(no subject)
Sep. 16th, 2003 11:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labrujahWalter left the building and stepped into the blinding sun. It must have been a hundred degrees, easy. It wasn't much cooler inside the department of labor offices, where he had been sitting in a long row of plastic chairs, filled with a long row of people filling out the simple worksheet with the yellow pencils they handed out.
Essentially, the sheet asked if you were working or not. You checked a box. Then you went up to the counter and handed it in to the tired but patient person there -- they ranged from a middle-aged lady with a wart and secretary blouse to a young guy with a beard to an older black man with a white beard and inexplicably, a sweater vest.
Walter had shown up not knowing what was going to happen. Would they take him aside to question him? Quiz him about why nobody had hired him on the three job interviews he had gone on? Did they need his bank statement or the carbon of his rent check? He had worn a tie just in case, and a short-sleeved oxford shirt, which was now damp in the back in an oval that was surely visible.
It turned out that nobody particularly cared about his interviews. There were about thirty people ahead of him and fifteen or so behind him, all waiting and sitting in the little school desks. One woman had brought her daughter who sat on the floor by her feet, coloring, fluffy pigtails aloft. Another woman talked loudly on her cellphone, despite the "No Cellphones" sign tacked at the front of the room. Walter had a magazine to read which he had picked up in the lobby of his building. He was trying to keep it looking new but it was already folded longways a couple times and had a few water spots from somewhere.
The last place Walter worked was an architectural salvage warehouse. Bits and pieces of the big old mansions, skyscrapers, restaurants and even barns would come in every day, sinks and mirrors and backsplashes and chandeliers and floor tiles. Sometimes these pieces would be so gorgeous, so perfect and beautiful -- a single cracked crystal dangle, a pink tile with a curved edge, a length of egg-and-dart moulding -- that Walter would want nothing more than to have it. He would get a little warm and be sure someone had noticed his strange reaction already and look around, but nobody would, absorbed as they were in their own tasks, driving forklifts or answering the phones. He would look at it again and touch it and move it somewhere nonchalantly, as if he was just getting it out of the way, but move it somewhere hidden, a special place where he could come back for it later and wrap it in his jacket and try to walk out quickly without running into anybody.
Of course sooner or later they had to lay some people off, and it was a family business so the non-family workers went first, and Walter's acting kind of jumpy for no obvious reason had never helped his popularity around the place. And he had ended up there, in the stuffy flourescent-lighted school-like labor department building, waiting on line sitting down on the hottest day of the year so far.
Essentially, the sheet asked if you were working or not. You checked a box. Then you went up to the counter and handed it in to the tired but patient person there -- they ranged from a middle-aged lady with a wart and secretary blouse to a young guy with a beard to an older black man with a white beard and inexplicably, a sweater vest.
Walter had shown up not knowing what was going to happen. Would they take him aside to question him? Quiz him about why nobody had hired him on the three job interviews he had gone on? Did they need his bank statement or the carbon of his rent check? He had worn a tie just in case, and a short-sleeved oxford shirt, which was now damp in the back in an oval that was surely visible.
It turned out that nobody particularly cared about his interviews. There were about thirty people ahead of him and fifteen or so behind him, all waiting and sitting in the little school desks. One woman had brought her daughter who sat on the floor by her feet, coloring, fluffy pigtails aloft. Another woman talked loudly on her cellphone, despite the "No Cellphones" sign tacked at the front of the room. Walter had a magazine to read which he had picked up in the lobby of his building. He was trying to keep it looking new but it was already folded longways a couple times and had a few water spots from somewhere.
The last place Walter worked was an architectural salvage warehouse. Bits and pieces of the big old mansions, skyscrapers, restaurants and even barns would come in every day, sinks and mirrors and backsplashes and chandeliers and floor tiles. Sometimes these pieces would be so gorgeous, so perfect and beautiful -- a single cracked crystal dangle, a pink tile with a curved edge, a length of egg-and-dart moulding -- that Walter would want nothing more than to have it. He would get a little warm and be sure someone had noticed his strange reaction already and look around, but nobody would, absorbed as they were in their own tasks, driving forklifts or answering the phones. He would look at it again and touch it and move it somewhere nonchalantly, as if he was just getting it out of the way, but move it somewhere hidden, a special place where he could come back for it later and wrap it in his jacket and try to walk out quickly without running into anybody.
Of course sooner or later they had to lay some people off, and it was a family business so the non-family workers went first, and Walter's acting kind of jumpy for no obvious reason had never helped his popularity around the place. And he had ended up there, in the stuffy flourescent-lighted school-like labor department building, waiting on line sitting down on the hottest day of the year so far.
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no subject
Date: 2003-09-16 11:36 pm (UTC)afterward, will he shake hands and walk slowly backwards out of the office so that the interviewer doesn't see the oval sweat patch on the back of his shirt?
will he pocket the tiny copper tiger paperweight on the interviewer's desk, if he feels it did not go well?!
MORE! MORE!!!
no subject
Date: 2003-09-17 07:17 am (UTC)