now I remember,” I say. “The vapid, immature guy.”
“I got the feeling you weren’t very nice to him.”
“I didn’t ask for the interview.”
“You have to tell me how, at some point, you are going to support yourself.”
“Right now I’m using a Sealy Posturepedic.”
“Carrie.”
“I saw Dr. Petrov this morning.”
This seems to cheer him up. “Okay. And what did he say?”
“He wants me to do some kind of socialization experiment. Go on a date. Join a club.”
“And what did you say?”
“I said I’ll try.”
“That’s what I like to hear.”
“You know, you owe me,” I say.
“Why?”
“You know why.”
Silence.
He knows I mean the Big Lie.
“I know,” he says.
“Good.”
“Well, if there was a job you might be interested in, what would it be?”
“Something where I can use my intelligence,” I say. “Something where the hours aren’t ridiculous. Something where I can sleep while others are awake and be awake while others are asleep. Something where people aren’t condescending….”
“Yes….”
“Something I don’t hate.”
Chapter Two
“You ever been here before?”
“No.”
The woman behind the desk peers at me through small round glasses. I don’t know what her problem is. Everyone in this office has, at some point, never been there before.
She gives me three forms to fill out, including a W-4 and a confidentiality pledge, and this wastes twenty minutes. If only the rest of the job is like this.
She hands me two hulking toothpaste-white stacks of paper. “The lawyers need you to compare them word for word,” she says. “A full read. It could take a few hours.”
Dad has gotten me work legal proofreading, which he says pays well and can be sporadic. I can work night or day. I’m smarter than ninety-nine percent of lawyers, so it should be easy.
I reach my cubicle, which has a drawerless desk. This is even lower in the office furniture hierarchy than a drafting table. Behind me, an old guy in squarish glasses is reading two documents, his eyes swinging from one to the other.
He looks a little too old for me to consider him for a possible date. But who knows? He’s bald and unthreatening-looking. Maybe I can figure out how to flirt with him enough to lure him to dinner, and then I’ll be satisfying Petrov’s requirement. That would leave me with three requirements to go.
I look over my desk. It’s rife with supplies. Someone has taken a long piece of yellow legal paper and colored in every other stripe with a red Flair pen, and then completely filled in the remaining stripes with Wite-Out. And that person has also drawn a box in the left-hand corner with blue ink. It’s some sort of flag. It must have taken a good half hour to do.
A supervisor comes in to further explain my task. The first document I have to look at is an original. The second document is a version they got by scanning in the first one and printing it out. But sometimes, when they scan documents in, the new copies that they print out accidentally have extra commas or extra letters in them, due to dirt on the scanner, marks on the original document, or something else.
So my job is to compare the original and the printout word for word, making sure they’re exactly the same. I am supposed to do this for 210 pages.
It seems like there must be a faster way to do this sort of labor in this era of technological advances. No wonder lawyers charge $400 an hour. They’re paying proofreaders to sit and play Concentration.
I lean back in the hard chair and close my eyes. Within a minute, I have my answer. But I can’t use my easier system until Oldie behind me goes to get coffee. Which, I soon find out, he does every ten minutes. And it takes him ten minutes to do it. My father thinks I don’t want to work, but the truth is, no one else is really working. It’s all a big sham. No one says anything about it because they’re doing it, too. If all of the BS-ing was automatically extracted from the American workday, the American workday would last three hours. There are still tons of secrets in the world to which I am only just becoming privy.
While Oldie is gone, I take the top page of my original, put it in front of the top page of the new copy, and hold them both up to the light. They match exactly: not a line, word or dot out of place. So these pages are fine. I put them both down and move on to the next pair. I hold them up to the light, and there’s not a stray line, streak or speck. This probably takes two percent of the time it would take to read the whole thing.
When I finish, I leave the document a third of the way open on my desk so it looks like I’m in the process.
I use my extra time to think about a lot of things.
I think about why, if the highest speed limit anywhere in the U.S. is seventy-five, they sell cars that can go up to one hundred fifty.
I think about whether the liquid inside a coconut should be called “milk” or “juice.”
I think about why there are Penn Stations in New York and Maryland but not in Pennsylvania.
I think about Michel Foucault’s views of the panoptic modality of power, and whether they’re comprehensive enough and ever could be.
Behind me, Oldie picks up the phone and taps at the buttons. He asks for someone named Edna. On the one percent chance this won’t be completely boring, I eavesdrop.
“Oh, I know what I wanted to tell you,” he says. “I called Jackie this morning, but she wasn’t there, but Raymond was. So Raymond tells me he’s home because he has all this sick leave saved up, you know, because teachers are allowed to accumulate their sick days, and so this is the third Friday in a row he’s taken off from school, and he was getting ready to go over to the Poconos to ski. He was practically bragging about it. And I say to him, ‘Raymond, that’s lying. Sick days are if you’re sick.’ Yeah, he’s cheating the kids. I know. I know. So he backs off and says, ‘Well, I only do it once in a while.’ And I say, ‘Raymond, excuse me, but you just said you did it three Fridays in a row, so don’t back off now.’ Do you know why our daughter married someone like that? He’s amazing, bragging like that. Amazing. I know. I said to him, ‘Work ethics like yours are why America’s going to pot. Because everyone tries to get away with everything.’”
Eventually, the guy hangs up.
I
