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Shovel 2 | Jul 15 2002

In my mind the room is only half a room and I’m standing in the middle of it with a bank of cubbies before me and more cubbies on both sides, though vaguer, and more cubbies beyond those, though vaguer still. It was my job to sort the mail into certain cubbies, then periodically deliver it, using a metal cart, to the people on my floor. At least ten or twelve other employees did the same thing in the same room, and each had their own floor. I believe mine was Six.

The first time I made a delivery, I returned to an empty room. Everyone had left at more or less the same time with more or less the same amount of mail, so where were they? When this same thing happened after my second delivery, I understood that you weren’t supposed to return right away but rather waste time doing personal things. It was crazy how much time you were supposed to waste, but I figured that if I came back too soon, I made everyone else look bad, which I didn’t want to do since I was a temp whereas everyone else was permanent.

I made a similar mistake the first day by sorting my mail as soon as it arrived. No one else did this, because there wasn’t much mail to sort. Basically you had to make the sorting last about five times longer than necessary or else it looked like you weren’t doing anything—which you weren’t. Everyone knew this, too, including the boss, since everyone including the boss was doing just as little as you were, while pretending to do five times as much. Suffice it to say, no one was allowed to do anything that made this state of affairs seem true.

That was pretty much the only rule.

*

No doubt to occupy myself, I became infatuated with a woman on my floor. I would see her at a copy machine near one of the mailboxes where I delivered mail. Evidently her job involved a great deal of copying. I can’t remember a single thing about her except that she was white and not tall, with hair that wasn’t blond. We never spoke, beyond a few mumbled “hi’s,” but I knew her name because I sometimes saw her take mail out of her mailbox.

I had this idea that she didn’t really have so much copying to do and would instead come there to see me because like me she needed to invent ways to occupy herself.

On the morning of my last day, I left her a note saying that it was my last day and asking her to meet me during lunch at a fountain outside where I liked to go after deliveries to waste time.

To my surprise she actually came to the fountain, and at the exact time I asked, only before I could say anything, she handed me a note and walked away. The note said that she had a boyfriend but that I was sweet, or that I was sweet but that she had a boyfriend.

In truth I don’t really remember any of this—I mean the scene at the fountain where I waited and where she came with a note—but still I’m certain it happened, in part because nothing else fits as well with what I do remember.