it tickles.) You get to know what it is like to know that your dead lover, your dead mother, father, brother, sister, that they are all standing in front of you, tall as the universe, and they have huge, infinite feet, and their heads are all ablaze with this brilliant, frozen fire. You get the feeling of being inside of a room and at the same time, the room being inside of you, and the room is the world, and so are you.