Jennifer Tries to Leave the Office

Jennifer is trying to leave the office.

She has quit her job.

She has decided.

She has decided she’s quitting her job.

She has decided to pursue a passion.

She has not chosen a passion yet, but when she does, she will commit to it fully--with her whole heart--in much the same way she committed herself to designing tape dispensers, which is her sole function in this office.

The company she works for comes up with new looks for office supplies. They create angular and erratic appearances for things like dispensers and paper clip holders and the handles on scissors. It is a pedestrian place despite its unique ambition.

Jennifer started working at the company when she was twenty-three, right out of college, expecting to only be there a year or less while she made plans to travel and put together a book all about the different sorts of pelicans around the world. There are only eight types of pelican, but Jennifer felt like there should be more, and she felt confident that were she to dedicate some time to it, she could certainly discover at least three additional species.

The first year went by so fast, Jennifer worried her calendar was defective. Despite the office job not being her dream occupation, she still couldn’t help but do it with gusto. It turns out that gusto requires more time and energy than is available in the average day, and Jennifer found herself devoting less and less of herself to planning for the future she wanted rather than the present she tolerated.

Soon she was rising up the ranks and making a name for herself in the world of supply redesign. There was talk that she was the one the industry had been waiting for, and after two years, there were whispers that she would be charged with the field’s Everest--reimagining the copy machine.

Jennifer heard the rumors and dismissed them. Taking on a challenge as magnificent as writing the next chapter of copying should be done by someone with a conviction for the work, and that simply wasn’t her. Instead of going after promotions and project acquisition, she buckled down on her dispenser designs, and while that might have hindered growth for anyone else, her reluctance to be a rising star only propelled her into the stratosphere. It turns out that, similar to the performing arts and the political arena, resistant heroes are everyone’s favorite kind of heroes in the world of corporate aesthetics.

After her fourth year at Your Office ™ , Jennifer was made Project Manager on Big Copy, the codename for a journey that would last seven to eight years, and ultimately take twelve.

She told herself she could hop off at any time. That she was just one woman, and that, were she to leave to finally (Finally!) get going on the real purpose of her life, someone could step into her shoes without any great disruption. Then she watched as two and then three, and then more than three of her second-in-commands moved on to either better jobs at bigger companies or wild abandon the likes of which she had all but given up on for herself by the time her tenth year at the company arrived with a small party and a vegan marshmallow pomegranate cake in the break room.

Part of her surrender was the result of a weekend trip she’d taken to a pelican sanctuary the week before her ninth anniversary. She had been flirting with the idea of not returning from the trip, but rather, using it as the stimulus for a complete break with a life she never wanted, lucrative though it was. She had put away a good amount of money, and she could now reunite with the Jennifer she was before her days were consumed by discussions of how the collate button could be made more appealing to the 18 - 29 demographic.

When Jennifer arrived at the Pelican Palace, she instantly experienced the sinking feeling that comes from reaching that moment in any dream where the handsome movie star proposing to you turns out to be your 10th grade math teacher or when the puppy you’re playing with mutates into an oversized naked mole rat. A dream reminds you it’s a dream by turning into a nightmare, and that was the feeling that enveloped her when she paid her admission and made her way into the abrasive, faux wetland created by the local conservationist society.

Jennifer wasn’t sure how she had convinced herself that she was in love with pelicans when, in all reality, she hadn’t seen one in person until that very moment. She had read about them in books and thought they looked grotesque in a vulnerable way that required protection. She wanted to be the one who supplied that protection, having had a lifelong yearning to shelter hideous things from a vain world.

Once she found herself within a few hundred yards of the birds, she saw that there was nothing vulnerable or tender about them. In fact, they seemed quite capable of taking care of themselves, regardless of their numbers in the wild. There didn’t seem to be any need for her, and that fact was only confirmed by the staff at the sanctuary when she inquired about volunteering only to have a teenage girl smile kindly at her as she informed her that there was a waiting list just to come in and scrape the fish buckets.

Jennifer returned to the office that Monday and promptly dumped all her pelican paperweights into the garbage.

But like all decisions we’d like to make but won’t, Jennifer’s was made for her but unfortunate circumstances. Your Office ™ was acquired by Better Boardrooms ™ which had previously been acquired by Floors and Ceilings and Chairs Inc. All the employees minus two were let go, and Jennifer was not one of the two.

She tried to see this as a gift. Her life’s stagnation showed no signs of slippage, and a kick in the pants in the form of corporate moving and shaking was just what she needed to turn the page in what had become a rather dull book, one that featured chapter after chapter all about copy machine touchscreens. How did one’s memoir become an instruction manual? She wasn’t sure, but she was ready to write something else.

You may remember that at the beginning of this, we told you that Jennifer had quit her job. You may also remember that we told you Jennifer decided that she quit her job, and that is true.

She had decided that what happened was that she quit, and that was the story she was prepared to move forward with if anyone asked, even though no one ever would.

The actual story about Better Boardrooms ™ not only purchasing Your Office ™ and terminating everyone, but subsequently selling the building to Chipotle was not a story Jennifer could tell herself. On her last day in the building, everyone else had already cleared out. Desks and cubicle walls were removed. Bathrooms had “Out of Order” signs placed on their doors, even though they were still, mostly, in order. The ventilation system had been turned off and the electricity had been discontinued.

Still, Jennifer sat on the floor and tried to leave.

She gave herself every reason she could think of (and there were many) for why she needed to get up and get going. Her keycard shouldn’t even work anymore, but somehow, it had, and she had spent the better part of a Sunday sitting on the ragged carpet, hoping someone would come along and kick her out, but nobody would and nobody did.

That was the last we heard of her, because you lose touch with people you used to work with once you’re no longer toiling away on the same tasks day after day.

We know she tried to leave, but we don’t know if she ever left.

What we remember of her now is minimal, but vivid. The strongest memory would be of her disconnected nature. You’d be talking to her, and you could tell, her focus was on you, but her heart was not in discussing paper trays and inkjet. She was not the only one of us with wanderlust, but she was the only one who, given the chance, could subdue that lust, and put herself firmly in place.

Jennifer was a wonderful boss, and we wish her the best, but she was always somewhere else.

How strange then that when told she could go (Go, Jennifer, go!), she couldn’t.

That building is still there. Chipotle never moved in due to an argument with the local zoning board. The lights are still off and the signs are still on the bathroom doors.

Jennifer might be there too.

We wouldn’t know.

We don’t know.

We’d rather not know.

We’ve decided we’d rather not know.