Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Golden Girl
Hey Heather, in keeping with my “never break a blog-content promise you made on the bus” pledge, here’s a bit of the old making-it-up:
The stack of jaundiced envelopes flopped into her brown plastic tray, as they did four times daily. “Internal correspondence,” they all proclaimed in heavy letters across the top, followed by line after line of hand-scrawled senders and recipients, each envelope secured with a thread wound around two cardboard rivets.
She spent much of her days unwinding those threads, opening those envelopes, and filing their contents: countersigned originals, FYI cc.s, yes, but mostly file copies of innumerable NCR forms: blue file copies, pink ones, random versions in green or sienna or peach or canary or tangerine, and even the occasional lavender. She’d never created any of the originals herself. The contents of the pages she received were meaningless to her. All she did was file them. If someone ever needed one back, it had to be findable. She’d never heard of anyone needing to do so, of course. Once she closed the cabinet door on a piece of paper, it was as good as dead to her.
She rubbed her eyes, sighed, and reached for the new stack. It wouldn’t do to have a senior clerk stroll past and see them sitting there. Unwind, open, stack in order of how close the file cabinet was. Original. Blue copy. Tan copy. Cc. There were an even dozen this time and she’d opened 11 before she got to one that caught her attention.
The “to” line was just her first name; that was unusual. How had it reached her? She knew there were others at the corporation who shared her name; it was so common that she sometimes tried to hide behind it. The “from” line - was blank. That was just weird. She thought that Office Services didn’t even deliver internal mail that didn’t say who’d sent it; it was opened for sourcing and returned for label completion. There was something unusual about this envelope. She felt an inexplicable surge of excitement as she unscrolled the little thread and peered inside.
For a moment everything around her ceased to exist - her desk, the desks around her, the bullpen, the world. She just gazed into the envelope. It felt unreal, even as her incredulous fingers slid into its shaded confines to touch, withdraw, and gently grasp the single sheet it contained.
It was so thin and delicate she could almost see through it; the NCR write-through was crisp - yet spectral, as if written by a celestial finger dipped into the azure skies of dusk. She didn’t even realize she’d stood up until she heard the voice at the next desk break through her reverie from an unexpected angle. “What is that?,” the neighbor asked, but from the tone of her voice it was clear that she already knew.
“This… this is the goldenrod copy.” She’d tried to keep her voice controlled but the words carried of their own accord.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Sent to you?”
“Directly to me.”
“Don’t show it around.”
“Okay.”
“But - can I see it?”
“You can take a look, she replied with newfound steel in her spine, “but I’m not letting it out of my hands.”
By now a small crowd had gathered. “Goldenrod.... goldenrod....” the mutters fluttered around her. People who’d worked just a few desks away but had never so much as said hello to her were flocking close, their eyes sparkling with wonder and awe. “I’ve never seen one.” “Thought they were mythical.” “How did she get it?” “What will she do with it?” “Goldenrod.“
The mail boy was wheeling his cart back to the elevators, old mail delivered, new mail acquired. He was new and confused by the to-do. “What’s going on?,” he asked from the back of the crowd. “Is something wrong?”
A senior clerk, approaching retirement, face pasty from a life in the office, answered without looking at him. “Don’t be an idiot. You brought her the goldenrod copy. Things around here may never be the same. Now take off your damn hat and show some respect. You will never see a day like this again.”
And through it all, the file clerk stood in the midst of the throng, her face beaming and ethereal, her chest and chin uplifted, a single sheet of paper fluttering softly in her trembling hands as she cradled it under gentle HVAC breezes.
Good fun, that, wot? Got lots more in the ol’ book plus loads of new fodder like inexplicable ailments and funny names for foot fashions! Let’s see what the blog fairie brings us next time! Or not! I said you needed another layer with that skimpy jacket!
