Ed’s disability. Or rather, they were really helping themselves to Mike’s dis, which Ed had snapped up for the going rate (a bottle of Johnnie Walker) because he might as well get it over with. So now Ed was a bottle of Scotch down and someone else was helping himself to the proceeds.
Ed rattled the door.
Inside the stall, Roy had suddenly asked himself a question. Why was somebody trying to get in? There were five other stalls. You couldn’t tell him all five were now occupied. And the company didn’t have any disabled employees, which could only mean one thing: Someone had turned up expecting to find this, this obscenity within the disabled stall and in all probability make use of it.
What this meant was that Roy found himself in a quandary. If he opened the door, he could put a name to a face. He could identify a member of the workforce and challenge him and the whole sordid business would come out. That was obviously the responsible course of action. But there was just one problem.
If Roy opened the door, he would be the one who was actually in the stall with a naked half-woman. All the evidence would point to it being Roy who had turned up for this little rendezvous. It would be Roy’s word against whoever. There would be no actual proof that it was, in fact, the other man who had intended to use company time for R&R, and that Roy was just an innocent bystander who got caught in the crossfire.
Someone was pounding on the door with a fist.
Elaine, meanwhile, was wishing she had had time to pick up something to read.
The lightning rods had gradually accumulated a stash of magazines, but Elaine had read all the issues of People and Us Weekly and Mademoiselle and Elle and Marie Claire and Better Homes and Gardens at least once. People has never claimed to be War and Peace. It’s not really the kind of thing you keep reading and rereading, discovering new layers of meaning each time. It doesn’t pretend to be. Nor, for that matter, does Us Weekly. People don’t go back to the February 1999 issue of Mademoiselle and suddenly realize how much they missed the first time around because they were too young to understand. This is not a criticism—that’s what people like about them. But what this means is that if you’re stuck in a waiting room with back issues of People which you’ve already read you’re going to have a long wait. A wider range of preread magazines is not going to significantly improve the situation.
What this meant was that Elaine had time on her hands. She had a million things to do, the screen message had come at the worst possible time but then that’s men for you, if they have a choice between sex at a time when it’s convenient and sex when you have a million things to do they’ll go for the bad time every time. In this case, to be fair, the client hadn’t specifically picked her and she didn’t have to accept—she could have let someone else pick up the assignment. But then she’d just have had it hanging over her head for the rest of the day. If she’d waited she’d have ended up having to accept later in the day, probably at an even less convenient time. So when it had come up on her screen she’d thought Might as well get it over with. And now here she was, stuck, waiting for Rambo to get off the dime.
She found herself wondering, as she sometimes did, whether it was all worth it. Sure, the money was good, but who needs this kind of aggro?
The fact is, there’s no perfect job. You’re going to run into aggro whatever you do, so you might as well get paid for it. Most places just pretend the aggro doesn’t exist, why would they compensate you for working in an environment that’s just one big happy family, you’re lucky just to be working with such great people it’s not the money that counts it’s the people I don’t think so.
The important thing is just to be clear about your goals. If you go through a lot of extra aggro on a daily basis, and at the end of the year all you’ve got to show for it is a lot of clothes in your closet, don’t go looking for someone to blame if you spend what