direction, and shook her head. He may have been shouting. “I’m glad,” she said, her voice like a spatula spreading cream-cheese icing, “for Glynis.”
“Don’t be.”
T hough Handy Randy had expanded into other boroughs, the main office and supply warehouse were still on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope, less than a mile from Windsor Terrace. Since he could walk to work, it wasn’t hard for Jackson to arrive early the following Monday, hoping to ensure that when Shep walked in the wisecracks would keep to a minimum. He deliberately projected a protective air of pent-up explosiveness and impending violence, which under the circumstances came naturally enough. Still, the atmosphere in the office was of barely suppressed hilarity; the accountant, the Web page designer, the dispatcher—everyone down to the receptionist wore expressions as if they were stuffing fists in their mouths to keep from busting out laughing. When Shep did walk in, he didn’t appear to make anything of the fact that the rest of the staff suddenly fell silent, and he glided toward his cubicle with a robotic passivity that seemed familiar; maybe Shep and Carol had something temperamental in common. No matter what life threw at him—“life” was a gentle way of putting it; other people, more like it—Shep absorbed it, like that blithe, look-the-other way shit his family pulled when he paid for his mother’s funeral, from casket to pâté, as if covering all those expenses was like farting and you didn’t mention it in polite company. When Mark, the website guy whom Jackson had put in his place on Friday, asked archly, “What, no suntan?” Shep returned mildly that the weekend had been overcast. He sat at his terminal and checked his email for complaints; Jackson could tell at a glance from across the room that there were plenty.
It was hot. Jackson had learned to wear short sleeves in the winter months, or he’d have come home drenched. Pogatchnik kept the heatcranked up full blast, if only to irritate Shep, who deplored the waste. According to their dickhead boss, waste was the point: a business that kept its premises tropical in January and arctic in August encouraged customers to feel confident that the enterprise was thriving. It was a sign of prosperity, just as fat used to be a badge of affluence: once you could afford to overeat; now you could afford to overheat. Shep had countered that he couldn’t understand why any red-blooded creature would be comfortable at eighty-five degrees in one season and fifty-five in another, but every position Shep ever took with Pogatchnik backfired, and the last time Shep had politely requested that they lower the thermostat the setting went up another two degrees. For that matter, just about every innovation Pogatchnik had installed was specifically tailored to goad Shep Knacker, down to the special seminar on “Getting Along with Difficult Co-Workers,” when Pogatchnik himself was the difficult co-worker.
Their boss finally deigned to shamble in at 11:00 a.m. He headed straight to Shep’s cubicle. “Seems like you owe me an apology, Knacker.”
“Yes, I do,” Shep said stonily.
“So?”
“I apologize.”
Pogatchnik continued to loom over Shep’s desk, as if wanting something more.
“I humbly apologize,” Shep provided. “I may have had a bad day.”
“Just because you used to own this outfit when it was an itty-bitty local operation doesn’t give you special rights. I’ll cut you slack this time, but any other employee I’d have shown the door. In fact, since you are any other employee—”
“I appreciate the second chance. I never expect special consideration. It won’t happen again.”
Listening to this grotesque public shit-eating from twenty feet, Jackson had a good grasp of why employees were arriving at work with canvas bags full of automatics all across the nation. The “itty-bitty local operation” was particularly hard to take. Shep had sold Knack of All
“Don’t be.”
T hough Handy Randy had expanded into other boroughs, the main office and supply warehouse were still on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope, less than a mile from Windsor Terrace. Since he could walk to work, it wasn’t hard for Jackson to arrive early the following Monday, hoping to ensure that when Shep walked in the wisecracks would keep to a minimum. He deliberately projected a protective air of pent-up explosiveness and impending violence, which under the circumstances came naturally enough. Still, the atmosphere in the office was of barely suppressed hilarity; the accountant, the Web page designer, the dispatcher—everyone down to the receptionist wore expressions as if they were stuffing fists in their mouths to keep from busting out laughing. When Shep did walk in, he didn’t appear to make anything of the fact that the rest of the staff suddenly fell silent, and he glided toward his cubicle with a robotic passivity that seemed familiar; maybe Shep and Carol had something temperamental in common. No matter what life threw at him—“life” was a gentle way of putting it; other people, more like it—Shep absorbed it, like that blithe, look-the-other way shit his family pulled when he paid for his mother’s funeral, from casket to pâté, as if covering all those expenses was like farting and you didn’t mention it in polite company. When Mark, the website guy whom Jackson had put in his place on Friday, asked archly, “What, no suntan?” Shep returned mildly that the weekend had been overcast. He sat at his terminal and checked his email for complaints; Jackson could tell at a glance from across the room that there were plenty.
It was hot. Jackson had learned to wear short sleeves in the winter months, or he’d have come home drenched. Pogatchnik kept the heatcranked up full blast, if only to irritate Shep, who deplored the waste. According to their dickhead boss, waste was the point: a business that kept its premises tropical in January and arctic in August encouraged customers to feel confident that the enterprise was thriving. It was a sign of prosperity, just as fat used to be a badge of affluence: once you could afford to overeat; now you could afford to overheat. Shep had countered that he couldn’t understand why any red-blooded creature would be comfortable at eighty-five degrees in one season and fifty-five in another, but every position Shep ever took with Pogatchnik backfired, and the last time Shep had politely requested that they lower the thermostat the setting went up another two degrees. For that matter, just about every innovation Pogatchnik had installed was specifically tailored to goad Shep Knacker, down to the special seminar on “Getting Along with Difficult Co-Workers,” when Pogatchnik himself was the difficult co-worker.
Their boss finally deigned to shamble in at 11:00 a.m. He headed straight to Shep’s cubicle. “Seems like you owe me an apology, Knacker.”
“Yes, I do,” Shep said stonily.
“So?”
“I apologize.”
Pogatchnik continued to loom over Shep’s desk, as if wanting something more.
“I humbly apologize,” Shep provided. “I may have had a bad day.”
“Just because you used to own this outfit when it was an itty-bitty local operation doesn’t give you special rights. I’ll cut you slack this time, but any other employee I’d have shown the door. In fact, since you are any other employee—”
“I appreciate the second chance. I never expect special consideration. It won’t happen again.”
Listening to this grotesque public shit-eating from twenty feet, Jackson had a good grasp of why employees were arriving at work with canvas bags full of automatics all across the nation. The “itty-bitty local operation” was particularly hard to take. Shep had sold Knack of All
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