Zach Zwyrn worked as a software developer in the collections department of a large financial institution. Among his duties was attending a weekly status meeting each Tuesday at 1 pm. It was scheduled to last for one hour.
Sixty minutes only. That was the rule.
After that time had passed, the meeting would come to a close. Whoever was speaking would be cut off mid sentence and given a halfhearted apology followed by an unreliable promise to take the matter up again the next time they got together.
The person running these meetings, Sheree Curtis (known to all to behind her back as "She-Ra Kotex"), was scheduled to report to her bosses directly afterward. Zach was pretty sure that part of her report was making recommendations whom to fire. Judging from the turnover of his coworkers, there seemed to be some sort of quota, or perhaps a bounty, involved.
They didn't meet in the traditional sense where a bunch of people all sat in the same room. This would have been impossible because those involved worked in offices all over the country. Instead, they all called into a conference line and start up the NetMeeting app on their Windows computers. The coordinator and taskmistress She-Ra Kotex would then share her desktop and the rest would dutifully follow along.
Zach had never actually met her in person. From what he'd gathered, she worked out of the office in Dallas, Texas, or perhaps it was Bangor, Maine. She never volunteered that information. Perhaps she believed that if she could not be pointed to on a map, her minions might believe she existed everywhere at once, like Jesus or Santa Claus.
The only picture of her he'd ever seen was in an online employee newsletter from last year. The caption underneath the photograph said that it was taken during a three-legged race during a team-building picnic near the corporate headquarters in Des Moines. The picture itself was a close-up of her face and it was a fearsome sight indeed. She might be considered quite attractive under different circumstances, without the clenched teeth, film of sweat on her face. and saliva foaming in the corners of her mouth. To be fair, there was only enough saliva to demonstrate her level of determination rather than enough to be truly disgusting. Her eyes were cast to the right, glaring with disappointment and contempt at the unlucky soul whose knee was tied to hers.
Week to week, Zach knew her only by the sound of her voice, which was as hard for him to pinpoint as the location where she worked. At its core there seemed to be something southern and rural, just a whiff of cross-burner twang. Whatever its humble origin, her voice had long since been buffed to a high sheen by a tony boarding school followed by the sort of liberal-arts college famed for its neo-Stalinist speech codes and astronomical tuition.
During the meetings, She-Ra stressed an orderly progression. So without deviation, the team would make their report in alphabetical order. It was once suggested that the meetings might be more productive if the agenda were organized on what parts of the project were relevant to each other instead. This caused She-Ra to spend no less than half the meeting making sure that everybody was well aware that the project had already been fully documented and that it was the responsibility of all to be knowledgeable on the interoperability of all its components. She then thanked the suggester for his input and added that if he wished to lead meetings, she could arrange it so he would have the free time to find a job where he could do just that.
As the members of the team made their reports, She-Ra would demo the code on her shared desktop for the rest to see. If you had no progress to report or (heaven help you) embarrassed her by having her click on something you wrote that caused her system to crash, she would take no less than 15 minutes to make you feel ashamed for wasting everyone's time. You would also be likely to be without a job within 24 hours.
Everyone was expected to make demonstrable progress every week. Therefore each meeting would start at the top of the alphabetical list rather than pick up where we left off the week before. With the hour hard limit in place, we seldom heard from anyone whose name started after the letter "L." Never once was anyone called upon from the letter "P" or beyond.
Zach Zwyrn used to hate his name. All his life he was getting picked last for everything, last to be called when the teacher was taking attendance, last to receive whatever freebie was being handed out when they wanted to make sure that everybody only got one apiece. It was as if the life enjoyed by someone named Adams or Baker would go stale before Zach's turn came to live it. Things were different now. With She-Ra Kotex as a boss, he was in no hurry to have his name get called for anything.
Back in the early days of the project, Zach actually worked hard ensure that his code was tested, checked in, and ready for demo. At the start of each meeting, he would chomp at the bit eager for his chance to shine. The hour would pass and the meeting would adjourn. Week after week, it was the same deal. He began to take it personally. This was just one more injustice that came from being given a name at the ass end of alphabetical order.
Then one week he decided to rebel. He deliberately failed to check in his latest code changes before the meeting. If by some miracle they went through in the allotted time and Zach's name got called, he figured She-Ra would just have to make do with the report he was going to give last week, or any other week when he was ready but never given his turn.
Zach's resolve held firm until dialing into the conference line and hearing She-Ra's voice. She was in a bad mood, even for her.
"I have spoken with upper management and they are not happy," she said. "They feel, and I agree, that the project has fallen far behind schedule and it's inexcusable. On their end, they are going to regroup, reassess, reprioritize to ensure that the development life cycle regains and retains its course toward project completion. In the meantime, you as a team have a few changes to make of your own because, quite frankly, we've been disappointed in both your performance and your accountability. Do you realize that some of you have never made a progress report during our weekly meeting. Well, I do and so does upper management. That crap, pardon my French, is over starting right now. I expect each and every one of you to impress me."
Zach felt a lump in his throat. What he expected next was reverse alphabetical order with his inexcusable failure as the opening act.
"Aaron Aachen, what do you have for us today?" said She-Ra.
The meeting ran through its hour until it ended abruptly halfway through DBA Denise Iverson's report of her most recent database schema changes. So that was it. They never even made it to "J," let alone "Z."
After that, Zach stopped caring whether he was prepared for the meeting or not. He would still dial into the conference line and connect with NetMeeting on the off chance that sort of thing was being monitored, but he only barely paid attention to what was going on. If he bothered to look at the screen at all, he would watch the yellow rectangular box come up and fade from the lower-right corner of She-Ra's shared desktop in which Microsoft Outlook would display sender and subject line of incoming email. With each message, he hoped it would be something urgent enough for her to cancel the rest of the meeting. This would happen occasionally, but not nearly often enough.
Mostly Zach amused himself by playing with a chimpanzee finger puppet he had bought from a gumball machine in front of the Safeway near his house. He named him "Mister Bananas." Zach liked to pretend it was Mister Bananas instead of She-Ra running the meetings and would idly scribble in his notebook the orders he imagined his simian boss might give such as "Kill them all. Hahahaha. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck You." and "Meeting adjourned. Fling poo!" What had once been the most dreaded hour of Zach's work week became the time he looked forward to the most.
The drawback in all this for Zach was figuring out what to do with himself during the other 39 hours. He certainly wasn't going to get any work done. There was no need, and even if he wanted to, he wasn't sure where to begin. This project he was hired to work on was now in its 18th month and there was no end in sight. Ordinarily you'd expect some higher ups to pull the plug on the thing and write it off as a lost cause, but it was these same higher ups who kept changing the scope of the project. What started out as a simple tracking system for bill-collectors had evolved into...actually, Zach had no idea what it had evolved into because he stopped paying attention to the design updates after he realized he didn't have to do any work.
He found his avenues for leisure activity were woefully limited. What he really wanted to do was not show up for work at all, but that was out of the question because people's intranet logins were tracked and used to as proof to fire people accused of taking unauthorized PTO. Internet use was also monitored for excessive (meaning any) web browsing for non-business purposes and rumor had it that all of the fun sites had been blocked anyway. Their thinking seemed to be that if everyone were denied all avenues of diversion, sheer boredom would compel them to work hard. Zach wasn't having any of it.
At first, his only sin (besides sloth) was gluttony. He would show up in the morning with both front pockets filled with loose change and make frequent trips to the vending machines in the break room so the day would go faster. By the time five o'clock rolled around, the wastebasket under his desk would be filled with empty wrappers of Cheetos, Butterfingers, Rice Krispie Treats, and some off-brand pastry that looked like pink styrofoam. It wasn't long before Zach had the complexion of a teenager and his love handles pushed the seams of his business-casual shirt to design limit as they spilled over the waistband of his khakis.
Zach's deteriorating personal appearance combined with his unabated boredom level began to depress him so he started to drink on the job. Prudent paranoia precluded him from keeping a bottle of liquor in his desk drawer for anyone to find. Instead, he picked up cocktail fixings from the corner store and used them to fill up his thermos on the way to work. He had always been fond of Bloody Marys and came up with his own version of the drink called a "Gate 'n' 8" made with Royal Gate Vodka and V8 juice. The drink was admittedly an acquired taste, but if mixed strong enough a thermos full packed a powerful wallop. Zach enjoyed his concoction, but found he had to take it easy and pace himself after he fell asleep in his cube for over an hour with his feet on the desk and Mister Bananas stuck on the end of his upturned middle finger.
Still craving diversion, Zach decided to buy himself an iPhone. They might have been able to spy on the computer on his desktop, but not on a wireless little computer held in the palm of his hand. He went to the Apple Store after work, put hundreds of dollars on his already overloaded credit card, and walked out of there with a portable employer-undetectable porn-surfing device.
The first thing Zach did with his new toy was to get a hold of complimentary visitor's preview passes at every adult site that looked promising. A number of the better ones required you followed an emailed confirmation link so he went to google and signed up as Porno.Bastard@gmail.com.
Almost immediately after getting his gmail account, he started getting port spam, and not just from where he went for those preview passes. His email address had obviously been shared, which would have surely been a violation of a site's privacy policy if any of them had one. Porn peddlers of every stripe started bombarding his inbox, trying to entice him all with varieties of perversions, some of which he'd never even heard of. Satisfied with the appetites he already had, he turned off his incoming-email alarm for that account and ignored them.
The next morning, Zach sat in his cubicle unable to get a signal. He hadn't counted on this. The transmission tower was on the roof of a building less than a block away. What he did not take into account was that his cubicle was in the center of the 7th floor in a 14-story building surrounded by signal-killing conduit, steel beams, wires, moist brick, and God knows what else.
The only place where Zach could get more than zero bars was in the corner of the building next to the printer and copier. Even there, cell-phone reception was far from perfect and he found that downloads were painfully slow and there was the risk of the connection getting dropped entirely. He discovered that the signal improved when he held his phone lower, peaking when it was about two feet off the ground.
Zach crouched down and navigated Safari to one of his favorite porn sites. The connection was good here with almost all the bars showing. While the page was loading, he looked out the window in the direction of the AT&T transmission tower. One floor up in the building across the alley he saw a young woman he recognized. He didn't know her exactly. He had just seen her on the street a number of times going to and from work, but she was memorable because of a strange innocence he saw in her, the alluring kind that had less to do with moral virtue than the law of averages not catching up with her yet.
Whatever truth there was in his assessment of her did not carry over into the realm of data transmission. The throughput of porn was at its most powerful when it passed through her loins. Vanilla sex, whips and chains, SS uniforms, it didn't matter. She was receptive to all of it.
Zach's days of boredom were finally over. When he wasn't in the weekly meeting co-chaired by She-Ra Kotex and Mister Bananas, stuffing his face with empty calories, or getting drunk on Gate 'n' 8, he was over in the corner of the building, crouched in the download position and pulling hardcore pornography through an ingenue's vagina vortex. It was the greatest job he ever had.
On an early Tuesday afternoon about seven months after buying the iPhone, Zach sat in his cubicle alternating between talking sips from his thermos and sucking orange Cheetos dust from the tips of his fingers. Mister Bananas stood upright next to his desk telephone beaming with his permanent smile. Zach picked up the phone receiver and dialed into the meeting.
"Good afternoon, everybody. I have wonderful news!" She-Ra Kotex said when she got on the line.
Zach farted.
"My next meeting has been canceled," she went on. "What that means is that we don't have to worry about the one-hour time limit. We can go all day, and all night if it comes to that. I'm really looking forward to hearing from all of you after last week's design overhaul. And Zach Zwyrn, I don't believe I've ever heard from you. This is going to be a real treat."
Zach let out a sigh and told himself that he knew this day would come even though he knew nothing of the kind. He considered many other possible scenarios: the project getting shut down, his finding work at another company, continuing his shenanigans until he reached retirement age, even thermonuclear war. However, the possibility of a 2 pm meeting getting canceled somehow never occurred to him.
Starting with Aaron Aachen, the project team began giving their status reports. Without exception, each person showed excellent progress, enough so to make She-Ra make such uncharacteristic utterances as "well done" and "strong work." Gone were the time-killing tirades of hers, not that it would have mattered in today's meeting with a clock that could click to eternity. At this rate, Zach's name would come up by 2:30 and then he would be doomed. He put his phone on mute and set the receiver down on the surface of his desk.
"Cover for me, Mister Bananas," Zach said. "I'm going to spend the time I have left here doing what I do best, surfing for porn."
Zach got up and walked away from his cubicle toward the corner of the building. He crouched down and pointed his phone at the young woman in the building across the alley. The signal through her was clear and strong, but the downloaded porn could not take his mind off the prospect that he would very soon be fired. Maybe he should be spending this time looking for a new job instead, he thought. He wondered if any of the companies who spammed his Porno.Bastard@gmail.com account were hiring. If nothing else, he certainly believed in their product.
Wait a minute. That was it. Zach opened up his gmail account and forwarded the message at the top of his inbox to Sheree.Curtis@----------.com. Though he couldn't see it, he knew that at that moment there was a yellow box coming up in the corner of She-Ra's shared desktop that said:
From: Porno.Bastard@gmail.com
Subject: Fwd: JIZZ SPATTERED ANAL SLUTS WANNA PARTY
Zach knew that his only hope of keeping his job was getting She-Ra to turn off her shared desktop and cancel the meeting. He also knew that sending one email would not suffice, so he followed up with "SCAT BLASTIN' BIMBOS," "SEXY AMPUTEE SNAIL TRAIL HONEYS," "HOT COLONOSCOPY CAM...YOU CAN WATCH THE GERBIL DIE!" and hundreds of others. There was no need to be stingy. He had countless thousands more where they came from, and there would be a supply of new ones every day. He had plenty of ammo, not just for today, but for whenever the need might arise again.
Zach put his iPhone in his pocket and walked back to his cubicle only vaguely aware of the bounce in his step or how he was snapping his fingers as he walked. He gave Mister Bananas the thumbs-up before plopping himself in his chair. There was an alert on his computer screen that the shared desktop had lost its connection. Zach picked up the telephone receiver, put it to his ear, and heard nothing but silence. The time was 2 pm. The meeting was over.
There are maybe 200 calories in a ceviche tostada, give or take. I was eating two of those and was on my second pint of Trumer Pils. Each beer was also 200 calories. Combine that with the dressingless salad and however much sugar I dumped into the coffee I drank throughout the day, I figured my total calorie intake was somewhere between 1200 and 1500. Wait, my tostada came with tortilla chips. so maybe the maximum for the day was more like 1800 calories. 