When it Ends - Gia Kornfeld

Temporary Hire

 

“Are you also a new temp hire?”

 

My stiff neck cracks a bit when I turn my head to see who has entered the breakroom. The sounds of my joints and neck releasing tension are in an upward intonation, a soft, confused cry. It asks a question without words. Why are you talking to me? Talking in the breakroom, which has become a sort-of safe haven. The carpet of pale navy lumps and dry beige walls are simply an extension of the suffocating cubicle purgatory, but a private escape nonetheless. All private until it is disrupted.

 

“No, I’ve been working here since 2020,” I set the coffee pot back in its home base. “Kind of on and off.” I’m unable to mask my anxiety about the conversation, my only interaction without a trained script or answer written in my notes.

 

The person engaging me in conversation is the actual new temp. Taller than me. 18 years old, newly graduated from the program we are working for. A homeschooled kid. Their mother must be active in the Homeschool parent Facebook group and had thought of this job as a perfect opportunity to shove their daughter out of the nest. The girl’s narrow shoulders drape a loosely fitted black graphic tee in order to soft launch the Sonic the Hedgehog snapback that tucks in her mousy brown hair. I always glance at the snapback, I didn’t know her name but I knew the hat. I also stare in disdain, are they lowering the dress code standard to keep the temp workers longer?

 

“Oh. I guess I didn’t notice. I’m new,” the temp chuckles at the lull in conversation already. I half nod, and slowly grab the creamer from the fridge. 

 

I mentally note over and over the correct response to everything. Laugh at the stories of coworker’s weekends, even if their humor is offensive and outdated. Let them entertain the concept of you being much younger than them, let them baby you. Act not in a rush when spoken to in the breakroom, but don’t pause fully to engage in the conversation. You are a machine after all, both for the company and for the satisfaction of workspace etiquette. Pretend you have ties to all of it, even if it’s looped with a single knot.

 

My smile, to my best ability, is strained. “Yeah. I don’t talk much.”

 

Distant

 

In October 2020, just two months after starting this job, I was thrown back into my bedroom with a laptop and a dated work cell phone that was 2 inches thick and had a blaring bird ringtone. I was eager to find a new home in a cubicle during my college gap year, but my cubicle ended up being my own light blue walls, decaying wood windowsill, cheap fairy lights and K-pop posters.

 

I initially saw it as a relief. Wearing masks at the desk, sanitizing every surface twice a day, by the end of it no one even saw the benefits of still working in person. At home, I had freedom to wear no mask, no pants, and especially was not required to socialize. Everyone became unavailable. Phone call? The wifi isn’t strong enough to hear sentences free of technological stutters and cuts. Meeting? Well, we can’t know if everyone will be there. Who was off today, again?

My unavailability, my exclusivity, it matched my fate at this job. I wasn’t staying for long. A few months of data entry and phone calls and I would be off to college with a few paychecks. Does connection matter at a job if you know you are saying goodbye anyway? 

 

I thought this way until I had seven months of waking up, hopping out of bed, sitting at my desk 3 feet away from bed, then clocking out 8 hours later and hopping back into bed. I felt an insane urge to be held socially accountable. My partner would come home from work and see me alone, curled up in bed with a new bullet point list of homeschool budgeting cases to stress about. It was just me and the numbers.

 

Across the hallway was my younger brother. Just graduated from middle school, now a trial dummy for high school shaky virtual procedure. He would go on later to be legitimately homeschooled. Diagnosed with epilepsy as a young child, he struggled to follow the routine of public school. He had frequent absence seizures, invisible resets of the brain every few moments. He had no comfort being forced into social interaction with this condition resting behind his eyelids. 

 

I had never understood the reason for homeschooling until I worked with it, when remote Alaska families became my email pen pals. The students are robbed of extensive social interaction from public school, but in exchange is a bounty of comfort and freedom. The negative stereotype of homeschooled kids lacking social skills was funny until I became the isolated orchestrator of homeschool curriculum, until I found that my brother struggled to have a social life anyway. We were on opposite ends of the process yet were lonely and distant all the same.

 

I never thought I would, but I wished for a routine that would let me leave my room, that let me have awkward small talk with people who passed my cubicle. Here, there was not a soul that would bother me, and I hated that.

 

Birthday

 

In September, weeks before the office was sent into Work-From-Home cabin fever, we celebrated my birthday. I figured there was no point in taking the day off when no one wanted to risk getting sick. When I had escaped into the breakroom for the first time that morning, I was greeted by a birthday cake. Molly, the kind older woman with a cubicle to my left walks in behind me with a grin, her eyes forming crescent moons behind her thick frame glasses. She is a few heads shorter than me, about my grandma’s height. She always walks through the office with a purpose, arms swinging out and taking steps larger than her body can handle sometimes. I flick a glance in her direction with my rehearsed smile.

 

“Happy birthday! Did you see the card on your desk yet? Oh, and we’ll cut up the cake later…” She bounces around the breakroom in her cubicle slippers, often getting a rush of festive adrenaline during birthdays or small reasons to celebrate. She knows everyone’s birthdays, their favorite type of cake, their favorite drink and snack and color. No matter how long they stayed. This was her freedom in the confinement of work. 

 

I had another coworker tell me that they had forgotten Molly’s birthday one year. When she came in to work that morning and reminded everyone, panic spread over everyone’s faces. How could everyone forget the birthday planner’s birthday? When I heard this story, moments flashed before my eyes of disengaged stares from others. Moments when I had cared genuinely about connection and was met with glazed over eyes. For a moment, I became Molly. They celebrated her birthday for a week straight that year. When it is mentioned in front of her she smiles and looks down, and I see her fall into a sacrificial role.

 

“Thank you Molly,” I smile down at the coffee machine. “I thought I just wouldn’t celebrate my birthday this year.”

 

She pauses in the doorway. Her brows furrowed playfully, and her hands found her hips. “You were really going to go today without celebrating with us?” I shrug and laugh shyly. “I forgot I could do that.”