Writings and Reflections

His Last Days at Work

by Lloyd B. Abrams

Every time he dragged himself into the monthly meeting, Richard Samuelson tried to estimate how many he had to suffer through over the years. This one, finally, would be his last.

Month after month, year after year, Richard Samuelson had to sit and listen to the same renunciations, the same blame-placing, the same pleas for excellence and hard work, the same bullshit from a never-ending series of dull-headed mid-level administrators who were more enthusiastic about clawing their way to the top than about bringing meaningful change to an organization that was hungering for improvement.

And so it went, on the first Monday of every month, unless, of course, the first Monday were to fall on a holiday. Then the torture was simply postponed for a week.

If a special event had taken place in one of the worker’s lives – a birth, a graduation, a marriage, a retirement, or a death – a quick mention would be made – a mere asterisk, a hasty addendum to the segment devoted to new business. If a retiree had died, those present would be asked to stand for a moment of silence, interrupted occasionally by isolated tittering. With the rapid turnover of employees, few had ever heard of the deceased, but Richard had been there so long that he had, indeed, remembered most of them. Every time one of their names was mentioned, he wondered where all of his own thirty six years had gone. And now, after years of “loyal service,” it was his time to be acknowledged.

He was asked to step up to the front. As usual, he had been sitting next to the rear exit because it was easier to get the hell out of there once the meeting was over. He had never wanted any fuss made over him. All he wanted to do, all those years, was to show up for work and to be given some slack if he happened to be late, to be able to do the job he was hired to do without undue interference, to be paid adequately and fairly, and, in general, to be treated like a fellow human being. He never thought that that was too much to ask.

As he waded through the crowd to the front of the room, there was no way to avoid the smiling faces that turned towards him. He nodded this way and that, but as he neared the lectern, where the supervisors sat, the faces looked ever more like grotesquely painted masks with duplicitously evil jack-o’-lantern grins.

He stood next to Lawrence Marchand who (1) consulted his notes, (2) cleared his throat and (3) put his arm around Richard’s shoulder. Richard (4) shrugged off the arm, (5) moved to his left, and (6) stood far enough away to make his silent reproach a statement.

Marchand had a perfect-toothed smile on a sun-tanned, skin-conditioned face that looked superimposed, as if it were photo-enhanced or cut-and-pasted. The Armani’d “Call me Larry!” Marchand attempted to show strength of character with his strong grasp when he vigorously shook hands. But it fooled nobody. Marchand began by shouting, “Thirty six years!”

There was a smattering of applause from the 150 employees who wanted to get out of there as badly as Richard. Running through each of their minds was a thread filled with the same dread – the dull agony of being there for so many mind-numbing, mind-fucking years that first killed the spark and then the spirit, taking the body along with it as hostage.

“Let’s hear it for Richard ...” Marchand paused again to check his notes, “Richard Samuels!”

A somewhat louder scatter of applause. Richard turned to Marchand and politely said, “It’s Samuelson. Not Samuels. Samuelson.” Under his breath, he said to himself, “Fuckin’ schmuck.”

“Richard Samuelson.” Marchand glibly passed over his mistake as if it had not mattered. Marchand, the poster boy for vacuous elegance, was standing next to Richard, who was wearing a button-down long-sleeve shirt and jeans over high-end walking shoes. It was laughable that they looked so different.

“Richard started with us way back in the early sixties,” Marchand began, consulting his notes. “A long time ago.” Some of the barely conscious realized the irony – that it was probably when Marchand was in diapers.

Richard tuned out the rest, and thought back to when he first joined the company, fresh out of college. Jobs were easier to get back then. At first, Richard was idealistic and enthusiastic, and full of ideas. He worked alongside similar college-educated men and even some women, but they drudged along, day after day, while criticizing and condemning him for his needless effort and misplaced passion. For them, the job was always so hard, always so much of a chore, but Richard treated his work as a challenge to be surmounted as quickly and as efficiently as possible. He always said that he found simple joy in just doing a good job. Many of his coworkers soon left but there was always a new crop of college graduates ready to take their place.

Richard was in the shower, after an eight-mile run, when a unique way of looking at the organization came to him like a flash. He was so excited and wrapped up in his discovery that he luffa’d his body twice without even realizing.

Richard imagined an organization in which all workers were able to buy into its mission, where they were rewarded for their efforts, not only financially, but emotionally and personally. Where they were not treated as cogs but as people, fellow human beings. This was long before in-terms like “buy into” and “mission” came into vogue.

Richard put his grand vision on paper. He typed and then re-typed his proposal, titling it “Our Ideal Organization.” His wife, newly pregnant, helped with proof-reading and editing. But when he brought it to his immediate supervisor, his response was, “What the hell are you killing yourself for?” and “Why the hell do you even care?” while he tossed the binder back to Richard with a sneer.

But Richard thought that his ideas were so important that he was willing to work his proposal up the chain of command. So he did.

Often, weeks or, one time, months went by before his proposal was returned. Most of the time there was no comment added to the rejection, nor any overt reaction, but he began to perceive an undercurrent, an undercutting, a sense of thinly-veiled threats and vague accusations. Richard made sure to not let his own work suffer, because he began to fear for his job. For Richard, the company’s pay scale was a double-edged sword. His salary rose so quickly at first that it made finding a similar-paying position outside the company almost impossible. By then, the economic recession had hit and he had a growing family to support. He and his wife already had two young children and another on the way.

Marchand droned on, reading verbatim from the prepared speech, originally written by a long-winded subordinate with lifeless writing skills, and pulled out of the “S” drawer, from the hanging file labeled “Speeches, Retirement.” Blank spaces on the often-Xeroxed pages awaited the insertion of a name.

Finally, after waiting for weeks for an appointment, Richard got five minutes alone with the Chief Executive Officer, the head of the corporation. The head muckety-muck sat behind an ornate desk in a corner suite on the top floor. Richard stood before him.

“I’ve read your proposal,” he began. “And it’s interesting. Very interesting.”

A pause.

“You know, I used to think the way you did when I started here. Back then, I still had my hopes and dreams. But I soon began to think otherwise.”

Still standing, Richard put his hands out in a gesture of appeal, of unconscious supplication.

“In fact, your vision of a more human and humane corporation would certainly change the work ethic. Between you and me, it would definitely increase production and give us a higher stake in the marketplace. And, the bottom line, as you probably realize, it would increase profits, as well.”

“But what’s the problem?” Richard got his voice back.

“We have a policy. We no longer accept proposals of this sort. No more visions. No more grand designs. No more ‘epiphanies,’ as you might put it. In the beginning, we would have considered and judged your ideas on their merit and perhaps even adopted them. But no more. We have already considered all there is to consider, and we have written it all down.” There was an abject, solid finality in his voice.

“And, so?”

“There is no ‘so.’” The CEO replied. “But I have decided to place a suggestion box down in the employee’s cafeteria. If you have anything further ...”

Richard turned and walked out of the office, past secretaries who didn’t bother to look up from their magazines, their knitting or their personal check-balancing. Only one of them was actually busy typing.

“So, everyone. Let’s hear it for Richard Samuelson!”

Several workers from Richard’s department stood up and hooted and whistled, hoping to get Richard the standing ovation he deserved, but most of the others clapped desultorily. His embarrassed co-workers slumped back into their seats when Marchand raised his hand for quiet.

Richard began to clear his throat into the microphone but the feedback squealed in protest. It was so appropriate, he thought.

He began again, and said, simply, “Thank you very much,” then nodded. Four words, and, mercifully, that was it. That was all he had ever wanted to hear from others and he decided it was all he was going to say. Richard quickly returned to his seat in the back so he could escape when the meeting ended, and the rest of the Monday meeting went on as scheduled. Marchand was already onto the next agenda item before Richard got to his seat.

Richard had long made it clear that he did not want any big deal made about his retirement, especially a company party in his honor. The tear-offs from previous memos about retirement parties for the revered that Richard always crumpled up and threw away invariably read: “Roast beef / Chicken / Filet of fish – circle one. Print your name in the space provided. Enclose a check payable to ‘The Sunshine Fund.’”

Richard did not want to be present among higher-ups who barely knew him, and co-workers who were coerced into dropping thirty-five bucks so they could plant their asses on metal folding chairs at plywood tables covered with cheap paper tablecloths. He did not want to give pompous, grandiose higher-ups yet another opportunity to make their self-aggrandizing speeches. He did not want to listen to platitudes passed off as accolades, false because they were neither accurate nor heartfelt. He did not want to hear all of those artificial words intoned with utter seriousness but which were as flimsy and as disposable as the white plastic place settings. He wanted no part of any of that.

And he certainly did not want a special luncheon in the employee’s cafeteria even though he spent almost every lunchtime there, holding gin rummy cards in one hand and a whole-wheat sandwich in the other, while adamantly refusing to listen to the ongoing bitching and moaning of those around him. His colleagues were, of course, secretly relieved that they would not be compelled to give up an evening or to chip in for an over-priced shindig, but they still wanted to do something special for Richard.

At the last moment, on the last Friday of his 36th year, he got wind that something was brewing, so he told his friends that he intended to eat lunch in his office by himself. He did not want to go out with a bang, not even with a whimper – he just wanted to go out in peace, with dignity – as he put it, “Just leave me alone, for Chrissakes.”

In his office, he gently picked up each of his personal belongings – the pictures of his children and grandchildren, the photo of Richard and his wife under the waterfall, his CD-radio and music CD’s, his notebooks, his memo pads and his computer disks – and carefully packed them into a cardboard box. A knock on his door took him out of his reverie.

A Chinese man in a white apron stood at the door. “Mr. Samuelson?” he said, with the typical Asian accent.

“Yeah.”

“Here your food,” he said, and handed him a brown paper bag.

“I didn’t order anything.”

“Don’t worry. Already paid for.”

Richard saw his co-workers outside his door, watching, and he knew at once.

He took the bag, nodded and smiled at them, and then closed the door behind him. He cleared a place at his desk and sat down. Steam wafted from the two white cardboard boxes when he opened them. He inhaled deeply and reveled in the aroma.

He remembered how he was so elated, years before, to discover that Chinese food actually had wonderfully subtle spicy flavors that differed greatly from the bland canned chow mein and noodles which he was fed when he was a kid. But at his desk, on his last day of work, as he mulled over 36 years of “what might’ve beens” and swallowed down regrets between bites, the sensually tangy taste of garlic chicken did not entirely mask the aftertaste of resentment and bitterness.

* * * * *

Almost two years have passed. Richard never did drive back to visit anyone at work, despite his almost heartfelt promises to do so. Early on, he made several phone calls to people with whom he was close, but there have been none lately. But he still has work dreams – anxiety dreams about not being prepared, dreams of floundering, in which presentations irreparably fall apart in the middle, and separation dreams about returning to do freelance work, and feeling totally out of synch, out of place, and out of control. His vivid early-morning, self-affirming nightmares are often dreams within dreams. His joy lies in waking up from them, although his heart pounds, his head throbs, and his T-shirt is wet from perspiration.

Before, there was never enough time, but now, Richard has been catching up on his reading. His eclectic tastes range from Singer to Grisham to comic books, from the Times to the “Utne Reader” to ezines on the ’net. And he also writes – short stories, vignettes, and letters to newspapers and politicians. Anger and outrage and deprecation – self- or otherwise – these he has gotten good at.

A friend at work once told him privately that it was senseless to keep on banging his head against the wall erected by a blind, deaf and quite dumb establishment that bowed down and genuflected before the God of the status quo. His advice was much different from the chortling rebukes of others who put Richard down for trying to make a difference. He tried to get Richard to understand that he had a decent job, and to “cool out and go with the flow,” but to make damn sure that after he left each day, he was to go home and have a real life. And to never throw that golden opportunity away.

Richard has taken that advice to heart. He tries to make every day count in some way. No, he doesn’t live each day as if it were his last; Richard laughs that you could die from such foolishness. But he does live a life enriched by diverse interests, a life enriched by children and grandchildren, a life enriched by a stubborn yet lovable Wheaton terrier, and a life enriched by a continually growing, maturing, love for his wife – although she sometimes complains that he drives her crazy.

He wakes up when he wants to, and he doesn’t have to fight traffic every day. He reads the newspaper on the back patio as he sips from his coffee mug. He rides his recumbent bicycle or walks the dog – each, for miles at a time. When they are together, Richard and his wife walk on the boardwalk holding hands and go to an occasional non-mainstream movie or show. And when they get Chinese food from the take-out place, the garlic chicken tastes just right.

Rev 8 / March 17, 2004 .. Rev 9 / March 18, 2019

Up to the beginning of the story
-- Appeared in Grassroot Reflections Number 50, May 2019

Copyright © 2019, Lloyd B. Abrams
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