The Ideal Candidate Will Be Punched In the Stomach

What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever done?

“It would feel so good to say goodbye, when I’m with you I wanna die!” Typically you would try to time your footsteps to the beat of the song—a permanent habit from your time in a marching band—but the tempo of this one is not compatible with your walking pace. You’re singing at full volume now. “And all that time was such a waste, I never wanna see your face.” You turn to the left, then to the right, and a quick glance behind. There’s an elementary school on the other side of the fence, but nobody is outside at the moment. You’re satisfied that it is safe to continue. “I just want to get the fuck away!”

You just demonstrated self-awareness. Forethought. Maybe you’re not crazy.

You are, however, several miles beyond the last familiar landmark. There’s nothing really specific that you’re navigating toward, no clear final destination in mind. This sort of walk has no natural end of its own. It’s over when you feel like you’ve traveled far enough to escape the compulsion to keep increasing that distance.

You spot another mangled and flattened plastic bottle at the edge of the sidewalk. You give this one a little kick too. It slides unsatisfyingly and comes to rest in the grass. Maybe this journey is simply over when you decide it’s over. Perhaps there is no special signal that flashes brightly to tell you that.

Ugh, that is an exhausting thought. For the moment, it’s easier to keep walking.

“The ideal candidate will be punched in the stomach.”

Aside from that one odd line of text, the responsibilities and requirements were a perfect match.

Ten minutes ago you weren’t considering switching jobs—you hadn’t even been searching for anything outside of your current role. It was nothing but a stroke of pure randomness that scrolled this posting across your screen. Your subconscious latched onto it before your thinking brain knew what it was looking at. This job, it was you. Every sentence, every bullet point, they all described you and your career experience up to that point. As far as you could tell, they had been searching for nobody except you. Except for the punching part, that was a little weird. But still, every single other word on that page matched your skills and your experience.

You fire off a copy of your résumé and a quick but reasonably well-crafted cover letter. Early Monday morning you receive an email from their internal recruiter. The phone call comes later that afternoon, and by Wednesday morning you’re arriving in front of their midtown headquarters for an interview.

The company easily employs tens of thousands of people globally, and the opulence of the building’s lobby is accordant to that kind of scale. The first three stories of this office tower are devoted to the lobby, reception area, and mezzanine. You’re not one to throw the word “grand” around, but this might be one of the few spaces where the description really fits. You walk up to one of the five receptionists—the only one not currently interacting with a guest—and tell her who you are. She takes your picture, scans your driver’s license, and prints a visitor badge that you delicately align over your pocket. Gotta make sure it’s perfect; can’t make a good first impression with an askew badge. “Seventeenth floor,” she yawns. You thank her and walk toward the elevators.

It is close to ten o’clock in the morning and a steady stream of employees is still hustling in. They pass through a line of glass-gated turnstiles. As each employee taps their badge, the turnstile emits a pleasant green and the glass retracts just long enough for them to pass through, then it snaps closed again. From a distance it kind of resembles a dozen mouths snapping up little morsels of food. You were directed to the gate at the far end, which the receptionist opens manually as you approach. Beyond that, two banks of eight elevators each. Doors open, people stream in, doors close. You embed yourself within a cluster of bodies who enter one of the open elevator cars and reach to press the button labeled “17,” but there are no buttons. All you find is a large screen that says “Serving floors 4, 7, 11, 20…” but no 17. You push yourself out of the car and back out into the lobby. There are no call buttons either. Each door has a screen above it that indicates the floors that will be visited, yet none of them say 17. There is no pattern that you can discern by looking above the doors or walking between the two elevator banks.

You’re getting frazzled, and it’s starting to get late. You wanted to arrive a few minutes early to be calm and collected, but this is making you confused and concerned. You push your way back out through the gate and return to the receptionist you just spoke to, who is now checking in another visitor. When she sees you again, her eyes roll a little bit. “So, when you go through the turnstile, it calls the elevator for you. Look at the screen on your left, and go to the elevator car it says.” Clearly you are not the first person she’s given these instructions to.

“Oh. Thank you.” You return to the gate to do as instructed. Car 5. Sure enough, the screen over the doors of the fifth elevator car includes 17. As you wait for the doors to open, you take one more look at the sheer scale of the lobby. Sunlight pours through the window and dances across the marble floor as it reflects off the chomping turnstiles. The overhead lights, dear God, how did they suspend things so large so far above the ground?

As the elevator doors close, you have a fleeting thought: Whoever has to climb the ladder and maintain those light fixtures, hopefully they get hazard pay.

The interview, consisting of three 60-minute meetings back-to-back in a conference room named “Csonka” for some reason, is basically cake. You cannot recall another instance where things have gone so well, with answers flowing so freely, where everybody in attendance is just energized to be there. Smiles are flashed, firm handshakes are exchanged, “I look forward to working with you” are the parting words from everyone you meet. The final meeting is a one-on-one with Chris the hiring manager, the person who might very well be your future supervisor based on your read of the situation. This, too, goes well. It’s gotta be a dream. It’s gotta be fake. Clearly there is something about this that you have completely missed.

“So, do you have any questions for me?”

You push aside your elation for a second and ponder Chris’s question. Actually… yeah, there is one. That bit from the job posting about being punched in the stomach. You diplomatically ask him about it.

“Well, yeah. That’s the role. You would be getting punched in the stomach. By me. That is the core of the day-to-day responsibilities planned for this position.”

“So… I come in, you punch me in the stomach, and then…”

“Then you’re done! Also, and this is more of a per-department thing, but in our org we’re not sticklers about the whole nine-to-five, track-your-hours thing. Once you’ve been punched in the stomach, you’re free to go home if there’s no other priority task.”

“I come in, you punch me in the stomach, and I go home?”

“Exactly right. It sounds like we won’t really have to spend all that much time onboarding. You seem to know just what needs to be done to really make an impact on this team. We’d be excited to have you join.”

For the first time in nearly three hours, you are absolutely speechless. There is no conceivable follow-up question for something like that. No insights, no empty platitudes, no rational thing that could be said to bring this exchange back into any territory that could broadly be considered normal.

“Ah. Thank you for the explanation.” The only words that were polite but nonspecific enough to fill the absolutely dead air that now fills the room.

“We’ll be in touch!”

It is now Friday afternoon, and you’re back in the lobby having a new visitor badge printed. You know how the elevators work now, plus the receptionist from the other day is busy with somebody else. There’s a good chance you’ll make it through this part without anyone thinking you’re some kind of moron.

Chris had emailed you that the role was yours if you wanted it, and he extended an invitation to show you around the office some more before negotiations began. He greets you as you step off the elevator onto the seventeenth floor, and the whirlwind tour begins.

The entire floor is an open plan with desks grouped into islands, except for a number of executive-looking offices clustered in the far corners. The center of the floor is a ring of conference rooms. The sun pours through the floor-to-ceiling glass panes on the south face of the building. Each employee is sitting in a gaming chair that looks very expensive but also a little ridiculous. There are two, sometimes three computer screens at each workstation, with a total display area larger than the TV in your living room. Jeans and pullover hoodies are the predominant dress code, although Chris wears a sweater vest on top of a plaid collared shirt.

All around you, the typical hallmarks of a company with slightly more money than sense. Dart boards (plural), ping-pong tables (plural), a kitchen area stocked with free drinks and snacks, and an entire wall of displays showing real-time numbers and charts. Everybody seems, at the moment, to be in the “work hard” mode rather than the “play hard” one. The PlayStation nook is unoccupied and a brief scan of the space only finds two employees actively drinking beers. Chris taps the shoulder of one of these people, who then removes his prominent noise-canceling headphones.

“Jon! Hey, Jon the man!” That particular adulation might’ve made sense for a rhyming name like Stan or Dan; this just sounded like a catachresis. “You got a second? I wanted you to meet the candidate we’ve been talking to.”

You introduce yourself to Jon, and he reciprocates.

“So yeah, he’s gonna be helping us out soon. Isn’t that right?” Chris slaps you on the back of the shoulder, rather hard. You smile politely.

Walking into salary negotiations with Chris, you suspected that this was not a job that you particularly wanted. You failed to see the allure of anything he had just shown you, especially considering that the entire scope of the job was to get punched in the stomach and then leave. Still, no point in walking away before finding out where this particular road might lead.

Chris slides you a binder—literally a three-ring binder—filled with sheets of paper and benefits booklets. It’s yours to keep regardless of the choice you make. He summarizes the top-line bits: Medical/dental/vision fully paid by the company, a sponsored 401(k) plan with an employer match, “unlimited”-in-air-quotes paid time off, pretax employee stock purchase plan, and a separate stock option grant on top of it all.

“We’ve considered your past experience and skill set and want to bring you on as an individual contributor, level five. You’re a little bit on the low end of that band, but this is what we think your total package should be.” He pulls a sheet of paper out of his folder and slides it face-up toward your side of the table.

Jesus Christ. Jesus Actual Christ.

Conventional wisdom states that you always negotiate. You always try to get more. But this, this is at least triple what you’re currently making. You close your eyes tightly and open them again, thinking maybe you’re misreading the numbers and something’s getting transposed or… who knows. Nope, that’s really what it says.

You briefly try to formulate some kind of negotiating tactic, but these numbers are complicated and your ability to mentally estimate percentages is faltering. It’s like spending a lifetime calculating tip amounts for dinner at Chili’s, and now you’re trying to do the same thing in a fancy black tie steakhouse. The numbers just don’t come. Oh well, screw it, this is more than fine enough.

“This all looks fantastic,” you say.

“Great! We’ll give you a little bit of time to go over the benefits package, maybe talk it over with your family or whoever. We’ll get you the formal paperwork first thing Monday. Do you have more of a sense of when you’d be able to start?”

You believe that you owe your current employer the customary two weeks as a professional courtesy. Chris is visibly disappointed that you feel the need to make him wait that long. Through some kind of mind trick, he talks you down to one week.

At home, alone with your thoughts, you start reading through the small library of documentation that Chris had given you. Every single thing about this company’s compensation package is more generous, more comprehensive, and potentially more lucrative than any other thing you have ever been offered by any employer you have been with before. This will be the highest base salary you have ever received and—if you’re being brutally honest with yourself—plausibly the most you might ever receive.

On top of that, this is a publicly-traded company, and that stock option grant has a not-insignificant number of shares listed on it. You can easily look up the day’s trading price and figure out roughly what that grant is worth. It requires the use of a calculator, but holy moly. Of course, they’re doled out monthly over a four-year vesting period. There’s also a one-year cliff where you won’t get squat if you leave during the first twelve months.

Twelve months. You stare across the room for a moment. Twelve months… of punches. You look down at your calculator’s display, still dutifully showing the substantial and precise number yielded by the most recent press of the “equals” button. For the first time in a long time, you have an actual impactful decision to make and a whole lot of conflicting opinions about which path to take.

You’re vaguely aware of philosophical terms like “principles” and “values,” but damned if you can remember the specific differences between the two. You’d be compromising, uh… hell, you don’t even know. It feels somehow amoral to try to maximize monetary gain above all other factors. But that’s the way this world works sometimes: You have to do whatever you can to get yourself ahead in life, and once you transcend above this constant grind you can finally, you know, uh… dammit.

Okay, new approach. You have a job, it pays X. Do you like doing it? Well, no, not really. Is there any specific thing you can think of that you would miss if you were to leave? Nope. Is there any chance you could negotiate to get them to give you even a fraction of the 3X that this new place is offering? Almost certainly no, and it would be cringingly uncomfortable to even attempt it.

Now the new place. Aside from the fact that you would be getting punched in the stomach every day, is there anything about the arrangement that makes it less attractive than the job you already have? You think long and hard, replaying event after event in your mind looking for outliers… Equivalent commute, nicer office, shorter hours. Effectively no other negatives. Everything tells you to make the jump. Aside from the punching. That’s, you know… You can probably learn to cope with that, right?

Monday comes. You sign the offer and it is countersigned with a bit of scrawl you can’t decipher, most likely belonging to a member of HR or Legal that you will never encounter again. You inform your current manager that you’ll be gone before this time next week. He does not hide his disappointment, and his response makes you feel terrible. Why? This is supposed to be business, isn’t it? You never really understood what good could come from bringing emotion into it.

Your soon-to-be-ex-manager informs the rest of your team the following day, and a stream of tepid congratulations follow. Next week they’ll all be stuck doing the tasks you left behind. You know exactly how it feels to be on the receiving end of that; you’ve watched peers leave during inopportune times before.

Is there ever really an opportune time?

The next three and a half days are just strange. Nobody asks you to do anything. Nobody calls on you in meetings. It is like you have some kind of contagious disease and everybody is trying to keep their distance from you. It is as if you are slowly turning invisible. HR calls you down for a customary exit interview to try to determine what might have been going wrong and what they could have done to keep you. When you tell the interviewer who your next employer is and some of what they are offering, the response is simply, “Ah. I understand your reasoning now. Well, that’s all the questions I had.”

You return to your desk, take one last look through the drawers, and turn off the screen. You stand up your ID badge in between some of the number keys on the keyboard, sling your bag over your shoulder, and walk out for the last time.

Your team does not see you leave. They’re all in a conference room conducting a meeting that you were not invited to.

Monday morning, 8:50 a.m., moderate drizzle. The lobby looks starkly different from the last two times you’ve been here, with a distinctly orange hue coming from the overhead light fixtures. The flashes of green from the turnstiles give your skin an almost putrid pallor. You don’t have your ID badge yet, so you’re waiting for the receptionist to print a visitor badge and let you in. As per the universe’s sick sense of humor, you got the receptionist from your first visit again.

“Seventeenth floor,” she sighs. “You remember how the elevators work?”

“Sure do,” you try to smile. Deep down, though, the interaction hurt. You work here now, she and you are supposed to be on the same team. Why’s she being so snarky to her colleague?

Oh well, game time. Can’t let things like that get to you.

You exit the elevator at the seventeenth floor. Nobody greets you. There is no obvious place to sit while you wait, so you slowly retrace the steps that you took when Chris showed you around. You spot a pair of faces you recognize from your interview, but you have completely forgotten both of their names. (You know, you’re supposed to be a professional adult. People tell you their names, the least you could do is try to remember them. It’s rude. Do better, you jerk.)

“Hey guys, I made it!” You wave, they wave back. You had briefly agonized over how to phrase that in a way that would belie the fact that you had no idea what to call either of them. “Is Chris around?”

“I don’t think he’s in yet, but his desk is over there. You can probably hang out in the conference room.”

“Thanks! See you around.”

Chris’s desk is right across from a door marked “Elway” at the center of a wall of solid glass. On either side, “Davis” and “Flacco.” You dimly perceive that this is a sports-related naming convention, although you hope very hard that nobody ever asks you about your thoughts regarding it. You step into the Elway room and the motion-sensitive lights turn themselves on. You drape your damp coat over one of the seatbacks and take a seat in the chair closest to the door. The one thing you feel you could do naturally—stare blankly at your phone—is the one thing you don’t want to be seen doing during the first hour of your first day. So you fold your hands nervously and look out through the glass.

Fifteen minutes and who knows how many employees pass outside. The conference room lights turn themselves off. Now you are sitting, hands folded, alone in the dark. You stand up so the lights will acknowledge your presence again, and they turn back on. You return to your seated position.

Through the glass, in the distance, you can see Chris turn the corner around the lunch area. He is once again wearing a sweater vest over a plaid collared shirt, a uniform you haven’t seen worn by anybody else on this floor so far. You look up at the Office Depot–branded wall clock, which stands out as being the only object in this building that seems like it cost less than ten dollars. 9:29, although you are not quite sure how accurately it had been set.

“Chris! Hey! Good morning!”

“Good morning, welcome aboard! So, we usually do this over in Jackson.” He points, you look over your shoulder. “I just need a quick minute to get settled, and I’ll meet you over there.”

“Gotcha, thanks.”

Jackson is about halfway around the ring of conference rooms. It is starkly different from its neighbors, having no table, whiteboard, TV, or even a lowly wall clock. Most of its light comes from outside the glass wall; the room’s single row of overhead lights appears to be permanently dimmed. There is a row of about a half-dozen of the ridiculous gaming chairs, each one appearing broken in some way, lining the far wall. Even with no other furniture, it feels cramped. You lay your coat on the ground and survey this other side of the office through the glass. A good chunk of the floor space on this side is lost to a hallway, bathrooms, and other unexciting facets of skyscraper design. Several of the smaller executive offices are on this side as well. Every door is closed. The view of the city outside isn’t nearly as breathtaking as it is on the other side, but you can tell well enough that the rain has really picked up. Autumn doesn’t technically start for another few weeks, but it’s beginning to feel like it’s arrived already.

Chris whips around the corner and steps into the conference room. Each move he makes is forceful and commanding, and his entrance is accompanied by a rush of air that carries the scent of a cologne that could best be described as “a cologne.”

“Sorry about that. How has your morning been so far?”

Your morning has consisted of nothing aside from nervous isolation and watching minutes tick by, but you engage with his small talk as best as you can. Fortunately this does not take long; Chris apparently has somewhere more important to be.

“So, here’s how we do this. You stand right here, facing this way. You see how my feet are?” Chris is standing, facing out toward the glass wall, with his feet about shoulder-width apart. You nod. “I count backwards from three, then I punch. I don’t expect that you’ll stumble or fall over, but we can wheel in a chair in case you think you’ll need it.”

You don’t know what you think. Chris isn’t a large man, exactly. Heightwise he’s just about the same as you, maybe slightly shorter. Is he younger than you are? He certainly seems to have taken better care of his skin than you have. He’s got a few athletic qualities, maybe he ran track or did rowing or something in school. You don’t know how hard he’s going to hit and, aside from that one time when you were screwing around on the playground in elementary school, you’ve never actually been punched before.

“I guess I’ll have a better idea after we’ve been through it once,” you respond.

“Ten-four. Like I’ve said, we usually don’t dial things up to eleven here. Consistent, sustainable velocity is the name of the game.” You can’t tell if that’s some kind of project management metaphor or if he’s literally talking about punch speed. “Okay. Take your position.”

The two of you swap places, and you stand like he did: feet apart, looking past Chris to the cloudy sky outside.

“All right. You can clench your abs, if you want to. Three. Two. One.” You close your eyes and do as he suggested.

THWUMP.

It doesn’t hurt, exactly. You feel yourself losing balance before anything else. The sound follows, then the burst of confusing sensations from your abdomen as you begin to recoil. A half-step backward, and you’re standing steadily on two feet. Oh, now you’re really feeling something. A sharp radiating wave from your belly button all the way up and down your torso. You can’t breathe out to make a noise. You can’t breathe in, either. Nothing about this feels familiar.

There, in the pit of your stomach, comes something you recognize. It’s that nauseous “butterflies” feeling you used to get when you misbehaved as a kid and you knew consequences weren’t far behind. It’s the first and only part of this that makes sense to you. You embrace the sensation for a moment.

As if waking from an unpleasant dream, your eyes open and you remember to unclench your abdominal muscles. You’re able to let out a cough, then a gasp, followed by heavy breathing.

“It’s been a pleasure,” smiles Chris as he extends a handshake. More disoriented than anything else, you reach out and meet his hand. He grips hard and jerks your arm down, up, and down. “See you tomorrow.” He turns around and surges out the door.

“Seeeouu…” is all you can muster. You stumble over to a gaming chair with one good armrest and collapse into it. Breathing hurts and the pain makes you retch. You can’t see anything clearly through the tears in your eyes. You are swimming through the worst pain you can ever remember experiencing.

A few agonizing moments and then it’s just sorta… gone. The nausea subsides, you breathe normally, the tears recede and you snort most of the snot back up into your sinuses. Your belly is still tender to the touch, but for the most part you’re back to normal. You step out of the conference room into the bathroom to wash off your face and blow your nose properly. As you look yourself up and down in the mirror, you wouldn’t know that anything had happened.

It’s quarter after ten, and although your understanding of the arrangement is that you can now go home if you want, something about that doesn’t feel right. It’s true that you don’t have an assigned seat or team, nor do you have a specific work area, or even a computer or any accounts on a computer, but it still feels like you should be doing something more productive here.

You walk the outer perimeter of the floor once before arriving back at the lunch area. You examine the wall of granola bars, mint candies, single-serve cookies, and snack crackers. At this moment you have no appetite for solid food. Next to that, a refrigerated cabinet—it looks like something out of a convenience store—with cans of juice and soda… ooh, an entire shelf of Dr Pepper cans. You pull one out, crack open the tab, and take a sip. You wouldn’t have thought that carbonated sugar water would help the current situation, but it really does.

You sit down at an empty table—actually they’re all empty—and slowly enjoy the drink. You smile and wave to the people who occasionally walk by and grab a pack of gum. This part here, this isn’t so bad. You finish the can and toss it into the recycling bin. It’s not even eleven o’clock, and you genuinely have nothing else to do. Maybe you really should go home.

You walk back to Jackson and pick your coat up off the floor. You brush off the unidentified flakes it managed to collect and put it on. There is a direct path to the elevators from where you are, but you decide to go the long way past Chris’s desk to make extra sure he’s okay with this.

“Yeah, we’re good here. See you tomorrow.”

Apparently that really is the way things work around here.

Tuesday morning, a few minutes before 9 a.m., sunny again. You’re back at the reception desk having a fresh visitor badge printed. At some point it’d probably be worth asking somebody when you might be able to expect a permanent badge of your own.

Seventeenth floor, walk past Chris’s desk, he’s not in yet, keep walking to Jackson. You’re a bit more prepared this time. You single out the least broken chair from the pack and wheel it into position. You drape your coat over the back of this. You have a handkerchief and a couple of premoistened towelettes in your pocket.

As you wait for Chris to arrive, you rub your hand down the front of your shirt again. Everything feels basically fine, aside from a dull ache when tensing a few of those muscles. There wasn’t even a bruise when you checked this morning, just a little residual redness. You pat yourself on the belly for no particular reason.

The office is bright this morning, with mostly clear skies outside and only the occasional patchy cloud blocking the sunlight. You glance down at your phone, looks like the rest of the week will have pretty mild temper—

“Good morning, good morning!” Chris bursts in. You could swear you felt your ears pop from the change in the room’s barometric pressure.

“Morning Chris. Hey, before we start, I was wondering if you could tell me who to talk to about getting an ID badge?”

“That ticket has been submitted, don’t worry.” He unbuttons his right shirt cuff and begins rolling up his sleeve.

“Do they need my picture or anything?”

“They’ll be in touch. Let’s go.” He beckons you to take your position. You notice he is wearing a Livestrong wristband on his freshly exposed forearm. Huh. It’s been a while since you’ve seen one of those.

“Three. Two. One.”

THWUMP.

You open your eyes wide enough to see Chris hurriedly unrolling his sleeve.

“Pleasure, as always. Gotta run to another meeting. See you tomorrow!” He waves, and you close your eyes again while grappling for the chair. It feels just like yesterday, except now you know what the progression is like. You’re incapacitated for essentially the same amount of time, but the moments do not drag quite as agonizingly as they did before.

You towel off your face, blow your nose, and head for the lunch area. Another can of Dr Pepper, another couple of minutes staring out across the busy expanse of the office. You head back to the conference room to get your coat, wheel the swivel chair back among its hobbled brethren, and take the long way out toward the exit. Chris’s desk is empty. Nobody really notices you leave.

The remainder of the week is much the same. You have a fresh visitor badge printed every day. Chris always shows up thirty minutes late and has somewhere to rush off to afterwards. Even though it is literally printed on a sticker on your shirt, nobody calls your name or really even says anything more than a perfunctory “good morning” when they see you.

To be fair, you have barely spent any time here all week. Why should anyone know who you are?

“Three. Two. One.”

THWUMP.

Maybe you should figure out when the different teams socialize. Hell, there are ping-pong tables (plural) here; somebody must use them for something.

Also, you probably want to start thinking about doing a little more calorie-burning exercise if you’re planning on making the Dr Pepper a daily thing.

Saturday morning. You wake up naturally, having deliberately turned off your alarm clock. You’ve been looking forward to the weekend because— Wait, why have you been looking forward to this? Over the past five days you have barely worked four hours in total, and it’s not even “work!” What have you been doing with the remaining 36 hours of the past workweek?

Well, alright, some of it was lost to commuting. Actually quite a lot of it was spent commuting. You live in a house out in the suburbs roughly fifteen miles north of the city. It takes a commuter rail ride, followed by a subway, and finally six blocks crosstown on foot to get from your front door to the office. It totals about 75 minutes each way, which means you’ve spent… Dear Lord, you suck at mental math.

You pull out the calculator and work it out. You’ve spent over twelve hours commuting to this job over the past week. To be fair, you’ve also spent about that much time commuting to the previous job—ever since you gave up your studio apartment in the city in the search for “more space” and comforts like “not having most of your possessions ruined during the multiple occasions when an adjacent apartment floods.” You peer out the back window at the line of trees that the neighbor planted so she wouldn’t have to look at the ass-end of an ugly rental house. A squirrel is busy rummaging in the hollow on one of the larger tree trunks. Not gonna get something like that outside your big-city windows.

Still, twelve hours. You never really sat down and put a number to it before. Maybe Chris would be amicable to some kind of arrangement where you work remote. You actually laugh out loud at the idea. It makes your stomach hurt.

9:30 on the dot.

“Good morning, happy Monday!” Chris blasts into the Jackson conference room in his typical style. He’s still wearing his coat and messenger bag. Both are flung off and placed on the floor. “How was your weekend?”

“Oh, you know, fine I guess. Short.” You remember that it would probably be a polite thing to ask the same question of him, but that’s not where your head is at this morning. “Chris, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask about.”

He finishes propping his coat up against the bag. “I’m all ears.”

“I’m having a little trouble understanding how this work fits into the broader picture.” Chris nods but says nothing. “You know, like, um, who our stakeholders are.”

“Ah. Well, as I’m sure you know, this company has multiple verticals and business units. Some of us work on the direct-to-consumer and e-commerce products, the folks at West Campus are mainly focused on B2B operations, and every team relies on the stuff that Internal Tooling and DX puts out. So there really is no single stakeholder. Case in point, that whole half of the floor is the Next Initiative team.” Chris gestures in the approximate direction of absolutely nothing. “They’re working on compliance and auditing for the Information Security org.”

“Didn’t you say our team was the Next Initiative?”

“No, we’re the Next Innovation Lab. It’s actually funny, FedEx keeps leaving our packages on their side of the floor.”

You are more confused than you were five minutes ago. Chris can plainly tell.

“Let’s double-click on that,” he thought-leads. “What insights do you feel you need in order to be more effective?”

“Um…” You would like to bluntly ask what the damn hell any of this has to do with anything, but can find no tactful way to directly ask that. “I guess nothing specific. I just like to know where I fit into the whole big picture, you know?”

“I understand your desire to learn more about the business. You’re showing a lot of initiative by asking. We can figure out ways to expose you to other teams as the rollout progresses. It’s gonna be a busy Q4, just so you’re aware.” He reaches his right arm across his chest and stretches it against his left forearm. “You ready?”

THWUMP.

The alarm clock sounds. The sun has not technically risen yet, but the twilight streaming into the bedroom window is sufficient to allow you to do most of your morning routine without turning on the lights. It is Friday. Payday the thirteenth. The thought occurs that you could probably see the pending direct deposit from the company if you cared to look.

You care very much.

Through eyes still slightly blurred by the crust that accumulated while you slept, you open your bank’s mobile app. It nags you with a four page slideshow about some irrelevant new features added in the most recent update, then requests that you confirm your contact information and income details. You tap the “Skip” button. There it is: ACH DEPOSIT… Holy hell.

You don’t need the calculator or your morning caffeine to comprehend that this single payment is comfortably higher than your total income over the entirety of the previous month.

Now the anxiety starts creeping in. It’s still a pending transaction; somebody’s gonna do something to keep it from settling. Even when it settles, they’re gonna find out you’re a scammer and reverse the payment. They’ll probably withdraw even more as a penalty. They might even decide to sue you. There’s no reason to believe this greyed-out ledger entry is real.

You look over to the window and notice that the squirrel is still at it. Whatever’s in that tree hole has really caught its attention. The view outside helps calm your mind. You pause for a moment to appreciate the first rays of sun just beginning to filter through the branches. Of course the payment is real. You did what you were hired to do, and they paid you like they said they would. No problems here at all. Nope.

After showering, you catch a glimpse of yourself in the bathroom mirror. The area above your navel is purple to the point of almost being black. The skin, to the extent you can bear the pain of touching it, feels thick like leather. You’re not even paying attention; you’re still stressing about whether that deposit was deserved. It still feels like the whole thing is, you know, some kind of stupid fraud.

THWUMP.

“Oh, by the way,” Chris is halfway out the door, but he turns back as you crumble into the chair. “The team is going to hang out after work this afternoon. Kind of an informal happy hour thing, we do it every other Friday. You’re more than welcome to come.”

“Sounds great,” you cough, wearily holding up your arm to give a thumbs-up. It’s likely that nobody sees the gesture.

As you regain your composure, you dimly perceive that happy hour is probably not going to begin until eight hours from now. You’re not going to commute all the way home just to come back again. Once you have finished drinking your daily dose of Dr Pepper, there is absolutely nothing for you to do here. Aside from the lunch area, PlayStation nook, and a few couches scattered around the other common areas on the floor, there are no empty desks where you could camp out. If you were to loiter in the common areas all day, you would conspicuously be the only person here that didn’t look like they were doing something important.

You decide to head outside and wander the city. It’s a brisk morning, not too terribly cold.

You text Doug, one of your oldest friends from the first job you had in the city. He moved across the country a few years back to chase some opportunities, but he has remained one of the few people you’ve met in a work context that you really tried to maintain contact with. Despite it barely being sunrise where he lives, he texts right back. After some back-and-forth, you both reach the point where you figure it’d probably be more effective to just call each other. He dials you.

Doug has always been one of the wisest, most well-read people you knew. He could speak in paragraph form about any topic from technology to sociology using deep references and words that you were pretty sure, but not always positive, you knew the meaning of. Compared to him, you had the eloquence of an annoyed diesel mechanic. But your conversations were always insightful and enjoyable.

Not much had occurred in his life since the last time you spoke. You tell him all about your job change and the choices that led you to this point. Doug does not seem surprised at anything you shared. A few parts are met with a kind of mild bemusement, but overall he understands why a person would take a cushy job where their only contribution is getting punched in the stomach. Even more surprisingly, he has a theory about why the role exists at all:

“What is the point of a corporation, really? To sell a product, you might say. Or more descriptively, to collect revenue in exchange for delivering a product, and then to spend that revenue on products from other corporations, ideally using those products to help make their own. Also to pay for staff, who spend their wages in the even broader economy. The point of the enterprise is to make money in order to spend it, which is received by a different entity who spends it on something else. The products they make are actually byproducts of this system. Keeping money moving is job one.”

You have long since lost the ability to function in your day-to-day life without using a calculator, but this sounds like plausible economic theory. Doug continues:

“Sometimes money comes in, but the business is so large and dysfunctional that it can’t effectively direct those funds to anything relating to making the product. So what do the individual departments do? They could always hold onto the surplus, or try to give it away in dividends and bonuses. But they can’t do that too much or everybody starts getting suspicious at each other about where this sudden unexpected clump of money came from and why it wasn’t used to benefit the product. The most effective strategy on every level of the hierarchy is to simply find someplace to stuff the excess funds that looks ostensibly like it’s helping achieve a business goal even though it isn’t. That’s why so many projects run over budget and fall behind schedule before ultimately failing, yet the business survives. It’s why so many enterprise software contracts are sold despite being essentially worthless. It’s why teams become packed with specialists whose job description is to make messes, who work alongside others who are only tasked with cleaning up those same messes. These all permit a department’s budget to intentionally disappear in a way that can survive a financial audit.”

“So we’re all just going through business like that I Love Lucy scene where they’re working at the candy factory, and they get overwhelmed by the number of pieces they have to wrap, and end up stuffing a bunch of excess chocolate down their shirts?”

“In a way, yeah. That’s why the image is funny. The viewer wouldn’t have related with the characters if the situation weren’t based around some sort of shared human experience. If I remember that episode right, they didn’t even get fired did they? I think they left voluntarily at the end.”

“Probably, I don’t really remember.” You most likely haven’t seen that particular episode since you were a kid. “But, well, okay… I can accept that my company sometimes needs to make money disappear without anybody noticing so that nobody has to have an embarrassing or possibly career-damaging conversation. But why does my manager need to punch me to justify it? I mean, he could give me a back rub, or we could play rock-paper-scissors, or just stare each other down. Why does he punch me?”

“Because he’s a dick.”

“Cheers!”

Everybody takes a swig from their bottle of Rolling Rock. This is one area of the business where an expense had apparently been spared. The group is circled around a ping-pong table that has been repurposed into a regular table. Chris stands at the head of it with Jon to his left. The four people who originally interviewed you—you have since learned their names to be Dave, Davey, Lydia, and Karan—stand to his right. Chris has, more than once in the time since everybody gathered here, called them “Dave Force,” a moniker that is visibly unwelcome. You stand near the corner at the opposite end of the table, flanked by Stef and a grown man whose given name appears to actually be JR.

You have worked very hard to learn these names over the course of the afternoon, and hope you are able to retain the information for more than five minutes. You still don’t know much about what anybody around this table actually does all day. Based purely on observations of who interacts with whom, you figure that this group must be the Next Innovation Lab and everybody else on this floor belongs to the separate Next Initiative. Possibly. Nobody has really made an effort to instill a notion of what any of this is or why any of it matters. Though maybe with some well-deployed small talk you can learn some things. You begin by simply listening:

Stef: “… then I’m double-checking the sheet, and I’m going like, we’re following the capacity curve like you asked.”

Jon: “And this was after the CRB approved everything?”

Stef: “Everybody on the thread was part of the CRB! So I’m like, okay, let’s start from the beginning. We have two 8x-larges, and they’re like, no, we have eight 2x-larges. Now I’m like, clearly one of us is having a stroke, and I ain’t the one smelling burnt toast here.”

Everybody except you laughs. You notice this and immediately put on a fake grin. As the story continues, you put together that Stef’s job is to create and configure IT infrastructure for another team. The purpose of these resources, and even whether they are used for any purpose at all, is not disclosed.

Chris: “Hey, Dave Force, what’s the score today?”

Four people simultaneously roll their eyes at this. Dave informally heads a team with Davey, Lydia, and Karan. Nobody knows where the name “Dave Force” came from but they all wish it would go back to wherever that was. The “score” in question appears to be the number of spreadsheet rows worked through, but you’ve so far been unable to suss out the broader picture. You realize you’re about due to say something, so you speak up:

You: “So Dave, what does the spreadsheet represent?”

Dave responds at length on behalf of his team. The short version is, they run a security auditing process. The spreadsheet contains a list of the most frequently-used passwords found in public data breaches—hundreds of thousands of them. Dave’s team divides the list up between themselves and manually types the passwords into one of the company’s internal tools to make sure none of the breached passwords permit access into the system.

You: (dumbfounded) “Oh… Neat. Bet that keeps you busy.”

Dave: “They say this group is the fastest that’s ever done it. Two years ago it would’ve been basically impossible to get through ten thousand in a day.”

Did he say two years? And ten thousand?

Davey: “Lydia is the real MVP, though. Nobody has ever outpaced her.”

Lydia: “I keep telling you guys to switch to split keyboards. Or at least try one for a day.”

Lydia’s keyboard was one of the earliest things you noticed back when you first toured the office. It was split into two distinct units, each placed on the desk near one arm of the chair. Red LED lighting radiated through every gap in the plastic. Her wrists barely moved as she typed, while the movement of her fingers reminded you of the way a spider might manipulate the twitching carcass of a housefly. The keys were suspended by a heavy mechanical buckle-spring mechanism, and the loud repetitive but slightly random clicking had all the auditory appeal of a rusty Soviet tank. Her computer mouse, clearly part of a matched set, was seldom touched.

Karan: “I tried to learn Dvorak a little bit when I was at university but—”

Lydia: “Booo.”

Several thumbs-down are put forward. You quickly scan the group to get an informal poll of the overall sentiment and feign your own response: a disappointed head shake. Actually, part of your response is genuine; these people all seemed so competent and fulfilled when you first interviewed with them. In actuality, though, they are hollowed-out husks of what may have at one time been a spark of human potential. Shouldn’t they be bothered, at least a little bit, by where this life has taken them?

You’re thinking too much. There’s a lull in the conversation here, use it as another opportunity to probe somebody:

You: “How about you, Jon? What do they have you working on?”

Jon: “I maintain the legacy checkpoint API. It pretty much runs on its own these days, but it’s never been formally documented. The thinking is that, whenever we get another team in place that needs to handle checkpoints again, they’ll be able to hit the ground running with our in-house tech rather than having to build a solution on their own or contract out to a third party.”

You: “You’re documenting and supporting an API that’s… abandoned?”

Jon: “Well, I mean, I’m using it. Can’t very well document something if you don’t use it, you know?”

Chris: “That API used to do, what, fifty RPS?”

Jon: “At least that.”

Behind you, something beeps. Several members of the group turn toward the source of the sound. It is the printer near the glass wall that looks into the Holmes conference room. JR excuses himself. He returns a moment later with a stack of at least 500 sheets of letter paper, each covered entirely in solid black ink. He hands the stack of blackened sheets to Chris, who quickly thumbs through it. He is quite pleased.

Chris: “You knocked it out of the park again, JR.”

There is likely little point in verbally acknowledging anything about what you have just witnessed. You just assume that, through some corporate razzamatazz, JR’s entire job is to waste toner. You guzzle approximately half of your beer.

Jon: “I love doing this. Really, it’s been my dream job.”

Nobody specifically asked, but Jon eagerly volunteered this information. He turns toward Chris and continues:

“I would still do this even if you weren’t paying me.”

There was a time in your life when you longed for such a deep connection with the work you did. Love what you do and you’ll never work a day in your life, and all that. In the moment, though, you sort of feel like this is the Island of Misfit Toys and also a cult.

“It’s pretty nice, I guess. They supply free snacks and drinks, and I have some flexibility with my hours as long as I get my work done.”

You somehow hadn’t found time to talk to your parents or anybody else in your family since you switched jobs. In actuality, it’s probably taken this long to work up the nerve to talk about it openly with anyone. After every detail you share over the phone, the person at the other end of the conversation responds that the job sounds incredible. You temper that excitement:

“Yeah, but it’s a very demanding role.” And, “It takes a lot out of me.” And, “I don’t think most people could do this type of work.”

You actually don’t think most people would do this type of work.

“Well, just remember that you’re lucky to have a job at all. Nothing in this world is guaranteed.” Somehow this particular family member never fails to deliver her unique brand of homespun advice, that out-of-touch wisdom only attained by being thoroughly retired and never having applied for any job in over four decades.

It’s late Sunday afternoon. It’s actually not that late, but the sun is starting to set very early this time of year. You had always joked, when you were at the previous job, that you never got to watch the leaves change in the neighborhood because you were always gone during daylight hours. You realize that wasn’t actually a joke, it’s a plain statement of fact. Now that you get home every day around noon, you have started to appreciate how subtly the leaves can change from one day to the next. How much else have you been missing during that intervening time?

You scan the landscape through the curtains. The sunlight has gotten redder, casting low shadows that have grown longer. That squirrel is still rummaging around in that same hole. You lean toward the window for a closer look, the warm air from your nose fogging the terribly-insulated glass pane. That squirrel is not moving all that much, actually. You stare longer. It’s not moving at all. A calm breeze rolls its way through, and you faintly detect its bushy tail swaying lazily. You’re pretty sure… nope, you’re absolutely sure: That squirrel is dead.

You step back for a moment to briefly rub your eyes. You return to your previous position, but can no longer make out the outline of the tree you had been looking at. You must’ve been thoughtlessly staring for the last 30, maybe 45 minutes. Now it’s too dark out there to really see anything. The room lights were never turned on, so you’re just standing there in the dark. You sigh. You’ve been sighing a lot throughout the day.

This is not unfamiliar to you. This is something you can recall feeling countless times before under similar circumstances. Sunday is basically done and the weekend has gone with it. Tomorrow you go back to the office, back to everything you were supposed to enjoy escaping over the last two days. But you haven’t enjoyed anything, you just wasted your precious free time in the name of rest and recovery. You’ve wasted pretty much every weekday afternoon in the exact same way, just standing here staring at nothing.

How was your weekend, somebody is going to ask. Short, you’re going to quip. How’s it going, it simply “goes” with no other characteristics. That’s the formula of the joke. None of this is a joke. None of what you’ve been saying to people over the course of your career has been a joke. You really were upset at how little you got to enjoy the foliage on your street. You really do think that the weekend is too short to meaningfully recover from getting punched in the stomach every day. This feeling you are experiencing right now, fuck, what is this? It’s like the polar opposite of excitement and ambition. It’s that desire to curl up into a ball where nobody will ever find you. It’s the feeling of being crushed under a weight that you can’t escape, but complaining about it makes you seem weak or vulnerable, and everybody else seems to be doing just fine handling theirs, so what the hell is wrong with you? It is anger, frustration, despair, and every kind of negative energy directed at… what? You can’t even say, so may as well shoulder that weight along with everything else.

This has nothing to do with that squirrel. No, it has everything to do with that squirrel. You envy that little prick.

Monday morning, 9:30 a.m., somehow you have managed to put on your normal face and go to work.

For a company with “unlimited”-in-air-quotes paid time off, Chris sure has a good attendance record. You’ve chatted up a few people during your time spent hovering around the lunch area, and the common theme is that he’s hardly ever out sick and he only takes vacation time in a two-week block each summer. Most of the people here have similar attendance patterns; pretty much every seat is occupied more or less every day.

Say what you will about your previous job, but your old boss was out a lot. He had kids in two—was it three?—different schools and there was always some snafu that would cause him to miss half a day or work remotely. There was something… relieving about the days when he wasn’t physically right there. He still spewed emails and instant messages and ticket comments and video calls, but the physical distance was, you know, nice.

You notice, not even a month into this engagement, that you resent the regularity with which you are forced to interact with your supervisor. “Interact,” hah, that’s funny for some reason. You adopt a mocking voice and quietly mutter to yourself:

“Look at me, I interact with my subordinates by punching. Let me delegate this workload vis-à-vis my fist. If it weren’t for those dweebs in HR I’d have a brass knuckle—”

“Good morning, happy Monday!” Chris’s inbursts made the Kool-Aid Man’s entrances seem positively genteel. You shut up real quick. “How’s it going?” he asks.

“Oh, it goes.” You’re a goddamn soothsayer.

“I hear that!” Chris says. Hearing is not the same as listening.

“Hey, Chris, I was just thinking. You probably don’t need to count down from three each time we do this. I mean, I can see your windup. I know when it’s time.”

“Really?” He genuinely ponders this. “Fantastic! That’s a super optimization. Let’s try it out right now.”

THWUMP.

“Wonderful! Incredible effort, team!”

What team? What team?

You’ve spent some time at the sinks in the seventeenth floor bathroom, but this morning you’re in the stall. Sometimes—not all the time—but sometimes, your bowels get a little scrambled during the course of your work. You’re beginning to learn that there is an upper limit to the amount of caffeine you can consume before having a bad day, digestively.

The room is tiled in maroon with yellow accents, certainly a bold color scheme. It’s also pretty dark compared to the rest of the floor; there’s zero natural light in here. The floor tiles are smooth with an almost mirror glaze. You can clearly see the reflection of the wall-mounted hand dryer underneath the stall door. It’s probably likely that a person standing in that spot could see your pitiful attempts at clenching your muscles while trying to avoid passing out from the pain. The toilet paper, much like the happy hour beer, is bountiful yet crap—

Click. The motion-activated lights turn off. The ventilation fan stops too. Now you are sitting in absolute pitch darkness and disquieting silence. You give it a moment in case your eyes find a way to adjust. They do not. You can’t see a bloody thing, and the motion sensor has no way of seeing into your stall. It does not take long for the air to grow thick and stale, the faint smell of bleach cleaners and quite a few other things beginning to reclaim the space. This bathroom has completely forgotten about you, and that’s just how it’s gonna be for a while…

BAM! Every muscle in your body tenses, which hurts like hell. You hear the door fly open with a force like a tornado threw a barbecue grill into it. You’d recognize Chris’s subtle touch anywhere. The overhead lights and fan turn on to greet him.

He likely doesn’t know anybody else is in here with him. If he did, he would’ve tried to initiate small talk by now. You try to remain very still so he doesn’t detect your presence. This is a rare opportunity to observe a creature’s natural behavior, you may as well accept the good fortune. From the urinals, vaguely melodic groaning would be the most clinical way to describe it. Yeah, that’s definitely him. He spends his whole bathroom visit just… humming. He steps back, the urinal flushes automatically, and he darts out of the bathroom as briskly as he had entered. He does not wash his hands.

You wait a moment to make sure he’s really gone, then relax with a sigh. The toilet that you are sitting on flushes itself. That’s the third time it has done this since you’ve been in here.

“How about cleaning up a crime scene?”

“You mean like wiping up blood and brains and shit like that? Ew, no. Wouldn’t do that either.”

On this weeknight, you’re seated in a corner booth at a bar with four other people you know from outside of work. You are the slowest drinker in the group, now just about two glasses into the evening. The rest of the party is quite a bit further ahead in the race to inebriated serenity. The conversation has taken an organic turn to the topic of jobs that nobody wants to do. Prior to the crime scene cleaner, there had been “bathing patients in hospice care,” “slaughtering pigs,” “emptying portable toilets,” and, oddly enough, “roofing.” Nobody in the group would do any of those hypothetical jobs for any amount of hypothetical money.

Yet, those are all real jobs done every day by real people. They’re important jobs that keep society running the way we have grown accustomed to. Nobody in the group wants to stick their arm shoulder-deep into a clogged sewer pipe, and nobody wants to ride through the July noon in a festering garbage truck, but countless people do those things every day. People who, in the majority of cases, probably take home less money than any of the people sitting around this table.

“How about getting punched in the stomach?” you propose. The table falls silent as each person pauses to make sure they heard you right.

“What, like a boxer or something?”

“No. Just like walking in, getting punched in the stomach, and leaving.”

“I don’t see how that’s a job,” the second-most sober person in the group argues. You can’t fault her assessment.

“I’m seriously asking. You get punched in the stomach, and they pay you…” You round your total compensation to the nearest hundred thousand and reveal the number. The table goes into deathly quiet consideration.

“Shit, for that much they can spit in my mouth and break my fingers too,” the drunkest member of the group exclaims. His words, delivered with a barely detectable slur, suggest that he hasn’t given this question even the slightest bit of actual consideration. Nobody else has anything to add. It was a weird question and you are a weird person for having brought it up.

You fidget with your glass, which has about two sips worth of drink left in it. You really don’t feel like finishing that now.

The train is unusually crowded on its way into the city this morning. You had received a transit alert on your phone earlier regarding problems due to an equipment breakdown a few stops away, but that has since been cleared up. This looks to be the residual overflow of people who couldn’t make it onto an earlier train.

Your phone dings again, this time with an email on your work account. While they haven’t given you a desk, or a badge, or really anything to make you feel any shred of belonging, they did eventually give you an email account along with a strong hint that you should check it regularly using your personal devices. It’s not your favorite thing to have had to do, put it that way.

It is a notification email from the company kudos board. Chris has bestowed you a unit of “leadership and initiative” praise in a two-sentence text box: “consistently delivers strategic value and innovative process optimization. the most reliably creative problem-solver we’ve ever punched in the stomach.” Other employees can add their own digital reactions to the message in the form of a smiling face emoji. So far only JR has elected to do this.

These kudo boards—kudos board?—they really serve no purpose other than to ostensibly boost morale. Honestly, you find them so cloying and infantilizing that you’d rather not receive any praise on the platform at all. It’s kind of embarrassing to show up in those emails. And it’s not like you get any kind of tangible monetary award or additional consideration out of racking these things up; they’re completely pointless. Well, okay, maybe they may factor in some small way into the annual performance review process and that makes them, well, still largely pointless. You had once heard it mentioned—and maybe it was a joke or maybe it was sincere—that the company unofficially considers a person’s employment to be a success if they make it to the two-year mark. That suggests to you that plenty of people flame out well before that milestone. From where you sit, it’s perfectly clear how a person might not last even half as long in that environment.

You have a partially-eaten breakfast sandwich in your other hand and return your attention to that. You enjoy a few bites while staring out the window at the passing houses. It’s kinda funny, even when the train is running normally you don’t usually get the seat near—

Panic. Throat. There is something seriously wrong in your throat. Whatever you just tried to swallow didn’t do the thing it was supposed to do. Cough. Gasp. Swallow. Swallow. Swallow. You’re not actually doing any of these things, your body is following some kind of autonomous routine. Lean forward. Retch. Cough. You feel the glob of whatever rise to the back of your mouth, and you hack it onto the floor. You’re breathing heavily now, but at least you’re breathing. Tears, seemingly from nowhere, pour from your eyes.

What the hell was that?

“Here you go.” Chris hands you a grey folder. You open it. Performance review time. You’ve barely been here for two months, but apparently the cycle waits for nobody. “If you could get that back to me by this time tomorrow, that’d be perfect. We’re trying to get all of you some more mon-ayyy.” He could’ve said ‘money’ like an adult, but we all make our choices in life.

THWUMP.

The performance review paperwork consists of a “how would you rate yourself” chart on topics like punctuality, knowledge, communication, and so forth. Anybody who doesn’t give themselves a healthy and self-aggrandizing mix of fours and fives has either an inferiority complex or a stupidity complex. Still, you want to at least give the appearance of playing the game, so you give yourself a three on leadership.

The rest of the document is a whole bunch of open-ended blank space talking about goals. Each goal needs to be SMART—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. This has been the same at basically every company you’ve ever worked at, and over the years they’ve thoroughly beaten the system into your brain. “Specific” goals leave no room for interpretation; you say what you are going to do and there is a clear way to determine whether that happened. “Measurable” goals have to have a number in there somewhere. An “achievable” goal, you would think that’s common sense—no point committing to something that is impossible to do. “Relevant” goals have direct relation to whatever the business’s needs are… or whatever you are paid to do in the case that these concepts do not overlap. A “time-bound” goal has another number in it, the date by which you will do that thing. By default, the assumption is it will be done by the next performance review at the latest.

This framework perhaps makes sense for an assembly line worker who performs a predictable and repeatable task and wants to see an incremental improvement. It also works for fields like sales (make X number of sales pitches and close Y number of deals) and even doctors (treat X number of patients and kill fewer than Y of them in the process). These are fields where this system might actually provide some benefit.

Even when you worked at a real job, you found this process pointlessly difficult as an individual contributor doing what they call “knowledge work.” You have never really been empowered to make decisions that could change the outcomes of any goals you might set for yourself. Put simply, your goal at all times is to do whatever the boss tells you to do, try not to screw any of it up, actually finish it, and don’t complain. None of that fits into the little SMART cubby holes they have carved out here.

You put yourself in the shoes of JR or one of the members of Dave Force (it’s a dumb, dumb name but boy it’s convenient). JR could write a goal that states he’d print a total of half a million solid black pages over the upcoming fiscal year. With the possible exception of “relevance” to anything resembling sane corporate decision-making, that’s a perfectly serviceable goal. He’s probably well on the way to shattering it right this moment. Same with Dave Force—perhaps a member of that team could commit to work through a hundred thousand passwords by the end of Q4. Another adequate goal.

The problem with memorializing this stuff in a long-lived document is that things change. At this moment, yes, everybody can extrapolate what they’re doing right now and predict what a reasonably ambitious vision of the future might look like. But Chris could swoop in at any time with new organizational whims that interfere with, halt, or even reverse course on work being done today. Somebody might leave the company, resulting in the remaining staff getting reassigned to cover that work instead of making progress toward their goal. JR might be instructed to stop the printing project, and instead begin pouring hand soap directly down the sink drain. Even you have no guarantee that “get punched in the stomach 250 times over the next calendar year” is a stable north star.

When the next performance review cycle comes around, these old goals get dredged up and compared against how reality shook out. A good manager might go “Well, I see what you were going for and you were well on your way, but circumstances changed and I can sorta morph one into the other… You’re fine.” A less good manager might say “BZZZZT NEEDS IMPROVEMENT.” Either way, you have to figure out how to artfully contrive 250 punches into more than one goal on this worthless sheet.

Actually, no, don’t say 250. Fudge that down to give yourself some wiggle room for sick days and stuff. 225 sounds about right.

Huh, you did that one without a calculator.

You roll the folder and its contents up into a tight tube and slip it into your inside coat pocket. The rigid paper uncurls as soon as you loosen your grip and an asymmetrical lump forms next to the zipper. There is still no desk, storage area, or any kind of spot to stash this until tomorrow; you’ll have to bring it home and back with you for no good reason.

In the lunch area, you can’t help but notice that the refrigerated cabinet is starting to look barren. Actually, no, for the most part it’s about as well-stocked as it’s ever been. Same with the wall of snacks. It’s really just the shelf where you have been sourcing Dr Pepper cans from. You crouch down and move your head through a few different vantage points. There are four cans in there. Scratch that—you open the door and pull one can out—there are three.

You know for a fact that people on this floor are consuming beverages from this thing. You can see probably half a dozen desks where somebody is currently doing exactly that. Strangely, though, you can’t recall ever once seeing somebody else drinking Dr Pepper. It’s quite possible that you drank the entire shelf on your own.

You are neither proud nor bothered by that idea. You pull the tab and crack open the can.

“Morning Val! I’ll have the usual.”

Valerie smiles and shakes her head. It has been well over eight weeks since you started here, meaning at least forty visitor passes have been printed by the front desk receptionists. Every member of the team recognizes you now, but you’ve developed an affinity for Val. She was the one who sassed you about the elevators during your first visit. Over the course of a few successive interactions, she started to take pity on you and your badgeless status.

The conversations never run anywhere near one minute apiece, but you’ve discovered a bit about each other. You’ve learned that she and the rest of the receptionists really don’t care about their work at all. All they really have to make sure they do is prevent the whackjobs and lunatics from getting to the elevators, and to press the emergency button if anybody gets out of hand.

She knows what you do at the company. She hardly batted an eye when you first told her that you get punched in the stomach professionally. “A lot of people who come through here do that,” she said at the time. She was the only person in this building that gave the impression that she knew what was really up and how things really were. It was refreshing to have a person to whom you could say, “This whole thing is actually just bullshit, right?” and find agreement.

“Knock ’em dead, champ.” She presents your visitor badge, and you peel it away from the tip of her index finger.

THWUMP.

It’s another dreary afternoon. Rain. This time you ended up in the back seat of the car, leaving the passenger side window as the only interesting view to be found. There’s not much out there: Slick roads reflecting light, trees in the distance, slower cars being passed. You’ve taken this ride enough times that it’s basically routine at this point. There is no need for conversation or any kind of interaction with the scene. All it takes is time.

You would think by now that you would have more of an intuition about where specifically you are in the journey between point A and point B. It never really seemed like a pressing need. On the few times you’ve tried, the street signs were too far away to make out. It’s not helped by the fact that it always ends up being too foggy and grey out there to see much of anything.

You turn your eyes briefly to the left. The other rear seat is still empty. It’s starting to look like that time again. You lean up to take a peek over the front seatbacks, which are quite a bit higher than you remember them being before. Passenger seat, empty. Driver’s seat, also empty.

As you lie awake in bed, replaying this most recent dream to yourself for the who-knows-how-manyth time, you marvel at how predictably routine it has become. Sometimes you begin in the front seat, other times you make it behind the wheel only to discover that the brake pedal really doesn’t do anything. It isn’t a nightmare, and it isn’t even very upsetting anymore. It’s just sorta there, like a movie without sound playing in the back of an airplane headrest that commands no attention. You’ve read somewhere that most attempts at dream analysis are essentially quackery, but you’re pretty sure this one is an unambiguous insight into your subconscious mind.

You’re awake anyway, so may as well take this opportunity to use the bathroom. It’s nearly 4 a.m. and you can still get two solid hours of peaceful sleep if you’re lucky. You allow the sink to run for a few seconds before putting your hands in to avoid the slap of ice water that has lain in the cold plumbing. As you wait, a look in the mirror. You noticed your first grey hair a few years back, but up until this moment you had never seen one there before. You squint and move closer to the mirror. Yup, now that has a grey hair too.

You lay on your right side to no avail. You lift the sheets and comforter, turn to lay on your back, and wait that amount of time again. You roll to your left side. The bedside clock says 4:41. You’re thinking about, well, nothing exactly. You’re sure there’s some kind of parade of thoughts running through your mind, but you haven’t been paying attention to it. All you’ve focused on is that feeling. That helpless, hopeless sense that you really are destined to be this way forever. And it’s not just that you’re stuck in this job and bound up in the sprawling root system that it has driven deep into your soul. No, you’re trapped in this cold night, in this dark room, staring at a stopped clock in perpetual misery.

Whatever this job has given you—and to be crystal clear it has given you most of the down payment on a house—it is not enough to offset this sense of constant dread. Whatever you have given to this job, certainly things that cannot ever be quantified on a bank statement, there are now pieces of yourself that are missing. Pieces you didn’t even realize were being given away. Pieces that, in this moment, you worry you might never get back.

This is a bad deal. This is a self-destructive situation. They are going to use you up and then incinerate whatever is left of your desiccated body to pay a fat bonus to some who-knows for achieving some who-cares. Whatever Jon and the rest of those people feel about coming to work, they are wrong. Or at least they are willing to trade away any last remaining shreds of mental health more readily than you are.

What was the plan here? Why did you leave a perfectly sustainable—if difficult and slightly unrewarding—job to do this crap? What even is this crap? You are, and let’s not mince words here, you are a thief. That’s the only way to make sense of this situation: You are stealing money from somebody, somehow. This is money you have not earned. There is no legitimate way that you should be receiving any form of compensation for simply absorbing abuse. These people, maybe the whole company but certainly the people in your immediate management chain, are irredeemably damaged to be using human beings that way. They will take, and take, and smile at you like they’re doing you some kind of favor, and maybe throw you a little perk from time to time to distract you from thinking about it too hard. But you? You can’t stop thinking.

You can’t stop thinking.

4:44.

You can’t stop thinking.

How are you here right now? How did you delude yourself into coming here this morning?

THWUMP.

“Oh, by the way, I’ve got your finalized performance review here. Do you have some bandwidth right now?” Chris is in good spirits, and acting like this is a regular interaction between two regular people. It seems to not bother him that he is addressing your half-passed-out panting body. You weakly wave your hand in a gesture somewhere between “thumbs-up” and “yeah, so what.” He rustles some papers, then summarizes:

“Since you’ve been here less than a year, we don’t have any existing goals that we can retro. But I remain seriously impressed at your commitment to improving process. And I want to be crisp here:”

God how you have grown to despise this man.

“I’m talking specifically about how we’re able to punch more effectively without the countdown now. Some of the guys on the other floors can’t believe that it’s sustainable, but the velocity numbers don’t lie. So, we are going to be giving you the full cost of living increase plus five percent, effective Monday the first. From all of us, we’re really glad you’re here.”

You have not opened your eyes once during that entire exchange. You hear and understand the words and the broader implication, but it does not produce any response. You feel Chris wrap his hand around yours, squeeze unnecessarily, and impart a rattling businessman’s-type handshake. He releases his grip and your hand flops back down.

“It’s been a pleasure, see you tomorrow.”

You soon recover enough physical and spiritual energy to sit up in the chair. Chris has left the performance review folder on your lap, still obviously curled from its round trip in your coat pocket. You skim the cover page looking for the numbers. You think, well, maybe you can hold out a little while longer to maximize your gains. You know, in the moment, it’s not so bad. Maybe, just for a bit…

You get up and walk straight to the bathroom to wash the Chris off your hand. You clear your throat to find something acrid and viscous rising up from your chest. You clear your throat again and swallow hard. You could swear you hear an audible click at the bottom of your neck. You’ve been popping antacids every day to try to tamp that down, but it hasn’t had much of an effect.

Fortunately, this company really seems to understand what its employees need, and part of the snack shelf in the lunch area is dedicated to stomach pills and digestive remedies. You’ve stopped grabbing Dr Pepper from the fridge and have replaced it with famotidine tablets in your daily routine. That shelf has been empty and untouched ever since the morning you removed the final can, anyway. There’s a bunch of other stuff in there, mostly flavored seltzer and stuff that’s a little too frou-frou for your taste. You originally thought that maybe you’d gain weight from the arrangement—each one of those cans added about 150 calories to a diet and lifestyle that wasn’t accustomed to such a thing. Yet strangely, the opposite has happened and you have been losing weight reliably, even when you were still on the sugar water. You pop two tablets and swallow, they go down with substantial difficulty. Even with the bland chalky taste of berry-laced chemicals, nothing improves.

You have known for a while that something was going on, ever since you choked and… Well, you can’t even call what happened “choking” really. The doctor called it “dysphagia”—he was very clear that this was a symptom and not a disease by itself—the underlying cause could have been a range of things, anything from “shrug” to “hm, interesting.” In the time since then you have become acutely aware of the act of swallowing. You notice every hitch, every motion, every sequence of muscle contractions between the back of your mouth all the way down to the middle of your chest. You have no ability to control any of these events—it still remains a largely autonomous thing—but the initial kick-off step, where the food leaves that fully controlled gate at the back of the tongue and tumbles into the great unknown, has become very difficult to control.

You compensate by taking smaller bites, chewing more thoroughly, deliberately shaping things with your tongue in an effort to line it up in a way that goes down more smoothly. It does not work. You’ve learned that you have no trouble swallowing liquids, and if you take a pill-sized bite of food you can sneak it down with a sip of water. Eating this way takes approximately forever.

You adapt to this by taking smaller portions, or taking food to-go when dining out, but the main factor remains water. Each bite of food comes with a splash of water, which really fills you up in terms of volume but not nutrition. Some of your meals have run for so long that you need to excuse yourself to the bathroom to eliminate some of the excess water midway through.

You’re simply not eating enough. Your pants are getting loose. That one well-worn hole in your belt goes right past your waistline now, and you’re wearing down a fresh new hole. On top of that, you are scared during every meal. You can’t eat without an ample supply of water within reach. You become anxious if the level of water in the glass drops much below the halfway mark. You ask the waitstaff in restaurants to bring multiple glasses right from the get-go.

You don’t even know what you’re scared of. Since that original incident on the train, nothing like that has ever come close to happening again. And yet, you have become incapable of enjoying even so much as a cookie without having a glass of water in your other hand. You don’t eat much around guests anymore. You weigh less than you did when you graduated high school, yet the BMI charts all say “healthy weight, great job!” based on your height. This does not feel healthy.

You’ve started trying to avoid looking at yourself in the full-length mirror. You don’t feel fit, and you certainly don’t look it either. The only word you can think of to describe yourself is “scrawny.” Scrawny with a dark, thick, leathered welt down the whole center of your abdomen. You’ve attained the chiseled physique of a Roswell Grey.

You run your employer-sponsored health plan through its paces. They stick cameras up your nose and down your throat. Your dentist wants you to start wearing a bite guard due to evidence that you’re grinding your teeth while you sleep. A team of radiologists bombards you with a lifetime’s worth of X-rays to produce a live video of your neck while swallowing. All of the sample material is the consistency of pudding, which you call out as not being the kind of thing that you’ve been having trouble with. They don’t have anything firmer that contains enough barium to show up on the scan, and surprise surprise, the symptom does not occur under these conditions.

The prevailing theory is that, due to the demands of your occupation, you are experiencing acid reflux that is damaging your esophagus. They prescribe a whirlwind tour of unpleasantly large and equally ineffective pills with names like esomeprazole and lansoprazole, names that you feel you shouldn’t need to know at this early stage of your adulthood. No improvement comes.

During a routine checkup, you find yourself interacting with a doctor you’ve never met before. He was a last-minute substitution due to some scheduling issue with your usual doctor. He scans your medical record and remarks:

“Seems like they’ve been running you through the wringer. Tell me about your problem.” You do. He inquires a bit into the nature of your work, and he can plainly tell that it is destroying you from the inside.

“Let’s try something here.” He starts clicking around on his wall-mounted computer. “I’m going to prescribe an antidepressant and an anti-anxiety medication. Start taking those, and let’s follow up in a few weeks.”

You had always been under the impression that such things required the detailed analysis of a psychiatrist or something, maybe with a bunch of questionnaires and electrodes and wires coming out of your head. But no, evidently a regular general practitioner can just do that if they feel the need to.

You ask him to explain his reasoning, even though you’re pretty sure you already understand the gist of it. It’s not that getting punched in the stomach is making you sick. Getting punched in the stomach is causing emotional problems, and those moods and feelings are causing the physical symptoms. You had never even once considered approaching the problem from that angle before. It was like somebody slapped your head and called you a dipshit, in a clinical sort of way.

You fill the prescription and, with the help of a little bit of water, take your medicine.

“Hey Val, um…”

You’ve been taking the pills for a few weeks now and are definitely noticing changes in your behavior. The part of your brain that tells you “Don’t ask that, it’s uncomfortable/inappropriate/weird/impolite…” is still there. Noticeably absent, however, is the part of your brain that heeds those warnings. You continue:

“Have you ever been on antidepressants?”

Val stops typing and glances up at you for a moment, then looks back down.

“Yeah, I used to be. At the old job.”

You are vaguely aware of Val’s work history, although you’ve never gotten into specific details with her. She did graphic design and production for the advertising arm of one of those companies somewhere east of midtown. She never once expressed a fondness for that work or a desire to return to it.

“Most of us were,” she continued. “People can’t survive that environment without help. A bunch of the people behind you are probably on them. Or they oughta be.”

You turn halfway around to look over your shoulder. A larger than usual clump of people has formed behind the turnstiles. Somebody is being a slowpoke finding their badge and that’s clearly irritating a dozen people behind them. You catch yourself staring at the scene, fixated, wanting to watch the show to see how it ultimately plays out, but, nah. You turn back.

“Why’d you stop?” you inquire.

“Didn’t like the side effects,” she said with an expert curtness that you’ve grown to admire. The visitor badge rises from the printer and she peels off the backing. You can tell that this is the absolute limit to her willingness to elaborate on the subject. She has shared very little, but more than enough.

“You know, I don’t think I do either.” You take the badge, fold it in half such that it will never stick to anything again, and stuff it into your pants pocket.

As far as you can remember, you have never felt impatience at this job. The sense of impending dread you’ve experienced during your time spent in the Jackson conference room—now serving as the home for a large stack of flattened cardboard boxes in addition to the growing fleet of damaged gaming chairs—who keeps breaking all these chairs?—has never once been superseded by any other emotion or feeling. Until today, right this minute. Now you’re just impatient. Irritated. Why do you still get here so early? Chris has never once punched you before 9:30. You could probably roll in anytime you want. What an inconsiderate asshole.

“Good morning, good morning!” Whatever. Get it over with.

“Quick question: Has anybody talked to you about Eddie?” Chris asks.

Who in God’s name is Eddie?

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Ah, okay. Well, Eddie has decided to pursue other opportunities. He’ll be leaving us after Friday, and we’re going to do a little sendoff during happy hour.”

You pick up on the hint. You used to come to every happy hour religiously… for a while. After four or five of them, you started attending less reliably. You found it increasingly difficult to come up with ways to pass eight hours of a workday out in the city, especially now that it’s freezing cold most days. You haven’t been to any of them in weeks. If you want to still keep up the appearance of a team player, you’ll probably want to go to this one. And who knows, maybe some of the attendees will be more willing to show an authentic part of themselves for once.

“Sounds great,” you parrot.

Your mind is somewhere else, yet nowhere in particular. Normally you’d be trying to psych yourself up at this time, but this morning you’re just kind of drifting through things. Chris rolls up his right sleeve as he has done a hundred times before. Wait, is it actually one hundred? Or more than that at this point? Let’s see…

Your attention is pulled back to something new and unfamiliar. Chris has started rolling up his left sleeve as well. A large Apple Watch—maybe the largest and most gaudy one they sell, but honestly you never paid much attention to their product line—loosely jingles on its stainless steel band. He doesn’t just slide the sleeve up; this is a careful process of folding the cuff over itself, inches by inches, up the arm. The roll stops once it clears his elbow, resting loosely at the base of his bicep. As he moves his arms your eyes find something even more unexpected: a blackwork tattoo on the outside of his left forearm. It looks like a flower petal, but there’s also a solid bar… That’s a Celtic cross. A large rose. A vine with thorns wrapping around the whole piece.

You’re surprised, or at least your brain has responded with the thought of “that is a surprising thing to be seeing at the present moment.”

“Unfortunately, we’re all going to have to hustle a little bit in the short term to make up for his departure. So it’s not just you, we’re all making sacrifices.” He winds his fist way, way back. This seems, uh… different. You clench your eyes shut.

THWUMP.

Whoa, falling backwards. You step back to catch yourself, it’s not enough. Another step, still not enough. You feel as though you are tumbling end-over-end while the ground shifts beneath your feet. Another step, now your back has made solid contact with the wall. You stop trying to move, appreciating this single moment of stable proprioception. You slide down the wall and come to a rest in the crouched position. You wrap your arms around your legs and just squeeze for all you’re worth.

You’ve managed to get through most of your life without really studying the inside of your eyelids. Like, how could a person do that in the first place? They’re just covers that turn everything black, or in brighter circumstances, a kind of blood red that really ought to be more unsettling than it is. You’ve recently started doing it, or at least attempting to. The longer you stare at the blackness before you, the less black it appears. It’s now a very deep maroon, basically purple, although still not very bright. It’s not a color you often see in the waking world; anything putting off such a darkened hue would look black by comparison. Maybe it’s a color you could find in a darkened room under ultraviolet light, that’s the closest comparison you can conjure up.

On the fringe of this purple field, a ring of greenish yellow emerges. It too is dim but intense, a color that would not be well loved in the real world but which nicely complements the purple here. The yellow ring expands inward, pushing the purple into a shrinking spot that eventually disappears at the center of your field of view. Now a fully yellow scene, a purple ring begins forming at the edges of your periphery and slowly sweeps away the yellow in the same way. Then the yellow ring again, then purple. The cycle repeats for as long as you want it to. It’s soothing, reminding you of a screen saver that no longer has much practical use on modern computer displays. If you bothered to count the rings, maybe you could use their oscillations as a kind of crude stopwatch.

You take a deep breath, open your eyes, and stand up. It is nearly 10:30 now.

“Cheers!”

You really don’t want to be here. This entire evening has been dedicated to listening to people recount completely unrelatable stories about a person you have never seen before. What did Eddie do here? Why does everybody seem so genuinely enamored with this man? How have your paths never crossed in the entire time you’ve been here?

You finish another bottle of Rolling Rock, choosing to temporarily disregard the medical advice to limit alcohol intake while on antidepressants. You figure that, as long as your mouth is busy drinking beer, nobody will expect any thoughts or opinions to come out of it. For the most part, it looks like people have forgotten you are even here.

You slip away from the group for a few minutes and take a meandering stroll around the seventeenth floor. It was dark outside when this happy hour started, and the office looks starkly different in the absence of daylight. All of the conference rooms are dark except for Aikman—you can’t recall a single time when the lights in Aikman had been turned off, occupied or not. You count two other people on the floor, both of whom are working studiously while trying to tune out the noise from the members of the Next Innovation Lab. You continue on to the PlayStation nook. It occurs to you that you’ve never actually seen anybody make use of this area. Does the system work?

You switch on the large television screen and it lights up with a pattern of alternating solid pink and white bars. Several thin horizontal lines appear as well, all intersecting at a large asymmetrical black splotch near the center-left of the screen. You pick up the controller and press a few of the buttons. They collapse under your fingertips, suggesting that none of them work correctly anymore. You flip the controller over and notice that the rear of the case is cracked down the middle, separating from the top. The other controllers are similarly damaged. As are the game discs. Who keeps breaking all this stuff?

You complete your circle around the floor, concluding that you have been here long enough to have ingratiated yourself to this group—at least enough to make it to the next person’s resignation. You pause to take a look out the window. There is now a pelting sleet visible around the streetlights below. You briefly consider staying a bit longer to wait it out, but no.

“Hey, don’t hike through that,” Chris scolds. “Here, call a taxi.” He lifts a stack of papers on his desk with one hand and plucks a business card from the pile with the other. “You can expense it.” You squint to read the phone number. It is the city’s area code, followed by seven identical occurrences of a digit.

You dial the number with some difficulty; you have lost track of exactly how many drinks you’ve finished but it is certainly more than you’ve had in a long time. The dispatcher at the other end identifies themselves as a “luxury car service.” You tell them where you are and where you’re going, and they give you an estimated pickup time a few minutes from now. You wave goodbye to the few people who notice you beginning to bundle up, and you slip into an elevator.

There is only one person at the reception desk at this hour, an elderly man you haven’t seen before. You exchange goodnights. Through the heavy glass doors, made heavier by the howling wind, you find the large Lincoln sedan with its patiently-waiting driver. A total of perhaps fifteen seconds in the pounding elements, and you are inside the warm vehicle.

The back seat of this car is simultaneously luxurious but also kind of shabby. The upholstery is well-worn and every surface that could accumulate scratches from jewelry and attaché cases has done so. It smells strongly like cologne and cigars, and you’re pretty sure a determined person could shake a couple dollars worth of cocaine out of the floor mats.

But here you are, adequately intoxicated, looking through the clouded-up passenger side window at slick roads, reflected lights, trees. A line of slower cars in the right lane falls away as you roll onward. You almost never navigate this part of the city by surface streets, and have no idea where you are in relation to your house. None of the passing road signs are legible through the mist and fog. You sit and continue to stare out the window, at light and shadow, and at nothing in particular.

“Sir?”

You snap awake. The car is parked.

“We’re here.”

You look out the window and see your front yard. The driver reaches down and produces a miniature tablet computer with a credit card reader. He taps the screen a few times and hands it over his shoulder. You take it and review the contents of the screen. This is, by no small margin, the most expensive cab ride you have ever taken. You wince a little, swipe your credit card, and select the middle tip amount of the three suggested.

“You can expense it.”

One of the things that they tell you you’re supposed to do, assuming you’re a responsible adult, is to buy life insurance. You followed that advice a few months into your marriage, and aside from the inconvenience of having to submit the annual premium payment—why doesn’t this company support auto-pay?—you haven’t thought much about it in years. You don’t even remember the specifics about what the policy provides for, should it ever pay out.

You ponder this while looking out the window into the backyard. There’s a good chance that the last occurrence of really bleak winter weather is behind you, and the plants look like they’re ready to spring to life any day now. You follow the tree trunk up to the hollow that you have studied well. Some time in the last week or two, the tail of that dead squirrel finally came detached. Whether this happened through a natural process or if it was assisted by some kind of scavenger, you can’t say for sure. Actually, both of those options are each kind of natural in their way.

In your bedroom closet, in the top drawer of a cheap filing cabinet, a hanging file folder with an orange tab holds some answers. You pull out the cover sheet of the policy and scan it for numbers. Once you locate a calculator, you divide a six-digit number by a two-digit one, yielding a rather unimpressive five-digit quotient. Hm.

You try to retroactively justify why you just did that. There is no sequence of events where that money belongs to you. It’s for the benefit of those who outlive you. Or, in a purely actuarial sense, more probably to benefit a family you’ll never meet in their time of tragedy and unimaginable grief. You hope.

Is this number an independent assessment on your value as a person? Well, no, this was mainly a function of how much you were willing to part with each summer when the insurance premium payment was due. It could’ve been much higher, or much lower. It doesn’t mean anything. What are you trying to achieve here?

You put the sheet back and flip through the other folders in the drawer. You quickly find what you’re after: the pages of material that the pharmacist gave you the first time you filled your prescriptions. Nausea, agitation, aggression, unusually grand ideas, ah, there it is, “new or increased thoughts of death or dying.” Mystery solved, then.

To clear your head, you do something pointless and look Eddie up on LinkedIn. You’ve sort of lived by a rule that you don’t connect with anybody you currently work with, in case something you post or adjust within your profile on that wretched site grabs the attention of somebody in the office. Much like accidentally leaving an updated copy of your résumé in the shared printer’s output tray, that’s how rumors get started. Eddie though, he’s become inert. Nothing you do or say in front of him would likely make it back to your employer, as it’s quite likely that Eddie might never talk to any of the people you work with again. You click “Connect.”

The screen fills with the profile pictures and names of your current coworkers. With a single click, this machine has learned much about you and your social fabric. You sign out without acknowledging a single one of its fresh suggestions.

“There’s no clip? Or lanyard?”

“What, do you think we’re made of money?” Val quips dryly.

It really does feel cheap. The company name, followed by a picture of your face, followed by your name in stark uppercase, followed by the company name again. The printing is fuzzy, looking like something out of a late 90s inkjet in draft quality mode.

You had pretty much given up on reminding anybody that you were never given an ID badge. You’re not sure if Val or anybody on the reception team specifically went to bat for you, but the end result is irrefutable: You have a real badge now, and you can let yourself into the place at will. Never mind the fact that the picture makes you look like a person who had recently been punched in both eyes. You flip it over; the back is solid white.

“Well, I guess this is the end.” As you speak the words, you truly can’t tell if you mean the sentiment that such a phrase would typically convey. The only reason you talked to the receptionists at all is because you needed them to let you into the building. With this badge, that need is gone. But these people—specifically Val, who you have tried to get whenever the dynamics of the visitor line permitted you to—were the only ones in this building who still seemed to retain their humanity. What little you’ve spoken, probably a handful of minutes over the course of months, has contained some of the most cathartic and genuine conversation you’ve had in years.

You do mean it, you decide.

“I’m sure we’ll survive,” she answers. She most likely means it too.

You bring your new badge to your forehead and mime the action of tipping your hat. Val gives a small wave, and you leave for the turnstiles.

You had imagined, once or twice, what it might be like to do this by yourself. To tap your badge, become enveloped in a green glow and have a pair of person-sized frosted glass panes yield to make way for you and you alone. As you draw nearer, the feelings of pride and belonging don’t really come. It’s just a gate, you do this all the time in the subway. The only difference here is that it doesn’t smell so strongly of paint and urine.

You tap your badge. Nothing happens. Is it already damaged? Is somebody playing a trick on you? Are you fired?

Beep. Green. “Car 1.” The glass panes slide into their housings, presenting an unimpeded path to the rest of your day. You make sure to pause and make a mental note of this in case you want to try to feel something about it at some future time. You step forward.

BUZZ. As you pass to the other side, the lights turn red and the gates quickly close. The turnstile has decided, incorrectly in this case, that a tailgater has followed you through the gate without properly identifying themselves. The appropriate response would be one where you briskly walk away so nobody has a chance to figure out which idiot couldn’t use the turnstile properly. You, though, you stop and turn around to look toward the reception desk. Nobody has bothered to look up to see what the problem was. You can’t see Val through the crowd, but you feel like, somehow, she knows you were the one who did that.

THWUMP.

“Oh, by the way,” Chris adds. “I had to reject that expense reimbursement for the car service last week. We can only approve travel if it’s with companies on our approved vendor list, plus you would’ve needed to get the approval upfront in order to expense that much in the first place.”

You tap your credit card to the reader and collect your purchases. They don’t offer shopping bags to those who check out with such a small number of items, and you won’t need one anyway. You step out through the automatic sliding doors into the fresh air. It’s unseasonably warm this afternoon, the first short-sleeve shirt day of the new year.

This has become something of a regular spot for you. It’s the convenience store attached to the gas station down the street from your house. You’ve been refilling your car here for years but had never gone inside prior to a few weeks ago. You’ve developed an afternoon walking routine, with the first stop coinciding with a visit to this store. Each time you pass by, you buy a snack or some kind of on-the-go meal to consume as you walk. Today you are leaving with a one-pound bag of Nacho Cheese Bugles and a “Pepperoni ’n Cheese” Slim Jim. You eat the Slim Jim immediately and discard the wrapper in the parking lot trash bin. The Bugles, you will eat over the course of the next hour as you wander through the streets of the residential neighborhood on this side of the main road.

Remarkably, you do not have a beverage today. After consistently taking the medication you have been prescribed, the swallowing issues have effectively disappeared. You have since learned that you could bring them back, along with the sour feeling in your throat, by ingesting too much caffeine in too short a time. Intentional focused worrying can also make it recur. With that aspect of your life now thoroughly controlled, you have turned into an eating machine. You can clear a plate and go back for a second helping twice as big. You crave random flavors—things you have not eaten in years—and willingly give into those desires. Over the course of the first half of this one-hour walk, you eat the entire bag of Bugles.

Your weight has recently started increasing, although after the deficit you were in you figure you’ve got a ways to go before you need to start disciplining yourself out of this behavior. For the time being, though, this just feels… huh. This just feels blank. What goes in that blank. You roll the empty bag up and slide it into your pants pocket.

You are still pondering this question. You feel as though… you don’t feel. That’s basically the only way to make sense of it.

You have the dumbest epiphany. Antidepressants don’t make you happy. Anti-anxiety pills don’t bring calmness. This cocktail of medications is simply making you not-depressed and not-anxious. They don’t produce the opposite emotions to fill the newly-created void. Or, at least, they haven’t for you. It’s true that you’re not anxious, and that’s had a measurable positive impact on your ability to consume nutrients. And you’re not sad either, which has clearly improved your willingness to… oh.

You almost managed to get all the way through this walk without your thoughts drifting back to your job.

You didn’t tell anyone you had stopped doing it, you just stopped. “Changes in thinking or mood” was going to be your justification if anybody asked. Every thirty days, as instructed, you’d go to the pharmacy and pick up your prescriptions. The copay, five dollars each and every time you go, presumably in place to dissuade people from wasting resources by doing exactly this. You put each bottle on the shelf in the cabinet without ever opening it. You probably should’ve made a note to record exactly when you stopped taking your medication, but oh well.

The first emotion to come back was fear. A very nonspecific, wide fear about nothing you can quite put your finger on. It manifests itself as a persistent unwanted thought whenever you try to concentrate on something. Today, it is the interrupting notion that there is going to be a loud sound. Maybe a shelf is going to fall down, or the smoke detector is going to start blaring, or the kid down the street is going to deliberately make his car backfire, or the entire second floor of this house is going to collapse on you. Expect that sound. Anticipate that sound. Don’t freak out when it happens. It’s going to happen. Just don’t freak out when it happens.

According to WebMD, this is PTSD. Of course, according to WebMD you also have testicular torsion and a mild autism diagnosis.

The other emotions slowly start to come back too, particularly anger. That, combined with despair, forms the building blocks for frustration and before long you are swimming through your old brain chemistry again. Fortunately the dysphagia does not return. You have learned how to eat without overthinking, and that lesson seems to have stuck. You’re not quite as hungry for random junk food anymore, although you do still partake. The Chipotle queso in particular, setting aside the fact that the price strikes you as a total ripoff for what it actually is, brings such immense joy that you want to shoot it straight into your veins.

“So what do you do again?”

“What don’t I do, am I right?” You deflect as best you can, but you’ve never mastered the art of weaseling out of conversations with your in-laws. The joke does not land; a genuine answer is expected here. “Well, it gets complicated.”

You decide in the moment to explain what you did in your previous job, since that at least sounded like an honorable thing for a person to devote their career to. Without directly intending to, you color your words using the emotions that you carry about the current job. You describe a dysfunctional morass of idiots all pulling in different directions while somehow collectively bumbling themselves farther away from anything that could meaningfully improve anybody’s lives. You tell of ignorance, malice, arrogance, avarice, possibly touching on most of the seven deadly sins in a single sentence. As you conclude, he is both stunned and horrified. Perhaps you could’ve phrased it more gently. Oh well, maybe he’ll avoid talking to you for the rest of this dinner.

You rearrange the food on your plate. Meat down here next to the knife, mashed potatoes packed without touching anything else, green beans at the opposite edge. All lined up like a little log raft. You know, WebMD might be onto something with that autism idea.

You’re back to thinking about work again. You’ve learned to compartmentalize a bit, or maybe you’ve just trained yourself to try very hard to avoid all thought of the subject except for when you’re required to. Sometimes that fails, though, like when a family member unwittingly brings up a subject they don’t realize to be touchy.

You start to wonder what you might write down on your résumé to account for the time you’re spending here. You can’t just say you “adopted workflows to increase punch preparedness by 300% while adapting to dynamic business needs” or whatever; there aren’t enough buzzwords in this type of work to get you back to the kind of job you had before. Maybe you could leave it off, call it a sabbatical or something. Perhaps you worked at a startup that failed, or wrote a book that’s not yet published, or contracted for some super-secret entity that you can’t reveal but it was totally using the same tech stack that the job you’re applying to does.

You look up and briefly stare into middle distance. The last time you thought about doing all that, it was clearly time to leave that job.

It would not be inaccurate to say that each day has been worse than the last.

THWUMP.

You have completely driven away any delusion that this is the kind of life that a person should live.

THWUMP.

There is enough money in your savings account to live, albeit miserly, for a few years without working at all.

THWUMP.

Setting aside the paycheck, there is nothing here that you will remotely miss or ever attempt to rekindle to further your future career aspirations.

THWUMP.

You find that you don’t even care what happens anymore. You have transcended sadness and rode that feeling all the way past hopelessness, depression, simple cynicism, and have arrived in a place so utterly devoid of meaning that you have at one point idly considered what might happen if you cut both of Chris’s arms off with a band saw. You conclude that it would probably take much longer than you would prefer, and the whole “slip away under the cover of darkness” thing requires a lot of careful planning and you still don’t have the energy or discipline for that. So, no, not really an option here.

THWUMP.

Friday, May first. The weather has become reliably nice almost every day, and even your worst moods have improved recently—not always by much—but improved a little by spending time outdoors. It’s a bit after 7:00 a.m. and the sun has been up in that cloudless sky for almost two hours. You, along with a hundred or so nearby residents, stand on the raised platform next to the train tracks. It is about five minutes before the next scheduled departure, and this train has a reasonably good track record of being on time.

Soon you will all crowd onto the train, grapple for seats, and wait patiently for the conductor to check each ticket and stick a seat check marker under the clip in front of you. You will ride the train to its terminus, whereupon you will enter a separate transit system that will carry you into the heart of midtown. Day after day this system operates at or near capacity, its systoles carrying life-sustaining nourishment to the vital organs and other viscera that form the city’s economy.

Back while you were doing the old job, you had to endure two instances of the commuter rush every day. Now it’s just this one in the morning. Riding home during the mid-morning hour is cake; frequently you’ll have an entire half of the train car all to yourself.

That’s not what you’re thinking about this morning, however. You can’t quite decide what you’re thinking about. You look past the tracks into the parking lot of the dollar store that abuts the transit system property. At the top of a light pole, a mockingbird delivers a breathlessly complicated series of squawks and chitters. If you had even the slightest bit of experience with bird song, maybe you’d have more of an opinion on the accuracy of its mimicry. Its sounds combine with, and then are drowned out by, the rhythmic striking of a bell. A bit faster than once per second: Ding. Ding. Ding.

From your left, the train approaches the station platform. At this time of day the locomotive is at the rear of the configuration, pushing the cars ahead of it. Where you stand, toward the south end of the platform, the passenger cars roll quietly along. The loudest sound is the squeal and hiss of the air brakes as the train comes to a halt. The mockingbird flies away in response to that particular noise.

Individually, each passenger begins to move toward whichever door stopped closest to their position. A few old pros have long since determined exactly where to stand so they don’t have to move at all. From a distance, a naïve observer might assume that there was some grand choreography to this dance, but no. Everybody is simply following their own path of least resistance.

The doors open and the conductor’s voice scratches through the speakers, saying nothing intelligible or particularly important. Well, almost all the doors open. The door in front of your group has remained closed, and appears to be out of order. The group collectively realizes this and targets the next-nearest door to the left. Your group merges into the existing crowd already at that door, producing a mass of maybe thirty people all trying to board at that position.

A half-step toward the door. Then a pause until more space opens up. Half-step. Pause. You notice that everybody around you has continued in this fashion, but you have not. You’re just standing there. People are walking around you and filling the space you had previously inhabited. You are just a rock in the middle of this flowing stream, a minor obstacle to navigate and, given enough time, erode into silt.

You watch the last person in your group step up onto the train, turn toward the aisle, then leave your view. The doors close a moment later, and the train begins to move. You count the doors that pass by your position—eleven of them, you’re pretty sure. It doesn’t really matter which one anybody picks; they’re all going to the same place. The locomotive passes next, with its engine loud enough to be felt and its diesel exhaust pungent enough to be tasted. The train rounds a curve to the right of where you are standing and fades into a memory.

A handful of people exited that train, and they all made their way down the stairs and past the station building. You are still standing in that spot and you are now the only person still on the platform. What is this? Is this what a nervous breakdown feels like? Is that what’s going on here? What are you going to do? Catch the next train? What’s gonna happen? Does it matter? Have you decided to just stand here all day?

For a moment, yes, you do simply stand there. You begin to look around more freely at the passing traffic, the birds on the station’s roof, the little flowers on the shrubs near the garbage cans, and the bees that are attracted to one or both of those things. You inhale sharply and let the breath back out. You turn to the left and start walking.

The area immediately outside the train station is well known to you. In addition to the dollar store, there is also a pharmacy, a grocery store, a half dozen small restaurants, and a bank branch. You’ve run plenty of errands here over the years. Strangely, though, you’ve rarely had a need to venture north. You are aware of one excellent hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant in that direction, roughly halfway between this station and the next one up the line, but that is the extent of your geographic knowledge of that town and everything beyond it.

You’re walking on the sidewalk of a residential boulevard that runs parallel to the train tracks. Your direction of travel, broadly, is north—“away” from the city. The streets bend and split and rejoin in curious ways, but you make sure to keep the tracks in sight to maintain your heading. One foot in front of the other, carrying nothing but the untucked button-down work shirt on your back.

In this moment, it does not bother you that you don’t know what you’re doing or why you’re doing it.

One of the first things you do before getting far is to set your phone to airplane mode. You have no intention of calling in sick or letting anybody know where you went. If they knew, they would probably try to pull you back from it. No, this is a path to be walked alone. Untethered. Man, stop thinking about that and enjoy the scenery.

Look left, no traffic. Look right, no traffic. You cross against the light.

You’re pretty sure that the train stations up on this part of the line are fairly evenly spaced. You try to mentally replay the list of station names that they prattle over the public address system every day. Best you can recall, there are nine in total. You’ve just passed the second one.

The sun is just a wee bit much. If you had planned for this excursion, maybe you would’ve applied sunscreen or brought a hat along. It’s not insurmountable, and you continue on. You have not even broken a sweat.

You look down at your watch. On a normal day at this time you’d be waiting for Chris to storm through the door into Jackson. Prior to today, you’ve somehow never missed a day. Neither has he. There’s a first time for everything.

Up ahead, something unpleasant: The entrance ramp to a cloverleaf interchange connecting this road to one of the numbered state highways. You’ve made it your life’s mission to never have to drive on this highway, and you’ll be damned if you’re going to try to cross it as a pedestrian. You stop and look around. On the other side of the street is a bus stop with a small printed map of the immediate area. You jaywalk there and inspect it. If you backtrack about three blocks, take a left, continue around the park… Yeah, that seems survivable.

You reverse course, turn, and cross the highway at an underpass. As you crest the hill, a comforting sign rises into view: Burger King. Ah, what the hell. It’s here, and you’re hungry enough for it.

For each chain restaurant that you visit with any kind of frequency, you’ve developed an order that has become your go-to for that establishment. A known amount of food for a known price that will leave you in a predictable state. Even this location in a borough you’ve never been to, with its cracked asphalt parking lot looking sad next to a bustling four-lane highway, could reasonably be expected to get the meal right.

They do, and it satisfies. Maybe it wasn’t the smartest thing you could’ve eaten given the day’s activities, but, well… Nothing you’ve done today was smart. On the way out, you refill your “medium”-size cup—the name is misleading; their medium cups hold damn near a full liter—with Dr Pepper. It’s free, technically.

You take your drink to go and rejoin the sidewalk that would’ve taken you around the outside perimeter of the park. You realize that, as a pedestrian, you can cut across. At the geometric center of this park sits a large duck pond with a series of floating fountains to churn up the water. A ring of benches surrounds it. The area is not exactly deserted, but at quarter to noon on a weekday it makes sense that attendance would be low. You take a seat on one of the benches, a respite that you don’t really require considering you just sat for twenty minutes eating a bacon cheeseburger meal. You close your eyes and listen. From here, you can’t make out the constant hum of the highway. You don’t smell car exhaust or garbage cans. Even the air feels perfectly still.

You examine the inside of your eyelids. You’re met with a full field of moderate-intensity red. There is no purple or yellow, no rings subsuming one another. Nothing moves. Nothing captures your attention. There is nothing in there that needs to be examined further. You open your eyes into a squint to give your pupils time to fully adjust. This is a nice spot. Maybe someday it’d be worth figuring out how to get back to this place.

You notice your right leg has started shaking up and down. You’re getting antsy sitting around. It’s probably time to go. You take a deep swig from your drink, stand up, and continue on your original course.

“What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever done?”

A crushed and dirty plastic bottle sits in the middle of the sidewalk, and you kick it toward a utility pole. You miss. The craziest thing you’ve ever done; where did that thought come from? Ah well, may as well engage with it.

When people ask things like that, they’re looking for juicy yet largely relatable stories of youthful indiscretion. You know, getting real drunk, riding a mechanical bull, getting a dumbass rose–and–Celtic cross tattoo, things that might more appropriately be called “spontaneous” or “free-spirited.” Experiences you could package up in a neat little box, present to the person asking the question, and move on. Skydiving, swimming with great white sharks, having one real good night at a poker table, those sorts of things.

You always had difficulty producing memories like that. You never really engaged in behaviors that fit into the formula that’s expected. If anything, you were more of an instigator or an idea guy. (“Hey, Ryan! Betcha can’t drive all the way through the Taco Bell drive-through in reverse!” The son-of-a-gun actually did it, and he succeeded on the first try. The employees were apparently not paid enough to notice.) It feels somehow inauthentic to share those stories as if they were your own experiences. You’ve always been just a tiny whisper of chaos in somebody else’s ear.

So what is the craziest thing you’ve ever done? You’ve stopped walking to ponder this question.

It’s this. This right here.

Walking all the way out here—who knows how far it’s been but you’ve been at it for almost six hours—is likely the craziest thing you’ve ever done, for some definition of “crazy.” That’s already starting to tread dangerous waters, because it conflates impromptu foolishness with people suffering from genuine mental health disorders. There’s probably some segment of the population for whom those two descriptions overlap nicely, but that’s a damn hard needle to thread.

You ruminate and decide that “crazy” implies something that is more self-destructive than it really needs to be, something which ought to have been recognized as a bad idea by the person or persons involved. But then, there’s some wiggle room. In what way is it really self-destructive to skydive or swim with sharks, assuming of course that you survive the experiences? You suppose that over-reliance on chance is part of the equation as well.

“Crazy” is walking with only a vague sense of direction toward an undefined target, belting out an old Reel Big Fish song in a confident singing voice that you have never once let another living soul hear.

Wait, no. “Crazy” is randomly getting strung along at a job you never wanted and only took because it was there. “Crazy” is taking both hands off the steering wheel in order to just “see what happens.” It’s everything you’ve been doing for the last eight months.

You expected to see a sign or something. Maybe it would have an ornate patch of landscaping around it, and the name of their narcissist governor to round it all out. Apparently they only do that on the interstate highways. When you cross a state line on foot, there’s very little fanfare. Aside from an abrupt change in the composition of the asphalt and the degree of workmanship demonstrated by the adjoining counties in repairing their potholes, very little has actually changed.

Through some series of events in the nineteenth century, the final station on this commuter rail line was built half a mile past the border of a neighboring state. You are now in that state, and will soon reach that station. It is the figurative but also quite literal end of the line. This is the last opportunity you’ll have to conveniently get yourself back home by train.

You’ve come to the conclusion that you’ve done whatever it was you set out to do. You have no idea what you accomplished and you’ve gained nothing tangible from it, but you have done something. You step into the air-conditioned building and buy a one-way ticket to your home station. You study the large map on the wall. In the corner is a scale legend, which helps you estimate that you have walked about fifteen miles to get to this place. It doesn’t really feel like it; you could keep going if you wanted to. You just don’t feel compelled to go any farther than this.

The timetable says that you’ve got about forty minutes here before the next train leaves. It will get you home before 5 p.m. and the ensuing Friday night rush. You find a bench outside in a shady spot and sit down. It feels good to rest your legs. As you slowly allow yourself to be drawn back into your regular thoughts and the responsibilities they represent, a mixture of guilt and apprehension beckons you to wake your phone from airplane mode. You do so, and a number of notifications appear in no particular order. One very specific notification grabs your attention: an email from Chris.

You assume that an unexcused absence—or, call it what it is, you skipped work—would be viewed unfavorably. Maybe he reached out to see if you were still alive. Maybe he took your lack of response as a signal of distress and then proceeded to send the cavalry to come to your aid. Perhaps he simply fired you. These are all fine outcomes, you conclude. You open the email:

gentlemen,

It should be noted at this time that at least two of the people in the To: field of this message are women.

Chris has never once capitalized anything in any written medium. You find his commitment to the style somewhat impressive, given how difficult this is to do in our current era of predictive text and auto-correction. There was a time when you yourself typed everything that way, but the difference is that you were fourteen years old and trying to be “edgy” while writing comments on a fan-run message board about The Simpsons, and he is a supervising manager at a multinational corporation.

due to personal circumstance, i will be ooo today.
reachable on email.
chris

Sent from my iPhone

Well. Seems like maybe you managed to get away with something.

“Real sorry about missing you on Friday,” Chris offers while rushing through the door into Jackson.

He does not know that you are not at all sorry that you did not miss him.

The building’s security logs more than likely keep a record of each time an employee badges in. For all you know this information probably gets analyzed and funneled into the performance review metrics every cycle. But you’re also pretty sure that Chris doesn’t know you ever got a badge in the first place. He remains completely oblivious to the little interlude you took last week.

“No worries,” you say.

“Great. Well, we have to keep up the velocity here, and now we’re behind a day. If you’ve got the bandwidth for it, I’d like to pull a quick recovery here and punch you twice.”

Was that a question? Is he looking for you to sign off on the idea? Do you even have a voice in the matter?

Your non-answer did not matter, as Chris indeed did not ask a question. His sleeves are rolled up. His cable knit sweater, a muted shade of puke, stands in stark contrast to the primal virility pent up in his tensed arm muscles. He winds up. Your eyes are still open. You never really get to see this part.

His fist begins to move forward. Then to your right. It kind of looks like he is going to miss hitting you entirely.

You transfer your full weight to your left foot and begin to lift your right foot. You only now realize that you have just sidestepped Chris’s punch completely. This catches him off guard as well, and he takes an awkward half-step forward to maintain his balance. You both come to rest.

“Did you just dodge that punch?” Chris asks in a tone so surprised and lacking in confidence that it sounded like somebody else asked.

“I, um… I did.”

Chris looks at you for a good long while. He unrolls his sleeves.

“I expected better from you.”

He turns around and exits slowly. There is no empty farewell, no gust of wind, no swinging door. He retreats quietly into the din of regular business on the seventeenth floor. You stand there for a moment, thinking maybe he just wanted to regroup before coming back to really tear into you, but he does not return.

You choose the longer path to the elevators, trying to maintain the greatest possible distance from Chris’s desk. You pass the wall of displays, with their dashboards and graphs. You had never really spent much time studying them to make sense of the various acronyms and business concepts, but you get the distinct impression that the numbers are a lot more… red? Did these graphs always trend downward like that?

The invitation email contained no other context. 9:30 a.m., one-on-one between you and Chris, in the Aikman conference room.

Whatever adjectives you might use to describe Jackson, Aikman is the exact opposite. Glass-walled on three sides with two entrance doors, housing a table so massive that you assume they put it there first and then built the rest of the room around it. The space contains enough Polycom microphones that it is probably sensitive enough to read your thoughts. The single opaque wall supports a display screen too large to fit in anybody’s living room, which is currently showing a clock superimposed over a photograph of a serene lagoon on some Pacific island paradise. The clock reads 9:24, and you’re quite sure of its sub-second accuracy.

In your time here, you’ve seen this room get plenty of use. Usually it’s inhabited by folks who are dressed up a little nicer than the average worker on this floor. Ties and blouses, that kind of look. It’s seldom used by anybody you recognize, instead hosting groups of people who come straight from the elevators and who return back there promptly when the meeting is done. You don’t know how many Aikman-class conference rooms there are in this building, but this one certainly draws a crowd. You, however, have never once set foot in here prior to this morning.

It seems a little silly to have a one-on-one in such a large space, but this is Chris’s show. You are seated in the chair directly next to the head of the table. The head position has a large console to control the display and room lighting, a set of responsibilities you want nothing to do with. To your right are at least nine other chairs, all neatly pushed in against the table. The people from Facilities apparently devote special attention to keeping this room clean and tidy. From your position at the table, you can see clear from the elevators over to the aisle where your team sits.

You see Chris emerge from the elevator before he sees you. Your eyes meet through the glass wall, and you acknowledge each other’s presence. You peek at the clock on the large display. 9:29.

Chris heaves the door open. The room is large enough that you don’t feel this one.

“Good morning,” he says coldly.

He walks around the table as if he is targeting the head seat. Upon reaching that spot, he reaches over the back of the chair and presses a button on the console. In an instant, the glass walls of the room turn a solid milky white. You have never once seen the room in this state—you weren’t even aware that materials science had created a type of glass that could do that. Whatever happens in here, only the two of you are going to see.

Chris pulls back the chair directly opposite you and sits down. The seat at the head of the table remains undisturbed, perhaps reserved for Business Elijah.

“I’m sure I don’t need to explain the reason for this meeting. Frankly, I’m more than a little disappointed in your performance as of late. When we went ahead with your merit boost during the last review cycle, we were rewarding your commitment to going above and beyond and we expected that same level of commitment going forward. It really seems as though you have begun to let the ball drop on multiple fronts here.”

You find it incredibly difficult to maintain eye contact during situations like this, so you focus your gaze on the top of his ear instead. There is, perhaps, six feet of table separating the two of you, so it is hard to see much detail. But you’re pretty sure… Yes, it looks like he’s got some grey on his temple.

“And this goes beyond velocity issues and following through with tasks. This is about how you are perceived by your peers. Whether you realize it or not, you are one of the more senior members of this team and a number of the lower-leveled ICs look up to you and model their attitudes after yours. They can tell when you’re, you know, going through motions, and they pick up on that energy and take it to heart.”

You have since switched to looking at his other ear. That temple has some grey too.

“As it stands right now, we need three punches—at least—to break even here. Along with a serious attitude adjustment. I’m willing to help you work out a plan for how we can move forward and rectify this. And if you need some time to think it over, I can be a little flexible. But you’ve got to let me know where your head is at here.”

You nod, take a slow breath, and glance down at the brutally beige carpet. “No need to wait, I’m ready now.”

“Okay, I’m all ears.” Chris folds his hands and leans forward. You’re staring at those hands now.

“I’m done. I quit.”

Chris unfolds his hands and places them flat on the table. He sits back in his chair again. “Understood. Well I’m sorry to hear that.”

You reach into your pants pocket to try to find your ID badge. It is difficult to do in a seated position. “Yeah, well.” You pull the badge out and toss it onto the table. It lands face-down, slides until it contacts a nearby puck mic, and stops.

“Is this resignation effective immediately?” Chris double-checks.

“Yeah.”

“Alright. We’re really sorry to see you go. It’s been a pleasure and, yeah, we’re done here.” He stands up, presses the button to unfrost the glass wall, and exits. You stand up, carefully roll your chair back to the position where you originally found it, and walk around the table to the opposite door. Surely somebody from Facilities will straighten up the other chair and do something with your badge.

As the elevator doors close, you have a fleeting thought: After all these years of working, throughout all of the different companies and managers, you’ve still never actually been fired. This one seemed close, though.

You thought maybe you’d tell Val about what just happened. But as you near the reception desk, you notice she isn’t there. There are four receptionists you recognize—even though you don’t really know any of them very well—and one new guy working Val’s position. Thinking back, you can’t actually remember the last time you saw her over there. Was it, hmm, maybe three weeks ago? The day of the big rainstorm, where you slipped and almost fell on the marble and she mimed a golf clap.

As you approach the main doors, you briefly look back at this grand lobby that you’ll probably never set foot in again. It’s been a long time since you really paused to take it all in. “Opulent”—in the most negative possible connotation of the word—really is the only way to describe it. And right there, in the middle of the scene and thirty feet in the air, one of the massive overhead lights has burned out. As you step out into the unseasonably high humidity, part of you idly wonders if—in some cosmic way—it was Chris’s punches that had been keeping it lit.

You pull your phone out during the train ride home and notice the warning: “Failed to download new messages, incorrect username or password.” Whatever they lack in new hire orientations, they more than make up for with offboarding.

You spend the next few weeks trying to disentangle your personal life from your former employer. Your first order of business is to get yourself added onto the health insurance plan at your spouse’s job. You were also required to close out your employer-sponsored brokerage account, which holds a zero balance because you did not stay the full twelve months and none of the shares vested.

It turns out that the “generous” 401(k) employer match also has a one-year vesting cliff that you did not notice in the mountain of paperwork they originally gave you, so that balance roughly halves. That match was the only reason why you enrolled in the dumb thing in the first place. You try to log in to initiate a rollover into your personal retirement account, but their website refuses to load on any computer or phone you try. You end up entering your bank account details on a computer at the Apple Store in the mall, seemingly the only place on the planet where HR’s “myWorkBenefitsOnlinePlus!Now” portal actually loads correctly.

In the immediate wake of your departure, you swore that you would have nothing to do with that company or any of the people that worked there ever again. But with the passing of time, that stance has softened a bit. You see no harm in at least adding them as LinkedIn connections. It’s not like they’re going to jump out and drag you back in. Besides, sometimes it’s fun to scroll through lists of people you remember not liking very much and seeing that they’re still stuck in places you remember not liking very much. Kinda like keeping tabs on old ex-crushes and taking pleasure in the knowledge that they settled down with miserable people and went on to live unfulfilling lives. You know, totally normal and healthy things to do and think.

It’s quite easy to locate all of your former teammates. LinkedIn pretty much already knows the social graph; this feels like more of a formality. Jon, Dave, Davey, Lydia, Karan, Stef, JR, and even Chris. Profile after profile, picture after picture, every face grinning like a possum eating shit. You send a connection request to each one now to save you from having to ever think about it again.

The one profile you genuinely want to connect with is the one you can’t seem to find. Val isn’t connected to any of the members of this group, and you realize that you don’t even know what her last name is. If there is a single regret that you will come to carry away from these past nine months or so, this might very well be it.

Today is the first day of the rest of your life. That’s the saying, right? You’re supposed to wake up all fresh and renewed, ready to tackle whatever the world throws at you next. Right? This should be your second wind, your new lease on life, the newfound freedom to chart your own course through this world.

It has hardly ever felt that way in actuality.

It takes a surprisingly long time for your stomach to return to anything approaching “normal.” You saw noticeable improvement in your pain levels in the first few weeks, but the layers of hard callused skin don’t fall away so easily. You haven’t been flexible enough to stand up and touch your toes since you were a little kid, but at least now you no longer feel like you’re suffering from appendicitis when you try.

Your thoughts have slowly started to move on as well. During the initial days after leaving, you would go through phases of anger, sadness, and even moments of embarrassment as you mentally replayed your time at the company. You found that it made a certain amount of sense to handle it the same way a person might handle a bad breakup in a romantic relationship: time, despair-eating, plus a downright eclectic range of music ranging from violently energetic to simply dour. Time, of course, being the most important ingredient. Your need for these other remedies decreases over the course of a few months. The dozen or so bottles of unopened antidepressants and anti-anxiety pills—all expired now—end up in the garbage.

The relative who shared her hopelessly out-of-touch perspective with you over the phone, the two of you had one more afternoon of conversation before she died. She didn’t ask anything about work, you didn’t offer anything about it either. Her funeral was a small and dignified affair, attended by precisely zero of her former work acquaintances.

With the benefits of time and distance, you begin to pick up on patterns that have gone unnoticed for the last ten or fifteen years. The way you felt at this most recent job, it wasn’t all that different from the way you felt at previous places. That sense of not knowing what value your work provided, the inkling that maybe you were getting paid a lot of money to do nothing of any real consequence, while at the same time feeling a very real stress and anxiety that the whole thing was just a hair’s breadth away from collapsing and taking you down with it, all while quietly suffering abuse under people who would happily climb over your still-warm corpse to get slightly closer to their own selfish goals. The stomach cramps at this job were novel, yes, but these emotions have been there ever since you started in the industry.

Was there a single thing you worked on in all that time that objectively made the world better? Is there anything you look back on with pride, something you can point to and say “I did that!” with a real sense of achievement? Is there anything out there that you know for sure the company even bothered to keep using after you moved on? As far as you can tell, every project you worked on got cancelled or shut down or rewritten or who-knows-what-all within a few years. You don’t even know for sure if you moved the needle on any of them.

And let’s not even get started on you. You, who breezily engaged with any recruiter who blew smoke up your ass. You, applying and interviewing for jobs you didn’t want, then saying yes to their offers just because the compensation was higher and it felt like maybe the grass would be greener too. You, who time and time again sat around waiting for the world to tell you what you were supposed to do at every given moment, spelled out in big bright letters. Someday you will have to learn that opportunities never find you like that; historically, only punches do.

At some point you had talked to Doug, and he shared that he was thinking of starting a new company. Your response was that you probably weren’t ready for that. “Too burned out” was the reason you gave, if memory serves. So, smart guy, was that an opportunity missed or a punch dodged?

You keep checking on LinkedIn, which is not something a reasonable person does. You find one particular phenomenon at least slightly humorous: Several of your ex-colleagues who had originally accepted your connection requests have—for whatever reason—unfollowed you, leading them to reappear prominently in the “people you may know” box. Perhaps they view their link to you as some kind of poison, or your influence leaves them susceptible to whatever social virus led to you eschewing Their Way of Life. Maybe you are just permanently blinded by these cataracts of cynicism, but all you see on the site are punches. People throwing them, people receiving them, folks punching themselves, hucksters selling FIST certifications… This is your network. These are supposed to be your feet-in-the-doors, your legs up, your flies on the walls, your allies in the trenches. Scrolling through that feed, though, all you see are dozens of novel ways to get your guts pounded.

“Why not be an arborist?”

You have to give them credit, that’s a heck of a way to begin the opening paragraph of a job posting. Why not be an arborist; it’s a question you can honestly say you’ve never been asked before. You consider the suggestion carefully and reach a conclusion: It’s currently 90 degrees out there and you don’t like heights. You should absolutely not be an arborist.

You close the tab and place the phone back down on the kitchen counter.

A small ember of the idea continues to glow in your mind. Sometimes you romanticize the idea of going into the trades. Building houses, fixing air conditioners, pulling cables to bring up a new assembly line. You wonder what turns your life would’ve taken if you hadn’t tried to aim for this maximally-lazy path of drifting from one slightly-too-cold office to the next. It does seem like people who perform manual labor in physically demanding lines of work end up needing things like lidocaine patches and “pain powder” to a concerning degree, but then again, maybe you should’ve used those last year yourself.

Is it too late for a career change? Do you even want that? You don’t even know.

What you do know is, you can’t do this forever. You can’t live out the rest of your days on your dwindling savings. You can’t keep sitting around doing effectively nothing with this existence you have been given. You can’t continue to pretend that giving it another day is going to magically reveal an answer to these questions.

You escaped. You survived. You collected a couple of amusing stories to tell someday. The hard-won wisdom gained in those moments, although never specifically listed as an element of any compensation package, will likely pay dividends as you continue to observe situations and find patterns during your future journeys. The world remains well-stocked with selfish manipulative liars of all shapes and sizes, and you have become acutely aware of just how prevalent they can be in certain environments. Of course cynicism is not something that a person should strive to build their core identity around, but a small amount of it can serve as a powerful inoculant against the damage that might otherwise be inflicted by those personality types. If you could somehow travel back in time to deliver a warning message to your younger self… you wouldn’t. This all unfolded the way it was supposed to.

You step in front of the bathroom mirror and lift the front of your shirt. You squint a little. Your stomach is fine.

Knowledge, creativity, realism, humor, challenge. You have values. You always knew that you did, but you have only recently rediscovered them.

Ahead of you, a stretch of road that winds through the rest of your life. One foot in front of the other, you embark.