Day One of the Rest of It

The invitation arrived at 8:51 on a Tuesday with no agenda and a title that said only “Quick sync.” By 9:05 the eleven years were over and the laptop had stopped accepting the password.

There were four faces on the call. None of them was the manager. One was a woman from People Operations who read from a document and did it well, in the sense that a person reading a hard thing carefully is doing something kind. Two were silent for the whole fourteen minutes. The fourth was a lawyer, though nobody said so.

“I kept waiting for the part where they explained it,” he said. “There isn't a part where they explain it. There is a part where they tell you the date your health insurance ends, and that part is very precise.”

The reason given, in the aggregate and to the press rather than to him, was automation of back-office workflow. The team of nine had built, maintained and personally apologized for the escalation process that eight hundred thousand customers ran through every quarter. The process remains. The nine do not.

What surprised him was not the ending. It was the calendar, which for a week afterward continued to remind him of meetings he could no longer attend, in an account he could no longer open, for a company that had removed his badge photo from the directory by lunchtime the same day.

“You spend a decade being the person who knows where everything is,” he said. “Then you're the person standing in the parking lot holding a plant.”

The fern, which survived two building moves, a flood on the third floor and an entire summer in which nobody watered anything, has entered visible decline since relocating to a windowsill with actual sunlight and an owner with actual time.

“I water it now. I talk to it. I moved it twice for the light,” its owner said. “It was happier when it was ignored under a ceiling tile, which I feel is a message aimed directly at me.”

Horticulturalists say abrupt changes in light are a common shock, and that a plant acclimated over six years to weak, unvarying fluorescence will read direct morning sun as damage rather than as a promotion. The correct procedure is apparently to introduce the new light over several weeks, in stages, which is advice that arrived on day eleven.

There is a second theory, offered by a neighbor with an aggressive and thriving balcony, which is that the fern is fine and is being killed by attention. Under this reading the watering is the problem, the relocations are the problem, and the fern's six-year run of institutional neglect was not neglect but a stable equilibrium that a newly available man has now spent nine days destroying with enthusiasm.

He has been asked to stop touching it. He has agreed to stop touching it. He has, by his own admission, checked it twice since agreeing.

The fern declined to comment and has dropped four more fronds since this piece was filed.

Eleven drafts were produced between two and five in the afternoon. The first was honest. The last was employable. They had four words in common, and one of them was “grateful.”

It has since been seen by nine hundred people, forty of whom pressed a button and none of whom are hiring.