********************5
“So how did it go?” Duncan asked as he ran through the front door and immediately toward the kitchen. He was already running late for getting down to the bar, but he was sick to death of not having time to eat breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Tonight dinner was mandatory.
“It went fine,” Soren answered, sprawled out on the couch reading the massive BC Wilson employee manual. “Though I’m a bit worn out. Yes, I think that this will work out just fine.” She smiled. “I already mentioned to Duke that you’d be interested in a position and that you have a lot of experience in this field already. Really, it would almost be a transfer from one department to another.”
“Though I can’t wait to quit,” he said in exasperation. “I talked to Sarah again today about my workload and cutting back my hours. She swears that they’re interviewing next week for someone to help with my workload and that as soon as a new person is hired, I can cut down to part time.”
Soren rolled her eyes. “Yeah, pull the other one—it plays Jingle Bells.”
“Exactly.” Duncan returned from the kitchen with two roast beef sandwiches, already shoving part of the first one into his mouth. “I’ve been hearing this same story for the past eight months, so I don’t really have any reason to believe it. She sounded sincere, though.”
Soren rolled her eyes again. “Of course she does—she practices that tone of voice so that people like you will believe her and keep working their tails off. It’ll never happen. So, what are you going to do when Duke is ready to hire you?”
“Well,” he said chewing, “I’ve been thinking about that. I think that once I know I have another job lined up, I’ll give them one more chance to cut my hours. If it isn’t done immediately, I’m out of there. So what exactly are you doing?”
Soren showed the machine to Duncan and briefly explained its functions. “And that’s really it. You just wave the machine at the people who work in the stores, then go around scanning stuff. There’s really nothing to it.”
“And you can really set all your own hours?”
“Yep.”
“Cool.” He glanced up at the clock and grabbed his remaining sandwich. “Well, I’m out of here. I need to get down to the bar and scrub the floor before I open; I was just too pooped to do it last night. Are you working tonight?”
“No, I’m off. Tomorrow and Saturday I’ll be on. I’m doing more training tomorrow morning bright and early, so no late night for me. I think I’ll write a bit, though.”
“Good deal. That reminds me…” He reached for a guitar case which was sitting near the door. “I’m usually slow on Thursday night until around midnight, so I thought I’d take this down with me. I can practice before the crowd shows up. I meant to take it with me this morning—it was half the reason I came back to the house. So,” he bent over her kissing her quickly on the cheek, “I’ll see you in bed tonight.”
“Be safe—love you!”
“Love you too.”
Soren set down the massive technical tome and went upstairs. She looked again at the screenplay book she had left sitting next to her computer, smiled, and picked it up. Running a tub full of hot water and lighting a vast array of candles, she sunk down into the soapy water and finally opened the book.
*****************6
The next couple of weeks went by in a sleep deprived blur. No matter how early she got up, falling asleep early just never happened. It was only until training was done, she reminded herself, then she would never have to see morning again.
Her bartending job went more or less the same—slinging beer, shaking drinks, smiling when she really didn’t feel like it, washing the stench of cigarettes, spilled alcohol, and the residue from the artificial smoke machine off of her every evening. She kept the screenplay book next to the tub, reading through it a section at a time every evening when she returned from the nightclub. It didn’t look nearly as difficult as she had first feared. Hmm…
On weekends before they both had to leave for work, she and Duncan spent their afternoons preparing for Phase Two of their lifeplan, straightening, cleaning, purging the house of every useless or out of date object they could find. They rearranged, cleared rooms, took loads of paper to the recycling plant, donated furniture to rummage sales for worthy causes. It was a large house with a big yard, though with both of them being packrats, they had accumulated quite a lot of stuff in the few years they had been living together. They were both bibliophiles who enabled each other to indulge in their obsession—there were piles of books everywhere.
By the third weekend, they had cleared out the clutter and began to build shelves around the entirety of the ground floor. Over the buzz of the electric saw, Soren heard the ringing of the telephone.
“I’ll get that,” she said loudly over the noise. It was Duke.
“Hey. Did I catch you at a bad time?”
“Not at all. How can I help you?”
“Well, I’ve been thinking. You’re about finished with training—I figure next week you’ll be out on your own. Of course, you can still page me if you run into any problems, but I think you’re ready. Is Duncan still interested in a position?”
She involuntarily started to do a little dance in the kitchen, though she kept her voice steady. “As far as I know,” she replied. “Why?”
“Well, one of my problem children has acted out one time too many, and I’m ready to let her go as soon as I’m sure that I’ll have someone else to assigned the stores to. I already have stores set aside for you, but if Duncan is still interested…”
“Let me go ask him. Would you like to talk to him?”
“Sure. If he’s not too busy right now, put him on.”
Soren skipped into the living room and stuck her head outside onto the front porch where Duncan was sawing another length of wood for the shelving unit. He pushed back his safety glasses and raised his eyebrows at her.
“It’s Duke. I think he wants to offer you a job.”
Still covered in saw dust, Duncan trotted into the kitchen and picked up the receiver. “Hello?”
They talked for nearly a half an hour, Soren happily dancing around the room, listening happily to Duncan’s side of the conversation. “Ok. Sure. No problem. Well, I’ll see you then.” He hung up the phone as she danced around expectantly, waiting to hear the details.
“What’d he say? What’d he say?” she asked, still hopping from one foot to the other.
“Well, I can start training any time. The sooner the better as far as he’s concerned. And since he’s done training you…well, that means anytime.”
“So what are you going to do about Stacis?”
“I told him about that and also that I’d call him Monday afternoon with my final answer about the job, though I also let him know that I was ninety-nine percent certain that it would be a ‘yes.’ Unless a miracle occurs, I just can’t see them getting off their butts at this point.”
“Any more word on the new hire?”
“I asked Sarah about it again Friday. She said they would be putting out the ad next week.”
“Yeah, right. I think you’ve heard that one before.”
“Exactly. I’ll talk to her one more time first thing Monday morning, and if I get the run around, I have this funny feeling I’ll just walk out. I mean, even before I opened the bar they had been telling me that they would decrease my workload for over a year. I just don’t think that it’s going to happen. And, as long as they can get away with bullshitting me, they will continue to do so.” He smiled. “I have no idea what they’re going to do when I leave. The analysis that I do has become the most requested item by our clients, and I’ve been telling them all along that it doesn’t make sense that I’m the only one who knows how to do it. Oh well…”
Soren squealed and hugged Duncan. “I’ll just be sooo happy when you’re out of there. In case you hadn’t noticed, I really really like you, and I haven’t been able to see nearly enough of you because of that job. Between that and the bar…”
“Which I’ve also been thinking about. I’ll wait and see how the new job goes, but I think that after I’m done with training, I’m going to see about hiring Michael a few nights a week down there. I mean, he knows how to do everything, he’s good with the customers, he doesn’t drink, and I could use a few nights off once in a while. I’d still do the Wednesday and weekend shifts—that’s where most of the money is and you’re working those hours anyway—but I think I’ll see if he wants to work the rest of the week. Greg, the guitar player from my old band, was in the other night and mentioned that the Java Stop is looking for an acoustic act on Thursday and Sunday nights. He knows the manager there and wanted to know if I’d be interested in putting something together with him. He’s a hell of a guitar player, but he hates to sing. I always like working with him, and two guitars can make some pretty interesting noise. We’ll see…”
He glanced down at her. “You won’t mind giving me up for a couple of nights a week, would you?”
She snuggled against his chest. “Of course not. I mean, you’ve already been gone on those nights anyway, and with a gig at a coffee house, I doubt that you’ll have to stay there until three in the morning. Besides,” she looked off mysteriously, “I have a screenplay to write.”
Duncan looked at her questioningly. “So we’ve finally cracked the book open, have we?”
“Yes we have. It isn’t nearly as intimidating as I had feared. Not that hard at all, really. I have a few ideas…I’ve taken notes and worked with a few short stories, kind of practicing putting them into that format to get the hang of it. I actually want to talk to Augustus and Justin sometime. Justin has done a little directing, and Augustus took all of those classes a few years ago about filming and editing—who knows? But first, Phase Two.”
After one more hug, they resumed their remodeling, now with an even lighter attitude than before. Everything was working out according to plan.
**************7
On Monday around noon, Soren looked over her assignment sheets for the week, assessing the best order in which to do her stores. She was planning to start on them today, figuring that the best way to attack the work was to get it finished as close to the beginning of the week as possible. Also, if she got all of her assigned work finished, Duke had assured her that there was always extra work to be done closer to the end of the week. People getting sick, having car troubles, etc., always left him with a few stores to finish, and if her assigned tasks were completed, he would be happy to hand over the extra work.
Ordering her papers in a logical fashion, she closed the black leather binder she was using for the job and stared at the telephone. Technically, she was ready to leave for work if that was what she wanted to do. However, Duncan had promised to keep her posted on what happened at work that day, and she was quite curious. Perhaps she could just run out and do the three stores which were just a couple of miles away…
Then phone rang. It was Duncan. He was laughing.
“So, what’s up giggling boy?”
“I am sooo out of here. I tried three times to talk to Sarah and she blew me off every time. Finally I asked if I could make an appointment to sit down and talk to her since she seemed abnormally busy today. She looked at her calendar and penciled me in for eleven-thirty. As I was walking to her office for said meeting, she was coming out of it with her purse and a couple of the guys from Human Resources—they were on their way to lunch. She didn’t even seem to remember our appointment.”
“So, what are you going to do?”
“Well, as we speak I’m putting my few personal belongings into a box, and I’ve already written a short, sweet note and taped it to my computer screen.”
“What does it say?”
“It says ‘To Whom. I quit.’”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. I can’t tell you how excited I am to be walking through those glass doors for the last time. It hasn’t really sunk in yet. I feel like the parole board just cut me loose when I had been expecting another few decades. I’ve been waiting for this day for almost eight years…”
“Isn’t that when you started working there?”
“Yes. The fantasies about leaving forever began about three hours into my employment. But now that it’s finally here, it almost doesn’t feel real. I’m afraid that I’ll get just past the fountain outside before the security guards start chasing me down. I had almost forgotten that I was allowed to just walk away any time I choose.”
He giggled maniacally again. “I am drunk with freedom. I’ll be home in a few minutes.”
Soren smiled and set down the receiver. She felt like a kite whose string has just been cut.
Less than five minutes later, it occurred to her that lunch from the Chinese place down the street from Stacis would be nice one last time. It had been their favorite place to go for lunch on those rare days when Duncan actually had time to take a lunch break, and one more helping of Szechuan Vegetables would be a nice celebratory meal. She dialed his office, hoping to catch him still packing.
“Hello. You have reached the former office of Duncan Conrad. Due to a ridiculous workload and months of unanswered requests for help, I am no longer an indentured servant of Stacis International. Any business should be forwarded to Sarah at extension two one six. I wish you poor suckers the best of luck.”
Soren smiled and set down the receiver once again. This called for streamers. Fuck work—she could do it tomorrow—that was the beauty of this job.
Hastily, she dug through a cabinet which they had designated “craft stuff, etc.” until she found a roll of bright yellow crepe paper left over from last year’s solstice party and proceeded to cut off lengths of it, tying it in bows around every perceivable surface. She also grabbed a stack of brightly colored scrap paper, suspending each piece along the length of a string, and wrote the words “Congratulations on Your Liberation” which she strung over the double-wide entry way between the dining and living rooms. Just as she was dropping the scotch tape back into the desk drawer, she heard Duncan’s convertible pull up outside.
Dashing upstairs, she quickly retrieved two jester’s hats from the top of a bookcase, donned the black and white one, and raced back down the steps to the sound of Duncan’s key in the lock. Hat in hand, she wondered vaguely if she should hide.
Too late. Duncan stepped through the door and looked around, a smile playing across his face.
“Well, you’ve been busy.” He grinned and kissed her, then allowed her to ceremoniously place the multi-colored jester’s crown atop his head. “So, did you just assume that I’d be quitting today? Or do you just work fast?”
“I just work fast. Two hundred and thirty-seven percent faster than the average employee according to Duke.”
He looked around, seeming a little confused. “Yellow ribbons?”
“Yeah,” she explained. “Like the song from the seventies.” He still looked confused. “Oh yeah—I forgot. You were listening to swing and big band music back then. It’s a song about a guy who’s getting out of prison…never mind. Let’s just say it means I love you and I’m glad you’re home.” She paused and sniffed the air. “Do I smell…?”
“Yes you do. I thought that we should have one last lunch from China Bistro as a way to celebrate. I stopped and picked up our usual order on my way out.”
He held up the brown paper bag which had previously been blocked from her view by his billowing black overcoat. “Do you want you fortune now or later?”
She hugged him again. “You’re just too fabulous. I actually tried to catch you when you were still at the office to ask you to pick up this very thing. Great minds and all that.” She giggled. “That was quite a message you left on your voice mail.”
“Yeah,” he smiled. “On one hand, I think that it might have been a bit snarky, but on the other hand, I’ve kept my cool for nearly eight years. It was one of those things that every employee of the company has had fantasies about doing, so I thought that one of us should go ahead and actually do it. I think it’s good for morale.”
They sat down to a feast of spicy vegetables, fried rice and spring rolls, munching away happily at their own dining room table without having to watch the clock for the time that Duncan had to be back at his desk. It was exhilarating.
Half way through one of his spring rolls, Duncan absently began leafing through the pile of papers on the dining room table.
“So,” he asked through a mouthful of Chinese food, “is this the work you have to do this week?”
Soren nodded, wiping a drip of duck sauce from her chin. “I had been debating going out to do this stack of stores today, but I was waiting around to see if you would call. I would have wondered what happened all day and probably wouldn’t have done a very good job of paying attention to what I was doing. Why do you ask?”
“On the phone the other day, Duke told me that if I wanted to go out and watch you work sometime so that I could actually see what the job entailed, to just keep track of my hours and he would count them toward my training. To fully demonstrate our intentions to the universe, I think that we should spend my first day of freedom moving forward with our plan. What do you think?”
“Sounds good to me,” she said, setting down her chopsticks and reaching for her fortune cookie. “We can leave whenever you’d like.”
“What’s you fortune say?”
Soren cracked open her cookie and unfolded the small slip of paper inside. “It says ‘Your latest endeavor will succeed beyond your wildest dreams.’ What does yours say?”
Duncan tore open the plastic wrapper then started laughing. “It says ‘Today is the beginning of a wonderful adventure.’” They both laughed as Soren went to retrieve the black machine from where it sat charging in an electrical outlet in the kitchen.
“I guess it’s decided—let’s hit the road.”
**************8
After paging Duke to let him know that Duncan was available to begin work immediately, they got their stuff together and went out to the first store. Soren ambiguously waived the black machine at whoever happened to be behind the counter and they would nod or otherwise indicate some similarly ambiguous consent. She explained to any of the workers which seemed to want more information that Duncan was in training and would be coming with her to the stores sometimes. At the third store, the lady behind the counter called her over.
“Yes?”
“So your boss isn’t with you today?”
“No. I’m more or less done with training.”
The lady shook her head. “Well thank god. I thought he was going to talk my ear off. And what is his hang-up about dolphins?”
Soren shrugged and smiled. “I hadn’t heard that one yet. I have no idea.”
Still shaking her head, the lady behind the counter wandered off and started to clean a milkshake machine. “I have no idea what that man is talking about half the time,” she muttered to herself.
Duncan raised his eyebrows as Soren shrugged. “He’s not the average bear,” she said as way of a reply.
Not looking up from the milkshake machine, the lady harrumphed. “You can say that again.”
Soren explained to Duncan the items that they were supposed to scan, concentrating in this store primarily on displays, and as she expected he caught on within minutes.
“That’s it?” he said incredulously as they were exiting the store less than fifteen minutes after arriving.
“That’s it.”
“And we can do this together?”
“That’s right.”
“Any time we want?”
“Yup.”
Duncan smiled broadly. “I can’t believe that I’ve spent so many years cooped up in an office. I mean, this is cake.”
“And,” she continued, “at least half the job is driving from place to place, which means lots of fun time in the car together. Of course we get paid mileage, which is non-taxable. If you add that money to the amount that this pays per hour…”
“…we end up making more money than I was at Stacis. Soren, you’re a genius.”
She shrugged. “Maybe…mostly I think it’s a matter of knowing what you want and not being afraid to ask for it. I had a pretty clear idea in my head of what kind of job I was looking for, and because it was so clearly defined, I recognized it when I saw it. I just knew that there had to be jobs like this out there somewhere.”
Duncan nodded. “I had no idea that the data collectors had such a cushy position. The suits have always had a nose in the air attitude about them, assuming too that they didn’t make very much money. Who knew?”
Laughing, Soren said “Well, if they let you white collar business types know how easily the other side was living, there wouldn’t be anyone left to sit behind a desk to process all of this data. So, you think you can handle it?”
They spent the rest of the afternoon zipping through stores, laughing, and generally having a great time. When they returned home shortly after dark, they could hear the beep beeping of the answering machine indicating that they had multiple messages.
“Dear god!” Soren exclaimed. “There are seventeen messages on here. There would probably be more, but the tape ran out.”
She hit play. The first message was from Duke, who must have called immediately after they had left. He wanted Duncan to call him back and let him know if he was available the following morning to begin training. Most of the rest were calls from Duncan’s former co-workers.
“Hi, Duncan. This is Sarah. Would you please call me as soon as you get in? Thanks.”
“Dude—you’re the man. Congratulations.”
“Ha ha ha! Way to walk. Good luck with everything!”
“Hey—this is Greg. I talked to the manager of Java Stop, and he said that if we put something together we could start the Thursday after next. I figure that we have enough songs already to do a couple of sets, so give me a call and let me know what you think. Later.”
“Duncan? This is Sarah. PLEASE call me as soon as you get in. I really need to talk to you.”
“Indentured servant? I am SO down with that. We’ll really miss you, but I’m glad that one of us got out. Keep in touch—we should go to lunch next week and you can tell me where you bought your balls.”
“You are sooo lucky! The whole company is calling your voice mail just to hear the message. It’s been blocking up the switchboard—everybody’s talking about it. You’ve always been our hero—good luck with everything!”
“This is Sarah. Call me NOW. Bye.”
Duncan stood there smiling while the messages played. “Geez,” he finally said looking a bit sheepish, “I didn’t really mean to cause such a stir. I didn’t expect anyone to figure out I was gone this quickly.” He shrugged. “Oh well. Guess I better call Duke then head down to the bar.”
That night, Soren spent several hours writing. Rather than force herself to write the screenplay, she decided that part of the point was to just get used to writing in general. There were so many ideas floating around in her head that it felt as though they had become congested. A visual image kept floating through her head of a giant funnel coming out from the crown of her head, twisting and pulling infinite ideas into her from the universe at large. So many thing, spinning and turning inside of her mind, but only that tiny opening at the end of the funnel through which the ideas had to flow to come into the world. When she felt the whole of it revolving through her, wanting, needing to be expressed, it was kind of overwhelming.
So, she wrote. She just sat at her computer and wrote and wrote and wrote. Not about anything in particular, not to anyone in particular—just letting the words flow out of her in whatever order they appeared to want to express themselves. It was a good exercise, one which left her feeling light and cleansed—the screenplay would write itself when the time was right.
At a much earlier hour than usual, she felt her mind relax after its exertion and was able to hear her body indicate that it would like to lie down. Drifting off into sleep, she felt more than saw the image of a squirrel bounding happily through space in the peripheral vision of her closed eyelids. Drifting into the world of sleep, she smiled.
**************9
Next morning, bright and early, Duncan arose with a smile. He was smiling because it was Tuesday. And unlike every Tuesday for the past nearly eight years, he wouldn’t be going into the office. Oh no, not today. Today he was going to explore the wild wacky world of convenience stores. And, while not being exactly the most picturesque location in the world, it was at least not a forty story high rise building filled with cubicles.
Who went to convenience stores in the middle of the day? Certainly not office workers, who were the only people he had been exposed to for most of the past nearly eight years. What kind of people were these? It was nice to know that many realities existed outside of the corporate towers.
It was one of the reasons he found Soren so refreshing. They were friends in their early twenties, both going through an experimental phase with corporate America. She had tried it, liked the money, but then got scared when she realized that the lifestyle was addictive. Watching her creativity and happiness slowly get sucked down the corporate drain, she ran like hell when she realized that she was starting to get used to the money, and worse yet, the convenience it was able to purchase. So she bailed.
Duncan had chosen differently. Making a very solemn promise to his aging father, he had vowed to become a “responsible citizen,” a person who could assure a parent that they would be all right financially and otherwise from then on. He fully believed that it was possible to see one’s employment as a means to an end, as a temporary condition while one was getting one’s artistic feet under them. The image of the starving artist is such a cliché because it is so often the case, but back then Duncan just didn’t believe that it had to be that way.
He still didn’t believe that it had to be that way, but he certainly began to understand a few years into the corporate trip that he was often surrounded by the antithesis of who be wanted and believed himself to be. He never really felt as though what he was doing was unethical, but rather that it was simply meaningless at best. Many people knew that he did some ambiguous task with math in a large office building, but whenever asked what exactly that was, he couldn’t help but dismiss their question. What he did, he would explain, was several layers removed from reality and really made no sense at all when one tried to explain it.
“So, there’s the girl who works behind the counter at the Milky Mart. Nice girl—named Susan, or Suzanne, or something. Anyway, she seems smart, and she’s relatively attractive… At any rate, I’ve been talking to her and she’s in this awful dead end relationship with this looser she’s supporting, trying to go to school and raise two kids from a previous marriage. They’re father is another looser who’s been out of the picture for a while now. But I just don’t get it—I mean, what are these attractive, intelligent women doing with this sleaze balls? We’ve been talking for a while, and I’m thinking of asking her out sometime, but I just don’t know…”
That’s the way the whole system was—each and every part of it existed in order to justify and support the rest of the system. Marketing, consumer data analysis, package design—it was all a giant racket designed to keep the American consumer is a state of sensory overloaded paralysis. The question was always “What kind of highly caffeinated artificially flavored sugar water does the consumer want?” and never “Does the consumer really want highly caffienated artificially flavored sugar water, or does he just buy that because that’s what we make available to sell to him and he’s already addicted to it ?” Any question as to the well-being of the consumer was, of course, never mentioned. No one in the business seemed to regard consumers as people—they were just the financial host for the parasite of consumption based capitalism.
“…so she tells me that the kids father is coming over on Friday night to ‘drop some stuff off’ and that she’s going to try to seduce him. Can you imagine? As if she hasn’t already gone through enough with this loser. But, she’s going to try her best to get knocked up again. I just don’t understand it. I mean, she seems like a very nice woman…”
Consume, consume, consume. How can we get them to consume more? How much are they willing to pay to consume this? If they consume this thing, what other thing are they now no longer consuming? How do we make the consumable product more convenient? I mean everybody wants more time, right? None of us has the time to do the things we love, right? Isn’t convenience wonderful? It gives you time, gives you back your life, gives you…
“..so I’m hanging out with these guys, these psycho-nauts for lack of a better word, and they’ve got this high grade windowpane acid. Each hit is segmented into four pieces, thus the name windowpane, and there’s a hit of acid in each quadrant. I was supposed to be the tour guide on this particular trip, but a few minutes after I’d stuck a hit in each one of my eyes, I knew I’d taken too much.”
A whole lot of sugar, fat, and chemical additives. But damn—you can eat it right out of the bag, so who can argue with that? They’ve got both kinds of sugar water— fermented and non-fermented. Oddly enough, the cheapest drink available, ounce for ounce in most convenience stores, is the bottom-shelf forty ounce bottle of malt liquor. Cheaper than water, cheaper than soda pop.
“…then tried to communicate to them that Duke would be leaving the building for a while, but it was already too late. I went to this plane of reality where everything was blue—just blue. I don’t know how long I was there, surrounded by blue, the entirety of my being a nice relaxing shade of blue. I kept waiting for the mother ship to swing by and pick me up—it wouldn’t have surprised me one bit—and of certainly I would have gone…”
Some would argue that there are a wide variety of fruit juices and sports drinks available these days as well. And what is the second ingredient listed for all of these categories of beverages? That’s right—sugar. But it says or implies right there on the label in big letters that the product is healthy, and the average consumer—always running late, never having enough time—has already heard the jingle on television six hundred and thirty-seven times is not going to take the time to read the rest of that label. And even if he does, what else is he going to chose? Sugar, sugar, sugar…
“…and then she says tells me that she just can’t get the studies done this week because her ex-husband has taken her car and the new boyfriend doesn’t have one. Get this—a few weeks ago she told me that they’d spent their last fifteen hundred dollars to buy a tanning bed—a tanning bed for chrissakes—but they didn’t have any room in the trailer to put it, so they put in the second bedroom and moved the three kids out into the dining room. Then her mother has some kind of problem that she’s always running around dealing with…”
Or, of course, artificial sweetener. On one hand sugar, on the other hand a chemical compound which builds up and collects residue rather quickly in the brain AND tastes like crap. But if you’re worried about the calories…
“…and I’ve tried to tell them that if the Market Supervisors don’t have any control in the company, who does? We’re the ones who are actually supposed to be supervising what’s going on in the field, and if we’re not doing our jobs, then how can we know that this data means anything? There are going to be a lot of changes in the company, and I don’t know what some of these people are going to do. I mean, the clients are starting to wise up and figure out that they’re not getting pure data…”
The only choice left is unsweetened tea or water, and if you’re trying to avoid caffeine too, well, looks that it’s ‘ole aqua vita for you. Sure, you could go into the bathroom of the very same convenience store and fill up your own plastic sports bottle with tap water and you’d have pretty much the same product, but it just seems so much more…American to buy the brand new bottle with the unbroken seal and expensive label. The label says “spring” which implies “pure” because that’s what the marketing has been telling us for years.
“…so she tells me that she wants these other two stores way out in the middle of nowhere. I’m like—lady—you’re not getting the stores done that you do have, so what makes you think I’m going to give you more of them? These people…”
Oh, but the caffeine is good for you—studies show that it increases productivity, and you know what that means—increased productivity means increased output. Increased output means increased capital. Increased capital means increased buying power. Increased buying power means an increased ability to consume. So what’s our lesson for today boys and girls? Caffeine is good for the economy. Don’t forget to consume!
“…I don’t think he’s actually been in that store for the past five years. I had to go in and do the count while he was on vacation, and there were all kinds of new items which hadn’t been added. Sure, some of those things could have been new since the last time he was there, but not all fifty-seven of them. Who does he think he’s kidding?”
Duncan wore a relaxed and beatific smile throughout the day while Duke talked to him, alternately about the job and other random interests that he had. Duncan observed the external physical phenomena, stayed present with the work, and breathed in rhythm with the beeping of his ScanWand. He hadn’t been this relaxed at work in over…no, never had he been this relaxed at work. Now that he had walked through the dessert of corporate work, he could more deeply appreciate the verdant meadows.
“I think that the supervisors should have larger wands on their machines than the rest of the underlings, sort of a way to indicate rank, don’t you think? “Prprprprprgh. Well, time to go have a man smoke.”
Duncan watch as Duke went outside in the cold billowy air and tried desperately to light a cigarette in the wind, all the time his hair flapping in the breeze above his forehead. He was a truly unique individual—not something Duncan had had much exposure to for the past many years. He smiled and continued counting.
Duke had decided to start his training in one of the large audit stores where they counted almost everything except alcoholic beverages. All the chips, pop, snacks, water, juice, shelf stable milk, pickled pork products, nutritional supplements, cookies, ice cream, candy, you name it. Soren had told Duke, that if it was all the same to him, she would prefer to have a bunch of the smaller stores than do a few large stores. She preferred to spend her days in and out quickly from one store to the next for it limited the amount of interaction she was forced to have with the general public.
“’Scuse me, mister.” A large man with a flannel shirt and work boots stood looming over Duncan, a twenty ounce Mt. Everest Fog in one large callused hand, a two liter of the same soda in the other. “Now why is it that I have to pay a buck twenty-nine for twenty ounces of this pop, but only ninety-nine cents for five times as much of the same pop?” He glowered down at Duncan.
“I don’t work here,” replied Duncan, turning back to continue counting the pork rinds on the opposite side of the aisle from the coolers. He glanced over at the man, who was still standing there. “You could just buy the two liter,” he suggested. The man didn’t move. “You’re being charged an extra thirty cents for convenience.”
The man looked at Duncan as though he had just suggested licking the mud off of his own boot and stalked away, still grasping both products. He vaguely heard a mild ruckus when the man approached the counter still demanding an explanation from someone, anyone, for this truly illogical actuality. Duke, coming back in from the cold, nearly ran into the large pile of angry flannel as the man pushed through both of the glass convenience store doors, grumbling under his breath as he unscrewed the cap of the twenty ounce green plastic bottle.
“I got a page while I was out there from my problem child.” He chuckled. “Seems as though she finally got around to looking at her store assignments for the week and has suddenly noticed that there aren’t nearly as many stores as she’s been used to seeing. He he he… She claims that I’ll never find anyone who can do her job as well as she can, no one who would be nearly as fast. Boy, what she doesn’t know…”
Duke stopped and looked around. “So, are you bored yet?”
Duncan shook his head and continued to count.
“These monthly stores usually take eight or nine hours to count, so I figure with both of us here we should be able to knock it out pretty quickly. When you’re done with the chips and stuff, you can move on to candy while I do the cooler.”
“I already did the candy—and the cooler. Though I haven’t done the back room yet.”
“Euugh? Really… Well, all right. At this rate, we should have this done in record time. Maybe we’ll have time to go over to the Dairy Barn afterward and I can show you how to do beer. The manager there…well, let’s just say she has ‘behavioral problems.’ Frankly, I hate to go in there—that woman is a badger.” He threw up his hands and laughed. “Proceed.”
Duncan finished counting the chips and then went into the back room, pulling on his jacket before entering the cooler to count the back stock. Soda had always amazed him—two point five servings for every twenty ounce bottle, twenty-eight grams of sugar for each serving. That was the equivalent of putting sixteen teaspoons of sugar in every twenty ounce bottle, an amount no sane person would ever voluntarily choose. He tried to imagine someone putting that much sugar into a glass of iced tea.
Frankly, it was surprising that any American still had teeth in their head, not to mention the unnecessary and completely empty calories that were being consumed. But there it was—stocked wall to wall in the convenience stores. And in a culture where everyone is always running from one place to the next, from one thing to the next, convenience was believed to be a necessity. It didn’t have to be unhealthy, but unfortunately, that was the reality.
He also learned very quickly that one is liable to see some odd things from behind cooler doors in convenience stores. Occasionally, one of the doors would open from the front as a customer made a selection from the choices of beer, pop, bottled water, or juice. Usually they knew exactly what they wanted before they opened the door, so the whole exchange was quick and easy.
Some customers, however, had very unique methods for choosing their beverage. While Duncan was scanning a flat of Burpsi Cola, he realized nonchalantly that one of the cooler doors had been standing open for quite some time. He looked up to see a man in a well-cut suit standing in front of the three rows of identical red Perka Cola labels, looking surreptitiously this way and that. After ascertaining that no one was looking, he began to sniff each bottle along the front facings. Not finding the one agreeable to his olfactory sense among the ones closest to the front, he began sniffing the next row. Finally, he sniffed out the right bottle, identical to all the others to any other customer, smiled, and pulled it out from the second line in the third row.
Hmm. That was different, Duncan mused. He fought the urge to sniff for himself, to find out if there really was anything to that method. But even if he could pick up some kind of differentiation of scent from the mass-produced plastic bottles, how would he know when he’d found the “right” scent? What exactly had that man been sniffing for? Perhaps he should go ask…
A few minutes later, the heavily insulated main cooler door opened from the back room, and the manager stepped inside and sat down on an overturned milk crate. Duncan continued to scan the orange juice containers in front of him, not certain at all if the manager was aware of his presence. Five minutes later, she let out a startled sound.
“Ohmygawd,” she gasped. “You scared me half to death. I didn’t see you over there.” Knowing that he must have been in the cooler before she entered, she suddenly seemed to feel a little foolish and changed the subject.
“That man just drives me crazy,” she explained. “I came back here to hide. How can you stand to work with him? Doesn’t he drive you nuts?”
Duncan shrugged his shoulders. “Not really. He’s a different bird, all right, but he’s an all right guy.”
“Well, he sure loves to talk,” she said in a exasperated manner. “I have no idea what he’s talking about most of the time, and I certainly don’t want to ask. He just goes on and on forever, and I don’t know what he wants.”
Duncan shrugged again. “I don’t think that he wants anything—I think that he just doesn’t get much human contact outside of work hours. He’s new in town, you know.”
“No, he didn’t mention that.” Her attitude seemed to soften a little. “It must be hard—I’ve lived here my whole life. I can’t imagine trying to make new friends, start a new life…” She trailed off into reverie. “Still, he drives me crazy. If it’s all the same to you, I’m just going to stay back here.”
Duncan said nothing and continued to scan in the relative silence of the refrigeration fans.
“So are you going to be doing this store from now on?” the manager asked, striking up another conversation.
“I don’t know for sure yet, but I think so.”
“Well good,” she said with a hint of satisfaction in her voice. “I don’t mind you coming in at all, but he’s going to drive me crazy if I have to deal with him once a month.”
Duncan smiled. “All done,” he said, waiving his machine vaguely at her as he stepped past. “Try to stay warm.” He went back into the stockroom where Duke was looking around confusedly. He looked up at Duncan.
“Did you see a big stack of Crockadilade?” he asked with consternation. “I could have sworn that I saw at least twenty flats of the stuff when I came back here earlier, but I don’t see any now.”
Duncan shook his head. “I didn’t see any. There are two cases of it in the cooler, but that’s all I’ve seen.”
“Huh.” Duke continued to stare off into space, then finally shrugged his shoulders. “Oh well. I did the stuff back here, and I was just about to come in and help you with the cooler.”
“I’m done.”
“Oh. Well. All right then.” He considered for a moment. “This is one of the stores where we can copy the invoices and take them home to enter, which is nice. I mean, when you’re doing most of the stock for an entire store, the invoicing itself can take longer than it does to count. With some of the stores, they’re paranoid about any information like that being taken through the doors, but most places are just as happy to not have you looming around the office. There’s a copy machine out front—let’s get these things copied, then we can head over to Dairy Barn and you can meet the badger.” He considered for a moment. “Then, if you’re not too worn out, we can go back to my place and I can show you how to enter the invoices, but we’ll see.”
Duncan followed Duke into the office and watched while his boss dug though file after file of invoices pulling some out and making harrumphing noises over others. When he had a stack about six inches thick, he motioned Duncan to follow him to the pay copier at the front of the store. He handed the stack to Duncan, then walked up to the counter, pulling a five dollar bill out of his wallet.
“Can I get change for this?” he asked the girl behind the counter. “And where did the manger go?”
“Sure,” she said opening the counter and glancing around the store. “She’s, uh, doing paperwork.”
“Funny,” mused Duke, “I didn’t see her back there. Oh—I need the change in dimes. Can I get a receipt for that?”
The clerk looked briefly shocked, but started counting out the dimes nevertheless. Duncan looked away and grinned—Duke sure had a way with people.
Luckily, Duke’s pager went off again, so he handed over the bulky handful of dimes and disappeared outside to the pay phone to make a call, leaving Duncan in relative peace to make the copies. He carefully initialed each invoice with “BCW” and the date so that he would know which invoices he had already used for this audit to avoid confusion next month. The process took about twenty minutes, though Duke had not yet returned.
Duncan took the invoices back into the office, found their original folders, and refiled them in chronological order. Still, Duke hadn’t returned. Taking his stack of copies, he went outside to see what was going on.
Duke was on the pay phone gesticulating wildly.
“I told Todd that this was going to happen, but did he listen? Oh hell—what are we going to do now? Those cosmetic studies take FOREVER. I’ve got a couple of new people who are really good, but even so, that’s almost too much work to get done in one cycle. Especially with that group of employees I inherited who are still causing problems.” There was a long pause. “Uh huh. Well, I’ll see what I can do, but no guarantees. Yeah, I know the client is paying a mint for this stuff—as well they should be. These things are a bear. Oh well. Talk to you later.”
Duke turned to see Duncan standing there, the large pile of papers rubber banded together in his hands. Duke sighed deeply.
“So, how much work do you think that you and Soren are ready to take on?”
Duncan shrugged. He was used to working between fifty and sixty hours a week without getting paid overtime, and that wasn’t counting the bar. “We can probably handle a good deal, why?”
“You see, there’s this study that the company usually does once a year, but for some reason, the client wants us to do it again. It’s only been three months since the last one, but they’re willing to pay for it. The problem is, this wasn’t a scheduled study, and we just don’t have the man power to pull it off. Or at least I don’t think we do. However,” he smiled slyly, “you and Soren might just be able to get me out of this mess. If you’re willing.”
“Of course,” he continued quickly, “there’d be a few benefits. For starters, you could do the stores together and ride together, but since it’s a special favor, I’d recommend that you both count the mileage. Usually if you ride together, only one of you would be able to collect the money for mileage, but for special occasions such as this, both of you can. This study is a bitch—it takes forever—but you could pull in quite a bit of extra cash. It would really help me out.”
“All right—no problem. As long as we’re able to do it during the hours that work the best for us.”
Duke waived through the cold air. “Not a problem at all. Some of these stores are open twenty-four hours a day. I don’t care if you do it at four in the morning, four in the afternoon, or whatever. Just as long as they get done.” He chuckled to himself. “I have no idea what most of these market supervisors are going to do with this. Really, I’m in a pretty good position comparatively. At least I have two good people in my district, which is more than I can say for most of them.” He pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket, tapped one out, and lit up. “Aaahhh…time for a man smoke.”
They stood in silence, the frigid wind whipping around them, causing the dead leaves and various pieces of parking lot trash to dance and swirl in the breeze.
“So,” Duke said, snapping out of his head, “you ready to meet the badger?”
“I suppose.”
“Boy, you’re gonna love her. She’s a real treat, let me tell you. I have no idea what’s wrong with that woman.” He exhaled a cloud of smoke. “She knows I know her boss, so I think that intimidates her. She’s on some kind of power trip with me, always name dropping and insinuating that her good grace is the only thing keeping me in the store. Of course, that’s bullshit. We’re authorized to be in these stores by the high ups who certainly don’t want the corporation to lose that big fat check we send them every month. Really, she’s the one who ought to watch it.” Duke looked at Duncan with conspiracy in his eyes. “I think there’s something going on in that store, something seedy and underhanded that she knows about. I think she’s probably got something to hide and that’s why she’s such a badger.”
He exhaled another cloud of smoke then stomped out his butt on the sidewalk and started chuckling. “Either that, or she hasn’t been laid in a long time. And with a disposition like that, I wouldn’t doubt it. I mean, who could get in bed with all those claws and teeth gnashing at them? She really is a badger. Kind of looks like a badger, too.” Pulling out his keys and heading for his Oldsmobile, out of the shop this week and running fine, he glanced at Duncan. “Ready to go?”
They drove the short distance to Dairy Barn, all the while Duke telling anecdotes about the badger. Walking into the store, Duncan immediately saw and was struck by the presence of what was, ostensibly, the badger. According to the name badge, her name was Beverly. She was a big woman—nearly six feet tall—and looked as though she could easily pick up a steel beam and swing it around her head. Her face was pleasant enough, that is until she looked up when the bells on the door rang and saw Duke. Then her face changed dramatically as she went into badger mode.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, obvious displeasure in her voice. “Weren’t you just here yesterday? It certainly couldn’t have been a week already.”
Duke smile with pleasant sarcasm at her. “Oh, it’s been a week. Did you miss me?”
“No,” she said bluntly as she returned her attention to the National Snoop that she was perusing. “Not one bit.” She glanced back up. “Who’s your friend?”
“This,” said Duke proudly, “is my newest employee. I’m training him today and decided that I wanted to personally introduce him to you.”
“Thanks. I’m honored,” she said dryly. However, as she looked down at Duncan, her expression changed to one full of warmth. “Hi, I’m Beverly. You need anything at all, just ask.” Looking back at Duke with animosity she asked “So does this mean that I won’t have to see your smiling face every week anymore?”
“Oh, not just yet. Maybe, eventually.”
“Too bad. Now don’t you have work to do? Or are you just going to stand up here at the counter all day and waste my time?”
Duke chuckled. “No, we’ve got work to do, I suppose. We’ll be in back.”
“Good,” she huffed, turning a page of the colored news print.
“See what I mean?” Duke asked under his breath as they were going into the back room. “She’s a badger. Don’t know what gets into women like that. Anyway…there’s a lot of beer here for a small store, so we better get to it if we want to have time to tackle those invoices.”
Sure enough, there was a huge shelving unit in the cooler full of beer in back stock. The cooler must have been at least thirty feet long, the only light coming from a single bare bulb which periodically blinked in its socket. After a few minutes of scanning in silence,
Duke said, “I think it’s time for another man smoke. I’ll be back.”
Duncan continued to scan the beer, but now that he was alone, he found a new way to entertain himself. He had been a singer for most of his life and had studied many techniques for training the human voice. However, just a couple of years previous, he had come across some things which were never taught in any of the Western vocal styles.
Driving in his car one day, he heard what he later found out were Tuvan throat singers, and he was amazed. There was a technique of pushing air through the throat which caused several notes to be formed at one time, a low droning tone with a higher melodic fluting tone above it. He had been working ever since then to train his voice to do this new trick, practicing whenever he could. The cooler, with its already droning refrigeration units and fans, was the perfect environment for this pursuit. Happily humming along with the machinery, he scanned at an even faster rate now, experiencing the slight euphoria which always accompanied this type of singing. To anyone who wasn’t standing right in front of him, the sound seemed to be just another mechanical hum, though with a slight variation.
Once, the cooler door opened from the front, and the customer stood there listening for a moment trying to figure out if he was hallucinating before grabbing his forty ounce beer and heading toward the checkout. Duncan could see Duke through the glass doors of the cooler talking to Beverly at the counter. From her body language, he could tell that she wasn’t pleased. Duncan laughed and shook his head—Duke just didn’t give up.
At one point, a customer wearing a knit cap was holding the cooler door open and fishing his arm around on the shelf, reaching behind one of the rows of six pack bottles of beer searching for a something. Duncan heard him call to his friend “Hey, I don’t see any Shrubb Lite six packs. You want something else?” Duncan just happened to be scanning a shelf of Shrubb Lite on the back stock shelves, so he slid one forward toward the arm which was still resting in the empty slot on the cooler shelf.
The man, still turned toward his friend, jumped as the six pack suddenly touched his fingertips. “Geezus,” he exclaimed, now seeing Duncan behind the shelves of beer. “You ‘bout made me wet my pants. Why you gotta go scarin’ people like that?” He smiled and grabbed the six pack. “But thanks, man.”
“No problem,” Duncan returned as the customer closed the glass door with a whoosh.
Shortly, the back stock was counted, and Duncan moved on to the shelf inventory. Mostly to avoid whatever drama was transpiring out front with the badger, he decided to count it from the back. It was a lot easier—he didn’t have to deal with the doors insistence that they should automatically shut and he could continue to sing to himself without drawing undue attention from customers. Not a bad way to spend a Tuesday afternoon.
When he was finished with the count, he wandered into the back office and found a folder with beer invoices in it. Since Soren had already demonstrated to him how to enter these, he went ahead and started pushing buttons. Nope, not too bad at all.
Finished with his tasks, he pushed through the swinging doors and walked toward the counter where Duke was still conversing with Beverly. He saw Duncan and gestured toward him.
“Now he’s a smart man,” Duke said. “So what do you think? Are the stories in these rags real, or do people make them up?”
“Um,” replied Duncan, not really wanting to get involved, “I’ve never read one so I really couldn’t say.”
“See,” answered Duke definitively. “Every intelligent person knows that they’re just made up.”
“I didn’t say they were all real,” retorted Beverly. “They’re just what we have and I’m bored. Besides, I just read it for the horoscope.”
“So, what’s your sign?” Duke asked inquisitively. “Taurus? You seem kind of bull headed to me.”
She glared at him. “I’m not telling you.”
“What’s your horoscope say that’s so interesting, anyway?” Duke asked.
She glared even harder. “It says that I will find love in a very unlikely place.” Looking around her she said with disgust “Well, this is about an unlikely a place as I can imagine. This is NOT what I expected to spend my life doing.”
“So what did you expect?” Duke asked, as Duncan continued pushing buttons to check over the data. “A penthouse in New York? Diamonds and champagne?”
“No,” she said nastily, shaking her head at him, “but I didn’t get a degree in anthropology just to waste my days standing around in a convenience store talking to the likes of you. Now go on and get out of here in case my dream man shows up and sees me talking to you.”
Duke laughed and moved toward the door, Duncan following behind still pushing buttons on the ScanWand. “See you next week,” he called over his shoulder.
“Exactly when are you coming back?” asked Beverly. “I think I’ll schedule myself off that day.”
Still chuckling under his breath as he unlocked the car, he called over to Duncan. “So what do you think? Was I right? She’s a badger, isn’t she.”
Duncan shrugged. “She’s all right. She just hates her job.”
Duke seemed to consider this as they were driving. “Do you really think she has a degree in anthropology?”
“I don’t see why she’d make that up.”
“Hmm…” Duke seemed lost in thought. “Ok, so, I guess we’re off to my house so I can show you how to do the invoices for the big stores. See, unlike the beer stores, a lot of the grocery bills don’t have UPC numbers on them, so you have to hunt and peck through all the items in the store. It’s a bitch, let me tell you. And none of the invoices are in any particular order, meaning that the store may have bought seven different kinds of the same brand, and they’ll be scattered in seven different places on the invoice. The only way to do it is with a lot of patience—that’s just the way it is.”
Eventually, they pulled up in front of a large two-story house at the end of a cul-de-sac in a relatively expensive sub-division. Duncan was certain that this had to be Duke’s house—on the flag pole flew a banner of the Jolly Roger. They bumped up into the driveway as
Duke reached up to his sun visor to push the button on the garage door opener. The large double door opened revealing inside a vast array of mechanical parts of all kinds, some on shelves, some lying around in no particular order. Duncan also got to see ‘Ole Bessy for the first time, her gold trimmed electric blue fins jutting out from under a dirty shop rag.
“I try to do most of the work on the cars myself,” Duke explained, “especially ‘Ole Bessy. It would just feel…wrong to let another man touch her with his dirty hands. I’m possessive like that.” He got out of the driver’s side and opened a door into the rest of the house. “Do you want anything to drink? I’ve got beer, soda, diet soda, gin, root beer, whatever.”
“I’ll just have a glass of water.”
“Water?” Duke returned incredulously. “All right—suit yourself. Make yourself at home…”
Duncan wandered into the hallway and looked around. The house was large, but almost completely empty. There was a good sized formal dining room and living room at the front of the house which looked completely devoid of any object whatsoever. Duke seemed to confine his living space to the eat-in kitchen and the den right off of it. In these two rooms, nearly every available surface was covered in paper in no discernable order. Duke approached him and handed him a glass filled with clear liquid.
“There ya go. Aqua. Sure that’s all you want?”
Duncan nodded.
“So,” said Duke, “Let’s get started. I’ll just clear a space here on the table…”
Amongst the stack of papers, stood an arcane looking machine. In the background out across the back yard, Duncan could see two small neighbor children playing on a swing set. Duke held up the machine proudly.
“Do you know what this is?” he beamed. Duncan shook his head. “It’s a whippet machine. You just pop the canisters in here like so…” he pulled open a latch, “then take a great big puff off of this tube. Want to try it?”
“No thank you,” answered Duncan.
“Hmm. I would figure you artist types would be into this kind of thing. Doesn’t matter anyway—I bought a case last Friday—figured it would last me through the weekend, but they were all used up by Saturday morning. I make a lot of whipped cream, you know…” Duke waggled his eyebrows. “At least that’s what I tell them at the home goods place where I get the canisters. I look respectable enough—I think they buy it.”
Duncan doubted it but said nothing.
“So, I’ll just go put some music on, and we’ll get down to work.” Duke disappeared around a pile of papers into another room while
Duncan rearranged the detritus on the kitchen table to sit down to work. Turning on the ScanWand and perusing the first invoice, Duncan suddenly felt his body go into momentary and involuntary shock, assaulted suddenly by the deafening sound of loud guitars. Hoping that the volume level was accidental and that it would be turned down quickly, he held his hands over his ears. The volume didn’t change.
Duke returned and shouted over the music. “I just love Yes—They’re my favorite band. You like Yes, don’t you?”
Duncan shrugged and screamed back. “I’ve haven’t heard much of their music.”
“And you call yourself a musician? I love ‘em. I saw them in San Francisco in the seventies—what a great show. What I remember of it anyway… Say, I’m going to have a beer—you want one?”
Duncan shook his head.
Duke went to the fridge and grabbed a shiny gold can. “I just love Heifferschlizt—it’s my favorite. Yes, sweetheart…Daddy’s home,” he crooned to the buxom blond German girl on the can. “Sure you don’t want one?” he asked again.
Duncan pretended not to hear him, a likely story considering the decibel level of the music. Glancing at the grocery bills, Duncan understood what Duke meant when he said that they were in no discernable order. This was going to take a while.
A few hours later, Duncan was still pecking away at the machine when he noticed that it was starting to get dark. He still had a few hours until he had to be down at the bar, but he was getting hungry. Duke was dancing around the room to the fourth Yes album he had put on the stereo. Duncan called loudly over the music.
“I think I’m going to call it a day. Can I use your phone to give Soren a call?”
“Huh?” yelled Duke absently, as if having forgotten that Duncan was still sitting at the table. “Wha…? Oh, sure. Let me turn down the music so that she doesn’t think we’re having some wild party.”
Silence was never so welcome to Duncan’s ears. Duke returned with a cordless telephone in one hand, already dialing.
“I’ll call her, let her know you’re on your way.” He held the phone up to his ear and waited. “Yeah, Soren? Hey—this is Duke. Just calling to let you know your hubby is on his way home. Yeah. He’s been grinding away like a wild animal on these invoices. Uh huh. He’ll also be bringing home some studies that the two of you can do together. Yeah. All right—I’ll tell him.”
He turned toward Duncan. “She asked if you would pick up some coconut milk on the way home—she’s making Sog Panties, whatever that is.”
“Saag Paneer,” Duncan supplied. “It’s an Indian dish with spinach. I’m not quite done with these—should I take them along?”
“Sure, sure,” he replied, picking up his keys to take Duncan back to where they’d left his car parked. “There’s no hurry really. We just did the count today, and the monthly stores aren’t technically due until the last week of the cycle, which is still nearly three weeks away. But go ahead and take them. I don’t care if you finish them, or Soren can do it if she wants. I’ve already ordered a lap top for the two of you so that you can transfer files from one ScanWand to the other. It should be delivered to you house in a few days. So, did you have any questions?”
Duncan shook his head. “Not really. But I see what you mean—this does take a while.”
“Yeah,” nodded Duke in agreement, “it’s tedious work. It’s my least favorite part of the job, but it has to get done. You did great today, by the way. I think this is all going to work out very, very well for all parties involved.”
“Me too,” assented Duncan. “So what’s on the plate for tomorrow?”
“I thought maybe we’d go do another one of these big monthly scans at the Dedino Plus in Oakburrough. Then maybe for the rest of the week, you and Soren can work together on that study I was telling you about. You game?”
“Certainly. What time should I meet you there?”
“Oh, I don’t know…say, maybe tenish? Sound good to you?”
“Just fine.”
posted by fMom @ 8:18 PM
