It was dark and I flipped on the lights. The room illuminated the shelves and shelves and cupboards and cupboards of files that filled it. I moved over to my desk, a small wooden table with a chair, nothing personal on it to tell you that a human had sat here for seven years. I looked out of the slot in the wall that allowed my co-workers to push the job bags into the room without even seeing me. Or throwing through their hand-scribbled timesheets, the ones that I was meant to make sense of and input into the computer software program that calculated everyone’s working hours so we knew how much to bill each client.
I looked at the massive pile of job bags that had been pushed through in my absence. There were at least a hundred lying there. Maybe more. Papers had fallen out of them too, strewn across the floor like bits of litter. Hundreds of scraps of badly scribbled bits of paper, like dead butterfly wings, also lay spread out across the floor. I reached down and started picking up the endless job bags. The big brown envelopes that are stuffed to breaking point with the creative work and endlessly changing briefs for each client and job. It was my responsibility to file these bags in an order that made some sort of sense in case they needed to be pulled out again. And with over fifty creatives working in the building, each one of them working on as many as seven different jobs at a time, the amount of job bags that came through that hole in the wall was endless. Not to mention the hand-written scraps of paper, or sometimes, if I was lucky, typed pieces of paper. If you’d asked me what my job was yesterday, this would not have been it. Sitting in what was essentially a basement with a small single window close to the ceiling that looked out over the parking lot and hardly let any natural light in. Sometimes I got so panicky and claustrophobic in here that I had to pull a chair up to the wall, open the window, stick my head out and gulp in the fresh air. I was forced to do this pretty regularly. Everyone else in this office had space and air and light; I had none of those things.
“Here. It’s the latest bag for Craft Cola.” Suddenly a job bag slipped through the hole in the wall and fell onto the table below. I took it between my hands and looked down at it.
So, this was . . .
My job?
I looked over at the phone on my desk. I’d intended to call my parents the night before, but the strange lack of phone in my apartment had rendered it impossible. I dialed their number now, rather excited that I would soon speak to someone who had missed me, who had been worried about me and had noticed I was gone. Only, I was sorely mistaken . . .
I slipped the key into my apartment door. It was ten o’clock at night. It had taken hours and hours to get the job bags sorted and input all the numbers, and I wasn’t even finished yet. I walked into the apartment that still didn’t feel like mine, from a job that really didn’t feel like mine. The lights flicked on; the beige didn’t come to life. It sort of whisper-murmured with boring insipidness. I tossed my bag onto the sofa, but it was so hard that the bag bounced and hit the floor. It wasn’t even a comfortable sofa. I was starved, so went to the freezer and grabbed one of the meals inside it. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as it sounded. Maybe it would surprise me.
I popped it into the microwave and then made my way to the sofa and sat down. I turned the TV on and scanned my “To Watch” lists. Series after series after series stared back at me. They seemed to be a mix of two things. Shows about dating, and shows about murder. I had no idea what that said about me, but I think it definitely said something. There were no movies really; clearly, I preferred TV shows. I sat back on the uncomfortable couch and pressed play randomly on something, anything to help take me away from this reality. A TV show about people on the autism spectrum trying to date filled the screen and