Dexter James reached over to swat the off button on the alarm clock. He missed, sending the damned instrument of torture to the floor, where it continued to blast its infernal noise. He reached down and grabbed the clock. He fumbled with it for a few seconds before finding the switch that turned off the offensive noise.
He sat up on the edge of the bed and wiped the sleep from his eyes, thinking that he could use another half-hour of sleep. Six in the morning seemed to come too early in the day. He wasn't a morning person. The fact of the matter was that he wasn't a night person anymore, either. He was a tired person, who just wanted a full night of sleep.
His wife of eighteen years, Janet, moved on the other side of the bed. He knew exactly what she was doing despite the fact that he didn't turn to watch her. She rose from the bed and headed to the bathroom. Dexter ran a hand along the back of his neck and then yawned.
His wife exited the bathroom and said, "It is all yours."
"Thanks, honey," Dexter replied. He looked over at the alarm clock wondering how six minutes had passed since it had gone off. He unplugged his cell phone and blackberry that had been charging on the night table. He rose from the bed and headed towards the bathroom. As had become habit forced by necessity, he carried the cell phone and blackberry with him.
Seated on the toilet, he checked the emails on his blackberry that had arrived since going to bed the night before. There were a dozen of them, but only two required his immediate attention.
The first was a notice that Glenn's wife had gone into labor and had been taken to the hospital. Glenn wasn't going to be in work that day. Dexter stared at the message thinking about what it meant for him. Glenn didn't actually work directly under him; he worked for Jim, but Jim didn't have the authority to approve days off for his people.
He sighed and said, "Fuck."
He typed out a message that Glenn should take a personal day today, but that he should check with Jim to see if he would be needed in the office tomorrow. Dexter knew that Jim's project was behind schedule. He copied the email to Jim to let him know that Glenn wouldn't be in that day.
The second email informed him that one of the programmers had located a bug in the program he was supporting and had corrected it. The programmer's direct supervisor wanted to know when he could upload the modification to the production system. Shaking his head, Dexter responded with an email that the modified software had to go through system testing before being uploaded to the production machine.
Everyone knew that code had to go through system testing before it could be put into production, but the company had two measures of performance for developers. One was the total number of defects reported in a year. The other was in terms of how long it took between identifying that a defect existed and getting a fix for it in place.
In a strange twist of corporate logic, uploading a buggy fix looked better than taking an extra day to actually fix the problem. People had learned that they could reduce the official count of defects by putting more than one problem on the same report. As a result, uploading a buggy fix didn't increase the number of reported defects. It was impossible to hide how long it took to fix a defect. The day's delay forced by putting the patch through system test would make the numbers look bad for everyone, particularly if the defect hadn't been corrected.
Dexter responded that the code had to go through system test. As a result, the programmer should double check that the defects had been fixed and then send it over to system testing.
Dexter finished his physical business on the toilet. He set down his cell phone and went into the shower thinking that it was going to be a long day. He could imagine the set of emails that would be exchanged with the programmer and project led over the course of the day. His phone rang while he was washing his hair. He let it go to voice mail, wishing that just once he would get to finish his morning shower without a phone call.
Getting out of the shower, he dried off with a towel. Once his hands were dried, he picked up the cell phone and listened to the voice mail. As he had expected, it was a call from his boss. While the message was playing, the blackberry chimed that it had another email. He continued to dry off while listening to the message from his boss. It was the typical morning ten-minute message in which his boss rambled from one topic to the next, while driving to the office for an early start to the day.
Once he was dry, Dexter picked up the blackberry and read the email that had arrived. It was from the programmer telling him that he was going to be late to the office since he had worked through the night. While reading the message, another email arrived. Dexter replied to the first email that it was okay. He read the second email discovering it was from the programmer wondering why he hadn't responded to the first email yet. Dexter swore and said, "Give me a fucking minute, asshole."
The voice mail from his boss came to a distracted end with the message to call the man back as soon as possible. Dexter muttered, "I'll call back when I've finished shaving."
Picking up the electric razor, Dexter went to work removing his stubble. His phone rang about halfway through the process of shaving. He fumbled with the phone one handed and answered, "Hello."
"I was expecting you to call me back," Mark said.
"I just finished listening to your message," Dexter replied. This was a conversation that he had almost every morning with his boss.
"I called you fifteen minutes ago," Mark said.
"It was fifteen minutes long," Dexter said. He heard Mark honking his horn at another driver.
Mark said, "Would you stop shaving? I can barely hear you over the razor."
Irritated at not being able to finish his shave in peace, Dexter turned off his razor and said, "Okay, it is off. I wish you would wait to call until after I finish my shit, shower, and shave."
"You need to get up earlier," Mark said. Dexter could hear his shout, "Stay in your lane, fuck head. Where did you get your driver's license – a cracker jack box?"
"You're going to get killed if you keep using your cell phone while driving," Dexter said. Of course, he was on his cell phone through most of the drive to work.
"I just wanted to remind you to give Sid a call. He has a conference call with the English group at nine," Mark said. He then proceeded to remind Dexter of all of the things that Sid needed to cover during the conference call. Of course, there was going to be a group presentation at eleven to cover what had been discussed in the conference call.
Dexter was regretting his decision to have Sid make the presentation. Sid worked for Jim who worked for Dexter. Mark objected to such a low level person giving a presentation to a customer. Dexter had argued that since Sid was the person who had designed the system that it should be Sid who presented it to the customer. Mark felt Sid shouldn't been seen by the customer despite the fact that Sid had been working with the customer for six months. Instead, he believed Dexter should give the presentation to the customer with Jim present in case there were any questions that he couldn't answer.
Dexter stood in the bathroom listening to a repeat of the previous call while staring in the mirror with a half shaved face. It was rapidly approaching the time when he should be calling Sid and he still hadn't finished with his shave. He pressed the mute button on his cell phone and resumed shaving. He had to pause occasionally and respond to questions. His boss finally completed the call about the same time Dexter finished his shave.
He checked his blackberry and saw that another email had arrived. He brought up the email and saw that it was from Sid wanting him to call in order to discuss when they could go over the presentation. Mark had told Jim to have Sid call Dexter to go over the presentation.
Dexter swore, "I wish that we could just let the engineers present the engineering without having a bunch of fuckers riding on his back. What in the hell am I supposed to do? Change the fucking drawings at the last minute?"
Grabbing the blackberry and cell phone, Dexter returned to the bedroom and started getting dressed for the day. He was pulling on his pants when the cell phone started ringing. Ignoring the cell phone, he swore, "I'm already working and I haven't even finished dressing."
Picking up the cell phone, he listened to the voice mail from Sid. The guy was nervous about his presentation that morning and wanted to go over it. Mark, who was three levels above Sid, had told the poor guy that he was concerned about his ability to present something technical to a customer. Sid was hoping that Dexter could come into the office early. Listening to the request, Dexter said, "I go early to the office every fucking day."
Dexter unplugged the Bluetooth earpiece from the charger and stuck it into his ear. He dialed Sid and headed to the kitchen. He discussed the presentation with Sid while watching his wife prepare breakfast. She was talking to someone on her cell phone using her Bluetooth earpiece to free up her hands so that she could work in the kitchen. He was pretty sure she was talking with her contact in Ireland who was handling the billing for the company she worked for. They had three early morning conference calls a week.
She nodded to him and pointed down the hallway as a reminder to make sure that the two kids were awake. Nodding his head in acknowledgement, he poured a cup of coffee. It was 0635 and his day had already begun.
Still talking to Sid, Dexter walked down the hallway knocking on the kids' bedroom doors to wake them. He rattled the doors until the kid inside yelled that he or she was awake. Once the kids were awake, he returned to the kitchen.
It was a typical breakfast with him talking on his cell phone to someone at work, his wife talking to the team in Ireland on her cell phone, his daughter, Sarah, talking to one of her friends on her cell phone, and his son, Will, playing a video game. He sent out a message on his blackberry to one of the people working for him requesting that they double check to make sure that a conference room had been reserved for that morning's meeting. While he had been typing the email, a new email arrived with the agenda for the late morning status meeting for one of the other projects. He forwarded that email to the members of the team.
After finishing his breakfast, he looked over at his wife. She was still engaged in her conference call. He had finished his call with Sid. Sending an air kiss to his wife, he headed out the door while composing a text message to his wife telling her to have a good day. He knew that she would see it when she finished with her call.
He fielded two more calls from his boss, one from a project lead, and one from another developer complaining about the project lead while driving to the office. The traffic was typical for a Monday morning: it was an eighteen-mile long metal snake, from his home to his office. In each car, people were talking to invisible listeners. At one point, he looked at the radio in the car and wondered why they bothered putting radios in cars, anymore.
The office was filling with people by the time he reached the place. With his position in the company he actually had a real office with a door that closed rather than a cubicle. His office didn't have a window since he was still pretty low in the management chain. Of course, it didn't feel like he was that low. He was overseeing ten software projects that encompassed nearly sixty people along with three outsourcing contracts to firms in India and China. Seven years ago, he had been overseeing five projects until downsizing (upper management had called it 'rightsizing') had doubled his workload without a promotion or an increase in his salary. It was a lot of responsibility, but he did not have much authority.
The company had taken delegating responsibility without authority to an extreme level. Every decision he made had to be approved two levels up in the company. Every decision by one of his project leads had to be approved by him and his boss. Every technical decision by one of the engineers had to be approved by the project lead and him. It added an administrative burden to a workload that was already too great.
Settling into his desk, he booted up his computer. Watching it run like molasses in wintertime, he shook his head in disgust. Even with all of his responsibilities, he didn't have a secretary. Nothing irritated him more than the fact that he had to do office work in addition to the work of an engineer. The machine, he still tended to view them as glorified calculators, had entered the workplace and replaced secretaries.
Despite what anyone might say, the computer was a very poor substitute for a skilled office worker. It took him nearly as long to properly format a report as it took him to write it. He spent hours a week tracking down people to get the raw data for his reports, fusing the data into a coherent form, and generating a report that probably wouldn't get read by anyone in management.
When the computer finally finished booting, he opened his email program and sent out his Monday morning call for time sheets. After hitting the send button, he muttered, "I didn't go to college to do this crap."
Sid knocked on the door and said, "I'm ready to go over the presentation."
"Where is it?" Dexter asked.
"On the shared drive," Sid answered.
"Where on the shared drive?" Dexter asked thinking that it was going to be a long day.
His telephone rang simultaneously with the ding on his computer letting him know that an email had arrived.
One of the engineers knocked on his door. He needed a pen, and Dexter was in charge of office supplies since engineers and project leads couldn't be trusted with unlimited access to pens and paper. It wasn't Dexter's decision. It was a corporate policy. Dexter waved him over to the office supply cabinet, which took up too much room in his cramped office, and returned to working with Sid.
Dexter spent the rest of the day in meetings. It was impossible for him to give his complete attention to the topic under discussion. His blackberry kept chirping with emails that absolutely positively had to be answered immediately. Of course, those critical emails were hidden amongst the nearly sixty emails generated by the time sheet program.
In addition to emails, there were calls from his boss and other important people that had to be answered. Voice mail was not an option, particularly with regard to his boss. As a result, he was popping in and out of meetings like a Jack-in-the-box. The meetings would either continue on without him, or have to stop until he finished dealing with the caller.
Lunch was a working meeting consisting of stale sandwiches that had been made early that morning and left to sit around until delivered to the conference room. Dexter didn't take any of the cole slaw. He'd had a bad experience with it, once, in the past. The potato chips were soft from having sat out most of the morning. The best part of lunch, had been the pickles, but they had left him with a stomachache, having aggravated the sour sensation in his stomach that had resulted from drinking too many cups of coffee.
By mid-afternoon, Dexter's stomach was tied up in knots. He was popping 'pink pills' (the pill form of the pink liquid stomach stuff, to settle his stomach) and aspirins to fight off his headache. The aspirins aggravated his stomach, which required more pills. He was getting low on pink pills.
The last meeting of the afternoon finished after five. He went to his office to deal with the emails that required data that wasn't available on his blackberry. He had just sat down at his desk when his boss called him on his cell phone. Confident that he knew what the call was about, he answered, "Hello, Mark."
Mark said, "Dexter ... you son of bitch! He cut me off..."
"What?" Dexter asked trying to disambiguate comments about the other drivers, from the business content of the call.
"I wanted to remind you to call up the group in India at nine this evening to get a progress ... You damn bastard ... Get in your fucking lane, asshole..." Mark shouted. He continued, saying, "Anyway, call them about nine."
"You don't need to remind me," Dexter said.
This was a scheduled weekly call. He even called on his vacations. The only time he had missed the call, had been the time he'd had a bad case of food poisoning.
"Sure I do. Don't you remember that time you didn't call them," Mark said.
"I didn't forget. I was puking in the toilet. I had food poisoning," Dexter replied irritated by the charge that he had forgotten to call them. Every week it was the same damned thing.
"They were insulted," Mark said. "You should have called them to let them know you were sick."
"I was too sick to call," Dexter shouted.
He could imagine how insulted they would have been listening to five minutes of him barfing in the toilet.
"That kind of attitude will ... Oh you mother fucker. Fucking Asian drivers ... God damn it ... Go back to China and don't come back until you learn how to drive," Mark shouted.
"One of these days you're going to die," Dexter said.
There was a ding on his cell phone letting him know that he had a text message.
Mark said, "I'm supposed to give a presentation to the Director on the status of all my projects. I need a fifteen minute presentation on your projects first thing in the morning."
"I'll update the one that I gave you last week," Dexter said staring at the clock on his desk.
"They didn't like the colors you used on the pie charts. Change them," Mark said.
"How about yellow, purple, pink, and orange?" Dexter asked trying to come up with the most awful color scheme he could imagine.
"That sounds okay," Mark said. "Quit riding your brakes ... oh shit!"
"Did you hit him?" Dexter asked.
He could hear the squealing of brakes over the phone. His blackberry chirped that he had a new email message. His desktop computer dinged letting him know that he had a new email message. There was the ding that let him know that someone had sent him a message on the chat program. He knew without looking that one of the developers was trying to get in touch with him.
"The son of a bitch cut in front of me and slowed down," Mark said.
Dexter could picture the man making obscene gestures at the other driver.
Dexter said, "I'll get to work on the presentation. Anything else?"
"Call India, tonight," Mark said.
"Right," Dexter said.
He checked the email on his desktop. One of the people in charge of the nightly build was complaining that some of the developers hadn't checked their code in yet. He replied that they should call the developer and get them to check the code into the source code control system.
He got that message every night.
Mark said, "I better call Scott and get him to work on his presentation for tomorrow."
Scott was another manager at Dexter's level. Mark spent most of his time making calls to the managers under him.
"I'll see you tomorrow," Dexter said.
"Don't forget India!" Mark said before hanging up.
Dexter hung up the phone and said, "Fuck you."
He checked the text message that had come in while he had been on the phone. It was a message from his wife asking him to pick up some milk on the way home from the office. He texted back to her, that he would be working late. She texted that he should still get some milk.
It was nearly seven before Dexter finally left the office. He was driving home when he got a text message from his wife letting him know that there were leftovers of Chinese takeout on the counter next to the microwave oven.
He stopped at the grocery store, picked up a gallon of milk and a jar of the pink pills. He hated going to the store, ever since they had put in the self-checkout lines. He remembered when they used to have checkers and bag boys. One of his friends in high school, had had a part-time job as a bag boy. He used to tell stories about horny housewives showing their tits to him by leaning over and letting him look down their blouses.
He remembered that stores used to give out S&H Green Stamps. As a kid, he used to help his mother paste them into books. She'd save up a couple of books and then cash them in for some item at the S&H Green Stamp store. He wondered when the stores stopped giving them out.
Interacting with the self-checkout stations always irritated him. They had one person there, who ran from station to station whenever their was a problem. It seemed to Dexter that there was always a problem.
He muttered, "I didn't go to college so that I could have a part-time job at the grocers as a checker and a bag boy. The thing that really pisses me off, is that they don't pay me for doing the work."
He could imagine some asshole arguing that point with: 'They are paying you by lowering the prices.' He thought that argument was a load of bullshit. Considering the quantity of merchandise that passed through the store every day, he figured the cost per item for having a checker was a fraction of a cent. He didn't see that he was getting a discount per item by doing all the work himself.
After leaving the grocery store, he stopped at the gas station. He pulled up at one of the pumps and got out of his car. He ran a credit card through the machine and then started filling the tank of his car.
While standing there looking stupid, he remembered when, as a high school student, he'd had a part-time job as a gas attendant at an Esso Station. He pumped the gas, checked the air pressure in the tires, checked the oil, checked the level of washer fluid, and washed the windows. He reminded people when they needed to have an oil change and to get their car inspected.
Those days of 'full service' were long gone. Even if he went to the full service island, they just pumped the gas unless he explicitly asked them to check the oil and to wash the windows. It definitely wasn't 'service with smile.'
The attendants in the full service line couldn't even check the air pressure in his tires. The stations had removed the air hoses from around the pumps. If he wanted to check his tires, he would have to pull over to the air station. If his tires were low, he would have to pay fifty cents to put air in them ... and he'd have to fill the tires himself. Air used to be free.
While topping the tank, he muttered, "I went to college so that I wouldn't have to work at a gas station."
Upon returning home, he put the gallon of milk in the refrigerator, and the plate of Chinese food in the microwave. While the food was getting nuked, he texted his wife to find out where she was. She texted back that she was shopping with their daughter. He figured she would be home about the time he got on his conference call with India.
Sitting at the table, he stared at his reheated Chinese takeout meal.
He muttered, "My Dad used to get home at five thirty, and would have a hot meal waiting for him. What the fuck am I doing wrong?"