I discovered the fairy propped up
against a colourful tower of sticky notes at the far end of my desk.
It was hidden at first behind a stack of files that I had been
neglecting to update, but revealed itself upon
my feeble attempt to create the illusion of a smaller workload
by dividing the pile into two.
I remember the ensuing moments
in a comically slow haze. I languidly
cocked my head to the side as I stared at
the tiny creature, motionless and unexpectedly dull next to the
fluorescent vibrancy of my sticky notes. It had an almost bat-like
appearance, dark and furry, with grotesque anthropomorphic features
in the form of a face, and arms, and legs. Its wings were milky-grey
and translucent, and currently fell in a wrinkled heap around the
tiny entity like a blanket of decaying chicken skin.
In a former life, I might have
recoiled. Let out a yelp of shock, jumped from my seat. But after six
years of working as a Quality Customer Experience Agent at Omninet,
the regional leader in mobile phone services, I could proudly say
that so long as I sat at that desk, nothing could surprise me. So I
didn’t waste time trying to convince myself of a reasonable
explanation. I simply thought to myself, “Well, that’s it. You’ve
gone off the deep end now, Tansy. Your years of coping with absurd
customer complaints through improbably high caffeine consumption and
casual drug use have finally rendered some part of your brain
permanently unable to operate on the normal human spectrum.”
I resigned myself to this fact and got
up from my seat, reaching for the mug I had picked up from the thrift
store after my first day on the job, which had loyally taken up
residence to the left of my keyboard ever since.
I had dropped out of college a couple
of months before Omninet called me to the ranks, so I didn’t have a
lot of money to pool towards
personalizing my desk space, but that receptacle for the dark nectar
of life was an investment I have never regretted. It is a simple mug:
a classic white cylinder with a handle that extends from the top of
the mug to the very bottom, enabling the user to comfortably grip the
cup in a secure, four-finger manoeuvre. Its glossy exterior bears a
picture of a specific human bone and big, blue block letters that
read, “I FIND THIS HUMERUS”. It’s become such a natural part of
my working environment that the text is almost invisible to me now,
but I still let out a chuckle every time I happen to make sense of
the words.
This is my life.
Mugs. Corny jokes. Ordinary things that seem mundane, but in fact are
not, because their apparent ordinariness is a human imposition based
on the frequency of their appearances in a given culture. Take that
tower of sticky-notes on my desk. There are thirteen layers of
varying thickness in six different shades – pink, green, blue,
orange, white and purple. A staple of the Western office environment,
yet, there is nothing natural about this item, and its place on my
desk, or any other desk in any other office for that matter.
Certainly, it serves a useful purpose – temporary physical notation
to alert the user of something relevant to the object or document to
which it is attached – but need it come in a rainbow of colours?
Need it come in a myriad of shapes, sizes, and even textures? There
are traditional yellow square notes, semi-transparent plastic flags,
neon pink abstractions, blue rectangles fanned out in a spiral that
beg you to whisper “He loves me” whenever you pluck a petal from
the papery bouquet... There are even companies that will create
custom sticky notes that can display anything from a washed-out stock
photo of running wild horses to a portrait of your grandmother.
Call me crazy, but I find that
interesting.
This supernatural stuff? This was out
of my league. At least while sober.
I walked into the lunch room and poured
myself a fresh cup of coffee. I gulped
back about half of that and then emptied the rest of the pot into my
mug. Freshly wired, I made my way back to the cubicle.
When I returned, I couldn’t help but
notice that the illusion persisted.
At second glance, the thing was perhaps
not as hideous as I had originally perceived. Its upturned snout was
actually rather dainty, its long eyelashes feathery, and even the
chicken-skin wings, in life, might have been silvery and beautiful.
But I was fairly certain that this creature had not been alive for
quite some time. Hours, if not days.
As I gazed in curiosity, as much in
regards to my own condition as the condition of what appeared to lie
before me, it suddenly occurred me that my line was ringing. This
occurrence came in the form of my floor manager, Carl, who had walked
up to my cubicle and tapped my shoulder before calmly stating,
“Tansy, your line is ringing”.
Carl was only a few years older than
me, but he had been working for Omninet since he was 16 years old,
and the years of front-line customer service had taken a toll on his
appearance. His hairline was retreating from his forehead like a
waxing crescent moon, his belly was increasingly rotund, and his
promotion to manager had been accompanied by an underwhelming
moustache that he refused to acknowledge with anything but pride.
However, all these things combined served to enhance a fatherly,
jovial appearance that was well suited to his personality. Carl and I
had become good friends over the years, and I enjoyed working for
him.
“Carl, what’s that on my desk over
there?”
“You mean the stack of files I asked
you to update by last Tuesday?”
“No. Past that.”
“It’s a tower of rainbow sticky
notes.”
“Anything else?”
“3 pairs of scissors, one of which
has my initials on the handle.”
“Right, you can have those back.”
He picked up the scissors. “What’s
this about?”
He couldn’t see it. He could
acknowledge everything around the lifeless fairy creature, but the
creature itself did not seem visible to him. I considered what my
possible courses of action might be. It seemed that the likely
outcome was as I had originally suspected – I was experiencing some
sort of sudden-onset hallucinogenic mental illness. But I couldn’t
help but wonder for a moment whether it truly was an illusion, or
whether I had simply managed to pick up a visual signal that only
seemed invisible to an office drone who was accustomed to pay mind
solely to the collection of strange artifacts that make up his
working habitat. What should I do next? What could I tell Carl?
I took my mind back to Client
Interaction training. The key to any good customer service experience
is an approach of understanding. In difficult situations, the best
thing to do is to clearly explain your interpretation of the problem
to the customer, acknowledge their feelings, and ask them what they
want as a solution.
So that’s what I did.
“Carl, I see a dead fairy on my desk.
I know that sounds crazy and I don’t expect you to understand
entirely, but I needed you to know so we can decide how to move
forward.”
“A dead fairy?”
“Well, I think it’s dead. It looks
dead.”
He looked at me quizzically, and didn’t
turn back towards the sticky notes. There was concern in his eyes,
for me as a friend, but it was gradually being buried by a mask of “I
don’t have time for this”.
“I think you should take some time
off, Tansy. I’ll find someone to cover you for the rest of the
week. Let me know if you need longer.”
“Maybe that’s best.”
“Ask someone in Security if you need
help getting home, and make sure you have someone to check up on
you.”
“Thanks, Carl. I’ll do that”.
“I’m late for a managers meeting.
We’ll talk soon.”
“Sounds good.”
And then he walked off, at an unusually
frantic pace.
I wondered if my condition was
contagious.
I turned
my attention now towards logging off of the phone system, shutting
down my computer and packing up my meager supplies. I polished off
the contents of my humerus mug and left it on the desk. I’d wash it
when I got back.
Then I thought of something else.
Sliding over to the area beside my stack of files, I leaned in close
to the infected area of my vision. I brought my face within inches of
the tiny life form and stared at it dead on. The image was constant,
unwavering. I reached for a pencil and slowly directed it,
eraser-first, towards the fairy-bat. My hand started to quiver as I
drew closer and closer, aiming for a section of torso covered by the
flaccid wing.
Splllrghffff.
In reality, there was probably no
detectable sound from the impact between eraser and wing, but in my
head, it was amplified to stereo volume.
I pushed at it. I felt the resistance
of object against object. I saw the textures of its body bend and
move with the pressure of my pencil probing this way and that. If
this was a trip, it was some trip.
I slid back to the other side of my
desk and grabbed my lunch bag, pulling out a Tupperware container and
emptying the dry salad into the garbage before lining it with a
handful of tissues from the box I keep on top of my computer tower.
That should be about the right size.
I shimmied back to the spot beside the
files and hesitated a moment. My last experiment suggested that this
was more than a hazy mirage – this was something that I could
touch, and feel. If I took it home with me, took a long nap, maybe I
would open the container again and find a pen, a banana peel, or
nothing at all. If the little fairy-bat was still there... well, I’d
cross that bridge when I came to it. But if I left it here on my
desk, and returned to find it gone, I’d always have to wonder if it
was ever really there. I had to take it with me.
I looked once more at the tiny coffin I
had prepared. I was almost entirely sure that the thing, if it really
existed, was dead, but there was still something unsettling about
placing it in an airtight container. I grabbed my other pair of
borrowed scissors and stabbed a few jagged holes in the plastic lid.
I considered how to transfer the body.
I considered leveraging it between two file folders but that seemed
imprecise and, well, a little tactless. If you’re going to dump a
body into a Tupperware container, you want to treat that body with
respect.
I settled on a blanket of tissues and
my bare hands.
I felt a shudder course through my
entire body as I wrapped my hands around the cold, limp figure. Its
eyes were shut as if it were settled into a deep slumber. It might
have looked peaceful, but any colour that might have been present in
its small, fuzzy face was drained entirely. I gently lowered it into
the pillowy tissue cradle and blanketed
its body, hesitating once more to examine its face before I snapped
on the lid. I wanted to remember it in fine detail, even if it was a
figment of my own imagination. I had never considered myself to have
any exceptional artistic vision, but if this was all in my head, then
I was clearly loaded with untapped potential.
With the lid secured and the container
packed carefully level above the rest of my belongings, I finally
said goodbye to my little slice of routine for an undetermined period
of time and walked in the opposite direction Carl had gone, past the
lunch room and out the doors.
To be continued...
