Generation A by Douglas Coupland Page B

sting.”
    Of course I knew about Zack. Everyone on earth did. “Yeah, but Zack was allergic,” I said. “Look, my father was a vet, so I grew up hyper-aware of mad cow and bird flu and all that. I’m aware of invisible cooties that jump species.”
    “I really can’t say anything more.”
    “Gotcha, you lying cunthead with badly dyed roots.” Pardon my Tourette’s.
    Of the five Wonka children, I was the only one who knew from the start that we weren’t just random stings. Though Harj figured it out pretty quickly, too, and then his insights dwarfed my own.

HARJ
    A bee! A bee! You can’t imagine what a thrill it gave me to see one. I remember as a child seeing them swarm the jacaranda trees in the harbour or flitter amid the plumerias beside the post office under the high noon sun. An early teacher, Mrs. Ames from Connecticut, a bored UNESCO housewife, had taught us in detail about bees, training us to think of them as friends, not enemies—a smart decision, I think. One could say the same thing about worms. Unless we are taught from an early age to like and love them, they are rather disgusting things to cope with when encountered. For that matter, a plate of Bolognese spaghetti might be a terrifying thing to encounter for the first time. I could make a list of other such examples, but I will not.
    Nobody in the call centre witnessed my bee stinging me. I looked at it, and it was like seeing a long-lost friend—the happiness it brought me!
    I quite forgot young Leslie from the New York Times on the other end of the line. She probably interpreted my silence as artistic temperament, but she finally asked, “Werner? Werner, are you there?”
    I told her that my name wasn’t actually Werner, it was Harj, and that I was sorry I had led her on, and that I was actually working in an Abercrombie & Fitch call centre in Trincomalee, the capital of Sri Lanka.
    “Don’t dick with me. I’m on deadline.”
    “I just told you the truth. If you like, give me some words and I will write them on a piece of paper and then photograph them for you, and in the background you can see my hateful boss, Hemesh, as well as the guava bins at the far end of the warehouse.”
    For whatever reason, she gave me the words EASY-BAKE OVEN . I wrote this and then held them up to the camera. The resulting photograph had Hemesh’s morbidly obese posterior neatly positioned to the right. I also sent her a photo of myself making a peace sign, and then said to her, “Do you want to know something far more interesting than this?”
    “This would be hard to top, Harj.”
    I photographed my bee on the desktop and sent the image to her. “This thing just stung me. You heard me say ouch.”
    “Nice try.”
    “I am not speaking in jest. Let me zoom in on it.” This was a chance to exploit my cellphone’s micro-zoom lens, which could turn an area the size of my pinkie fingernail into a 200-meg file. I photographed the bee atop the piece of paper that said EASY-BAKE OVEN and sent the file.
    Leslie paused, then said, “You’re kidding.”
    “No, I am not.”
    “Huh.”
    Hemesh looked in my direction and, hateful boss that he is, was able to intuit that I was not doing productive work for the Abercrombie & Fitch Corporation. He yelled something at me, and I told young Leslie that I had to go. I said, “Thank you for expressing interest in our winter collection, and please shop again in the future with Abercrombie & Fitch.”
    Hemesh gave me the evil eye. “Was that a personal call?”
    “No. That was a difficult customer from New York City.”
    “You’re on Midwest duty. How did that call get through to you?”
    “Ask the IT department. I sit here, I answer the phone and I sell our fine array of merchandise.”
    “I’m watching you, Harj. I don’t care how much slang you teach everybody else. If any co-worker starts to slack, then pfft , there goes my bonus bottle of Johnny Walker Red.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    And so I returned to work,