Nine to Five

This is an essay I wrote a few years ago for high school. I’ve got a bunch of ‘em sitting on my computer but they’re either too crap or too personal to post, however this one isn’t as awful as I remember so I thought I’d share it with you all! Reading back over it, there’s a lot I would change… Other than formatting, however, I have not altered it in any way. Be kind; I was only 15 when I wrote it.

Bob sits at his computer everyday doing…well, nothing. He has your typical nine-to-five existence; each morning he wakes up at seven a.m. and gets ready. At seven forty-five he eats breakfast, then gets in his car and starts the long drive through traffic to work. At eight fifty-eight he sits down in his chair, boots up his computer and starts to work. At five p.m. he leaves the office and sets off home, arriving at his apartment at six thirty-two. After dinner he checks his email (none), checks his answering machine for messages (none) and then watches television for two hours before going to bed at ten fifteen precisely. The next day, the routine begins again.

He started working for Megatech twelve years ago, expecting great things. He was quite young then, and full of hopes. Megatech was hiring graduates fresh out of college, advertising positions with promises of ‘exciting new opportunities’. A decade later and Bob knows that this was just a sales pitch. Even now he isn’t sure what it is Megatech does. All his work consists of is entering a list of numbers and names into the computer, shredding various documents and occasionally calling up clients to ask if they would like to avail of the latest offers. He assumes it is a service of some sort, perhaps in technology, yet he is no closer to guessing. Sometimes he makes a game of it, while he sits in the cafeteria at lunchtime. ‘Maybe it’s shipping,’ he thinks, as he chews his turkey sandwich. ‘Or medical manufacture!’ The mystery sustains him. If he didn’t have that, he’d probably quit.

There are some days when Bob pines for the past. Back in 1995, in his final year of college, he had been so fresh and hopeful. He had been seeing Marnie, a girl from his history class, for the past few months and the two had grown very close. He was happy then. Sure, he was broke, had a crummy apartment and couldn’t afford to take Marnie out to dinner. But money didn’t equal happiness. He started to realise, though, that you just couldn’t get by in life without cash. So when he graduated he took the best job he could find—at Megatech.

At first, the money was a godsend. Not long after starting work, Bob proposed to Marnie, and Marnie said yes. They moved to a nice house in the suburbs, got a dog. Made plans to accommodate two-point-three children. However, one day Bob came home to find Marnie was not in the house. When he went upstairs, he found that all of her clothes had been taken from the closet and her wedding ring lay on the bed, along with a note. Marnie had left Bob. For his brother Joe.

Eventually Bob got over the heartbreak. He had always been jealous of Joe—he was the strong, rich, athletic one, the jock in high school, the Casanova. Really, this wasn’t much of a surprise. Often when Bob had invited Joe over to watch the game, he had caught Marnie eyeing his brother up. They were twins, but boy were they different. Bob had been lucky getting Marnie in the first place. It was a wonder she even stuck with him as long as she had.

After the divorce, Bob became a recluse. Slowly he closed in on himself until the only people he ever made contact with were his work colleagues. After a while he severed all ties with them, too. No one made much of an effort to stop him. Mostly he just faded into the background, so it was as though he had never been there. Christmas parties and work functions went by each year, Bob staying at home of course. Now, if you ask anyone if they know a man by the name ‘Bob Johnson’, they’ll reply ‘that’s the guy from inventory, right?’ Then they’ll correct themselves and say ‘no, that’s Bob Jackson’. Needless to say, Bob’s like wallpaper. Faded, peeling, beige wallpaper, which no-one even notices.

Today Bob has something to be excited about. Every month his floor manager selects one of the employees who have performed particularly well to win employee of the month. This time around, Bob thinks he might be lucky. Although he still doesn’t know exactly what it is Megatech does, or what his job entails, he thinks he has worked very diligently. As he sits in his desk, listening to Cole the charismatic manager speak, he twiddles his thumbs and tries to suppress his excitement.

As Cole looks around, smiling his flashy smile, he is sickened by the faces of the grunts—his inferiors. He knows that by this time next year he’ll have been promoted, perhaps even to one of the uppermost echelons of command, and he won’t have to see these plebeians again.

Still, for now he has to be sociable, and so he refreshes his affixed smile (it was turning into a grimace), and glances down at the page in his hands. ‘I won’t keep you long, you have jobs to get back to!’ he jokes, and everybody guffaws as though he’s Bill Hicks. ‘The employee we have decided to reward this month is one of our oldest and most hard-working personnel. He’s been here for a little over a decade, biding his time for recognition. Ladies and gentlemen, it is my—and Megatech’s—pleasure to present you with employee of the month for July, Eric Kelly.’

There is a smattering of applause while Eric goes up to accept the champagne bottle and commemorative plaque.

Bob knows Eric—the two have been working in neighbouring cubicles for a number of years. At one point they were friends. Bob was even there when Eric got so desperately depressed with his dead-end job that he threatened to kill himself by jumping off the top of the Megatech building, all forty-eight floors above the traffic-filled street. Bob, being the helpful, happy (and then married) Samaritan that he was, managed to convince Eric that his life was worth living. Now, as he watches that inept, half-wit, snivelling sycophant shake hands with Cole and smile at his fellow employees, Bob can’t help but wish he had pushed Eric off the roof himself, all those years ago.

Once everyone is seated, hurrying back to work as ordered by a disgruntled Cole, Bob resumes his routine stare at the computer screen. At five p.m. he will leave the office and walk the stairs up to the forty-eighth floor.

Hopefully when he gets there, there will be someone ready to talk him down.

~ by Rowan on 24 August, 2009.