Dxx Abroad

It's 3:17 PM. I can't breathe.

I know it’s 3:17 PM because I can see the little clock in the bottom left hand corner of my computer screen from the place where I’ve laid my head on my desk. The little clock says it’s 3:24. Which means its actually 3:17. The little clock has been wrong since the day I started work, and I’ve been too lazy to take the twelve seconds it would require to fix it, to make five clicks of the mouse to bring my computer back from the future and in line with the rest of the world. I’m too lazy to make the adjustment; I do the math in my head. The little clock remains 7 minutes fast. I can’t breathe.

Somewhere behind me I hear Catherine, my boss, talking to Greg. Catherine is repeatedly nodding her head in agreement with whatever it is Greg is yammering on about. I know this because I can hear her droning “yeah, yeah…” over and over in that way she does when someone talking to her has a point and she has nothing to say in response. Catherine often cannot muster enough substance to voice an educated concurrence, so she just assents in a manner that robs her of the credibility that should accompany her considerable intellect. This place does that; it relieves you of the trappings of your intelligence. It turns you into a nodding moron. It leads you to say things like “The market is always right!” or “That’s a possible conference topic!” It leads you to believe that you ought to replace your opinion with whatever the stranger whose day you’ve intruded upon tells you. It reduces your life to excitement over the fact that 3 more people have registered to sit in a hotel conference room in Cologne, Germany for 2 days in January, pretending to be interested in Run-Off Insurance or Sports Law in the Middle East or whatever when they’re likely there just for the chance to escape their own hellish offices and families for 48 hours, even if it’s to a Renaissance Inn in fucking Cologne in fucking January, because that means you earned another 72£ commission.

It hasn’t done any of this to me yet. Which is why I can’t breathe. Resistance means clinging to your mental facilities. My body is rejecting the systematic decommissioning of my brain.

Their conversation makes me want to walk over to Greg’s desk and grab him by the short-sleeved button-down shirt that I haven’t actually seen today but that he is inevitably wearing and look into his eyes and try to find what’s left of the thinking person I believe he once was. It makes me want to point out to him, to everyone in this sad bullpen, seven stories above Old Street station, with its water-spotted ceiling tiles and its mismatched cubicle walls with frayed upholstery and its barely functional air conditioning that we don’t actually make anything, that we don’t produce a damned thing. It makes me want to stand on Greg’s desk and scream until I’m hoarse that we all work for a company whose business model consists of interrupting the productivity of people smarter than ourselves (well, than the rest of these people; I was, until a year ago, one of the interrupted) with the goal of getting them to explain their jobs to us so we can have a more informed conversation with the next person whose day we bring to a grinding halt.

It makes me want to rip my phone from my desk and charge across the room and use it to administer and old school beat down to Ben, that fat son of a bitch who heads the sponsorship department, to clock him in the face with the plastic base once for every time he’s condescended to me or consciously undermined that which I’ve done which passes for “accomplishment” in this place. And when the phone has disintegrated in my hands from the sheer force of the blows I’ve rained down on his smug, doughy head, I want to kick him until he’s stopped moving or whichever of my coworkers is brave enough to intervene manages to drag me, screaming and flailing, away from his broken body.

I want to do all of these things, to scream and to rant and to stand on desks and to commit a freeing and heinously violent act. But they would require breathing. And I can’t breathe.

I haven’t taken a breath in some time now. I don’t know how long because I’ve closed my eyes and can no longer see the little clock. Each repeated “yeah” from Catherine causes the unseen force gripping my windpipe to clench tighter. Greg’s words have a sharper quality now, though they are making less sense. The syllables are clear, but their context has evaporated. He is speaking recognizable nonsense. I realize I’m passing out.

I open my eyes and look back at the little clock on the desk and quietly gasp for air. Maria, at the desk diagonal to mine, slips into her phone voice and overpronounces her vowels while speaking to some businessman in Taiwan. It sounds ridiculous. Even more so when one is familiar with her normal speech pattern, Los Angeles via New Jersey, which I am. Catherine changes it up by adding a quick “Uh huh” in between couplets of “yeah”. Greg continues to impress only himself with his knowledge of the important players in professional indemnity insurance. Ben sits across the office, inviting physical attack. It being Friday, he’s probably mulling over going to Tesco to purchase a few 3£ boxes of ice cream. He’ll set the boxes on his desk and announce their presence, verbally and via email blast, proclaiming them a gift from the sponsorship department. Ben believes these small gestures somehow mitigate that fact that he’s a complete cunt. Ben is mistaken. I might thank Ben for fostering my deep-seated hatred of him, as it is the only unifying thing on which I can hang my relationship with my colleagues. But thanking a cunt for being a cunt seems like the kind of thing that will only encourage such behavior; beating him to death with an Avaya 4600 desktop conference-ready handset (surprisingly solid considering the grade of plastic used), however, will not only clearly express my disdain for his actions, but end them permanently. Obviously the latter is the more reasonable course of action.

I close my eyes again. My life is unrecognizable. I wanted this. Well not precisely this, but I wanted to obliterate everything and start over. And I did. For a while it was great. It was exhilarating. But things have changed. Things have disintegrated. The initial excitement of moving to London has given way to any number of small, but compounding misfortunes: A wasp stinging my eye while I was sleeping on a Saturday morning. My iPhone and computer frying themselves within 24 hours of each other. 3 days’ hospitalization with pneumonia. The friend with whom I have been living asking me to move out, essentially rewriting the history of our arrangement at will and without remorse, leaving me without recourse to object because he has been letting me live here for free. My semi-fruitless hunt for an apartment, made infinitely more difficult by my lack of credit in the UK and my already stretched-to-the-limit financial resources. My potential landlord repeatedly groping me while showing me a property, which I allowed simply out of desperate hope that he’d rent to me without requiring credit history. The same 40-year-old, married potential landlord trying to force his tongue in my mouth. The very same 40-year-old, married potential landlord who is also a preacher agreeing to rent me a place, setting terms and a move-in date and then, ten days later, after I’d stopped looking, notifying me that he’d decided to rent to someone else, leaving me with 6 days to find a home. This man subsequently calling me in repeated attempts to insinuate himself as some kind of friend, insisting that this is god’s way of ensuring that we become closer - his having to show me more of his properties, and I assume, grope me within the walls of each. My apartment in New York, where most of my belongings still reside, being burglarized. My feeling trapped in a job that I can barely contemplate continuing to do until the end of a given day, much less permanently. My desperation to get a job that would pay enough to afford my student loans and rent and leave me with more than 40£ for the rest of the month.

These were the things that were running through my head when I sat down at the job interview at Axxxxxxx and Gxxxxxxx earlier this afternoon. An interview for an actual attorney role. An interview that went South when my response to the interviewer’s initial question, “Tell me what you understand this role to entail”, ended after just nine words because my brain simply stalled. I couldn’t form a single thought beyond “I know that you cover anti-money laundering and…” I just stared. At her. At the patch of wall just behind her head to the right. At her left ear. At nothing. A drop of sweat rolled off my brow and onto the legal pad in front of me. Another broke free from my shirt collar and rolled down the curve of my spine, sending a shiver backwards in its wake. I had no idea where that sentence was going. So I ended it. I did not start another.

There was no coming back. No recovery. After a silence that lasted roughly forever, I calmly explained that I was unfortunately not able to continue. I rose from the table before objection could be made and exited, stripping off my jacket and tie as I walked through the lobby doors and into the street.

When I got back to the office Catherine had left today’s call sheet on my desk. The third name down the list is one I recognize. He is the head of Compliance at Visa, a man with whom I had a two-hour interview just after moving, only to lose the job to an internal candidate. The thought of calling this man, who had treated me as an equal and tested the bounds of my mental agility, to ask mindless questions about his feelings on our possibly producing a conference about data privacy is too much.

And here I am. Head down on the desk, wondering how I can get out of this, listening to Catherine and Greg, hating Ben, trying to maintain consciousness.

The little clock says 3:26.

It’s 3:19 PM.