While Children Starve In Africa

While Children Starve in Africa


          My boss isn’t at her desk when I walk in. She should be sitting there, too big for her chair, in pants too small, typing away in an attempt to look busy. I know she’s e-mailing friends and family, or looking at web sites that sell porcelain figurines of pastel colored cats and wishing she had the extra five dollars to buy the green one. Still, her absence is upsetting because it gives me free reign to examine her desk. There’s not much of interest save a small picture of a handsome young man who I’ve always been wary of asking about. How terrible if he were a brother that died, or worse, her husband at a younger, better age.
          My desk, which is only my desk Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 9:30 to 1:30, has all the expected supplies, plus laminated sheets of instructions for transferring calls, important phone numbers and a calendar with paydays marked in green and timesheet-days marked in red.
          I am a data enterer. I take files from the top folder marked “Add and Copy,” make sure all the arithmetic is correct, put them in the middle folder marked “Process,” and take them again when they appear in the bottom folder marked “Data Entry.” So I add, using a calculator to assure that 4+4 is still 8, copy, and put the papers in the processing folder.
          It takes me a few minutes to realize that my vague feeling of doom is because my absent boss is responsible for Processing.
          “Are you taking care of the process folder this week?” I ask another lady in the office.
          She looks at me quizzically and says, “Um, I don’t know, what does she usually do with the process folder?”
          “I don’t know, I only deal with Add, Copy and Data Entry.”
We decide to wait until one of the other students shows up, and see if they know.

          On my way back to my desk I pass Mary’s cubicle. She’s hunkered over her desk sifting through papers that are always piled so high I’ve been instructed to tape all messages right in the middle of her computer screen. She’s mumbling under her breath about people using the wrong font on their voucher forms. I knock on the side of her cubicle.
          “Mary, do you have anything for me to do?”
          “Huh?” She looks up and over her shoulder at me. “Oh, well, I guess you could handle this.”
          She hauls herself out of her chair and moves toward one of the large filing cabinets lining the east wall. She carries an extra 200 pounds, and sways side to side from foot to foot. She has short-cropped silver hair and tiny eyes that recede into the wrinkles and angles of her face. All together she reminds me very much of a circus elephant; one that would balance on a tiny chair at the behest of the trainer. At the filing cabinet she launches into an involved explanation of alphabetizing.
          She makes sure I understand to begin with A, and trundles back to her desk. She has no mysterious pictures on her desk. In fact the only things she has hanging are certificates praising her 10, 20, 25 years of service to the company and polar bears and kittens torn from magazines. Next to one kitten are two post-it notes. One reads, “Call Sister” and has a dollar sign circled with a slash through it and the other lists the time and place of her father’s next doctor’s appointment.
          I proceed with the alphabetizing, cursing a hanging file folder that breaks and threatens the integrity of the entire system. I remember the time Mary came into the office after lunch, flustered and blustering because she’d gotten in a fight at the Office Depot. She’d needed new hanging file folders, but couldn’t think of any way to describe them except, “folder pockets.” She stood there in the middle of the store repeating “folder pockets, folder pockets, I need folder pockets” until the salesmen gave up and she had to lumber through every aisle to find them herself.
          Our departmental supervisor walks in and hands Mary a pile of information to be pushed around, and puts a new stack in my boss’s inbox. Mary sighs and begins mumbling again, and I allow myself a moment of indecision and despair over those papers that will get stuck in that middle processing folder, waiting for the hand allowed to move them to data entry. I watch our supervisor walk into her office and close the door, and I suddenly know that she’s practicing maneuvers with her whips and chairs.