Twelve: Document Review (07-25-2022)
With the sun rising slowly, the light beginning to break through the shades, the man sat in a nervous sweat. The clacking of keys, a quiet symphony growing stronger with each new arrival, began to eat away at the man's focus. On any day, the office would hardly be three quarters full, with many choosing to work from home and many more laid off in the last year. Despite low staffing, management insisted employees keep close contact, allowing no more than a cubicle between workstations. The nearest cubicle to the man was occupied by a recent hire, a moderately well-performing, suspiciously late-twenties state school graduate, whose sass and bravado impressed management, although her position was secured long before, when management realized the need for diversity to avoid discrimination in hiring practices lawsuits after a wave of layoffs.
For the man, a new hire in his proximity meant an opportunity to show leadership and act as a mentor, or whatever version of a mentor might exist in professional services. Today his novice neighbor was spending her first hour of work cleaning her hands, after spending the first fifteen minutes of overlap with the man's day making a remarkable effort to eat an orange at a volume louder than polite conversation. Now she was browsing a news site, between breaks to check her phone. The man knew if he waited any longer, he would sweat through his shirt, already stressed from his tumultuous commute, but haste was necessary. The documents he had sent her needed review by yesterday, and his dithering then had pushed this simple check-and-return task past its due date.
The morning quiet of the office presented a dangerous environment in which to confront this coworker. Every employee was beginning their day, silently checking their email, and everyone was in the bullpen, at their cubicle. No meetings had broken out, no one was out on lunch, everyone would hear him accuse his coworker of malaise and inaction. It is no further help to his case that she is the only black woman in the office, and one of two black employees altogether. However, Todd, a ten year veteran, talks and dresses very, say, corporate. A bald head and perfectly coordinated pants-and-shirt style makes him blend in with the rest of the very typical suburbanite office staff, a thought the man pushes away as teetering on discriminatory.
Perhaps no one in the office would notice, although the quiet meant they would undoubtedly hear. The man wrung his hands together, worrying more that his frustration with delays would cause him to assume a tone of anger despite the relatively low level of urgency. He was angry though, and the new hire's propensity for distraction, frequent phone use, and constant eating began to appear to the man as blatant and telegraphed disrespect. He was in her immediate surroundings, he had told her clearly the expected return date for the documents, and she knew he could see her not working. The man did not want to entertain the thought that she had forgotten, as his anger mounted and the need to place blame on her for the work's incompletion without giving her an opportunity to claim innocence became his priority.
A creak broke the man's spiraling annoyance, and he glanced over to see the woman digging in her desk drawer. A mess of papers, some folded, some crumpled, and some stapled in strange ways, none in folders, stuck out the top of the drawer. She found whatever she was looking for, ripped a page off the bag and crumpled it up, returning the discard to the drawer and the other to her desktop. Her focus then returned to her computer screen, where the front page of a different news site scrolled it headlines by. The paper she pulled out sat on her desk unbothered. An email popped up on the man's monitor at his workstation, turning his attention backed to the task at hand. "Document Review," from his boss's boss, forwarded to him as a reminder of the due date's late passing.
Perhaps, the man thought, the blame resided with the boss's boss, who insisted the review be completed on hardcopy, as he was too old and tech-illiterate to handle an electronic review. The speed of technology was outdone by the slowness of inexperience. No one in the office would blame the man for blaming the boss, and would even see it as another case of mismanagement and impossible expectations. Ultimately, however, the blame did not lie higher up the ladder, as hardcopy document reviews never took this long, and many other new hires were perfectly capable of handling them in time. A clean track record with other new hires made this new hire even more inadequate, but the risk of drawing even further attention to her uniqueness in the office only worried the man further.
The time had come. The man was ready to place aside his worry. His play would be to recontextualize any criticisms of his confrontational nature as the result of his frustration with obstinacy rather than racial prejudice, and the source of his frustration being urgency rather than, again, racial prejudice. No one would directly confront him about the issue, but they might tell HR of his behavior. The reminder of HR's existence only reignited the man's circular paranoia, as the HR department consisted of a single woman, an older, hardly devout Jew whose office was plastered with slogans for social causes and unorthodox declarations of religious affiliation. This outward display of politick did not bother the man usually, but were he to have to converse with her about accusations of discrimination, it would place him in a difficult bargaining position, and the environment would contribute to a state of worry producing an appearance of guilt.
Running his hands through his hair, scratching the back of his head, glancing from monitor to laptop to monitor to calendar, he wondered if there was a way to weasel out of the responsibility. He could direct the boss and the boss's boss to the woman directly, but doing so could cut him out of the mentoring process, and be an abandonment of duty that would reflect poorly at his forthcoming performance review. If his fellow employees found out, they might see the move as siccing management on her, with racial undertones. He wrung his toes in his shoes, gripping them again the leather insole. She wore flats, plush velour with gold embroidery. He diverted his eyes quickly away from her feet, then away from her altogether, hoping to avoid her attention until he was ready to approach.
The last employee walked in the door, the same woman who always arrived a few minutes late. With everyone here, the maximum audience was present. The man had no enemies or allies yet, and no clear path to winning anyone over. All present options would paint him poorly, and make him appear racially biased. It would be several hours yet for the office to clear out some, though he was already behind and already being pestered for completion. Luckily, he did not worry about having the woman present during the lunch hour, as she, without fail, ate her multi-course lunch at her desk, headphones in, TV show on her phone. He only needed the right way to get her attention.