Welcome Friend

Welcome Friend

By Heather Ann Martinez

Words could not describe our distress. Our wonderful and most compassionate co-worker Julie took a new position in accounting upstairs. Now, our supervisor Marissa, warned us we would be getting a new person to fill Julie’s position on the team. Julie had been in her position for sixteen years. She practically ran the company. She knew what everyone did and whom to ask advice from. Who could replace Julie? No one, we thought. Bud, Mitch, Chloe, Sonya and I had been working with Julie for well over ten years. We started different days during the same month and have been friends ever since. We have movie night on Wednesdays and hang out at the bar on Fridays without fail. We attend each other’s neighborhood cookouts and participate in every chili competition at work every year. Mitch kept shaking his head as Julie took the last of her personal belongings to the elevator. We wished her the best. She was asked to take the accounting lead role. She was needed but the rest of us felt awkward about inviting her to future events. We didn’t really socialize with anyone in accounting. It just wasn’t done. The only other time I had to talk to someone in the accounting office was because a customer was incorrectly transferred to my queue. I had to tell Sylvia in accounting my name was Lanna not Laura Perkins. Laura Perkins worked in marketing. I worked in sales with my closest friends.

Granted, we had professional courtesies in the office. Outside of work, we all let our hair down. Bud is always our funny guy. He is the one to put fake spiders in your drawer or unscrew your swivel chair stem so that you fall backward just as you take your first phone call. Yeah, it is not fun trying to keep your composure when the customer is complaining about how one of our products backed up his toilet. Bud has literally pulled my chair out from under me a few times. Chloe and Sonya never laughed so hard. Other department supervisors came over and asked them to keep their noise level down. Clive, from the mailroom, said he even heard them carrying on, from two levels below. Mitch had a new joke every Tuesday and a new prank every Friday. Chloe and Sonya never stop talking about their kids. Julie was and is married to the company and I am just along for the ride. I wonder what the new person will be like. I’m about to find out. Our supervisor Marissa is walking around with someone. Her voice sounds like a squeaker toy. Here he is. Here is- how do you pronounce that? Lou-gene-air? No. Gustave Amir. It is French. He’s from Canada and he is a vegetarian. So, no steak and ale for him.

Gustave wore a suit with a nice tie and polished shoes. He was a child compared to the rest us. Granted, I’m a few years older than Chloe and Sonya. They are in their thirties. Gustave did not look a hair over twenty-one. Could we even invite him to a bar after work on Friday night? He is boyishly cute like a kid that sings in a church choir. What was he doing on a well-seasoned sales team. Granted, we were not the best sales team of any company in the United States but we pulled our daily quotas. Our managers used to tell us we set the standard for many in the industry. Now, we are babysitting junior. I only met him five minutes ago, and I already know he his not going to work out. I asked him if we could call him Gus. He said that was fine with him. I asked him about his background. All he came back with was where he went to university and his excellent marks in sales and marketing coursework. I gave him a headset and pulled a swivel chair next to my desk. I asked him if he had ever been in the chair. He looked at me with such curiosity through large, thick glasses. It dawned on me. He had never taken a sales call before. I looked at Mitch. Mitch pulled Gus’s chair to his desk and offered to let Gus listen to one of his calls. Mitch knew I had no patience for a newbie. We lost Julie to Gus. I still couldn’t believe it. I went to Julie’s office and pulled her into the nearest women’s rest room.

“Julie, they replaced you with a child! He’s going to ruin our team quota. We’re never going to get our team bonus check, our extra paid day off or...”

I was spinning and Julie knew it.

“Lanna, it’s not that bad. You’ll see. He’ll leave in a week. He will see it’s not for him and you can tell Marissa you don’t need anyone to replace me. Again. You, Bud and Mitch split most of the incoming calls anyway. Chloe and Sonya pretty much take turns calling in sick to take one of their kids to the doctor. It will all work out.”

Julie always has a way of calming me down. I thought a lot about it as I headed back down to my floor. Gustave Amir will be a figure of my imagination in a week’s time. For the first few hours of Gustave’s first day, I ignored him. At least, I tried to. He coughed a lot. He had a slight accent and he chewed on pieces of ice through every phone call he shadowed. Poor Mitch. I owed him a beer. He tried to make Gus laugh, but Gus didn’t seem to know or understand any jokes. I tried to offer him a beef jerky strip and he put his hand over his mouth and shook his head. Sonya reminded me he is a vegetarian. I forgot. I grabbed my half eaten bag of pretzels and offered him that instead. Chloe came over with diced apple slices and hummus. Gus smiled. Chloe gave me that motherly look as if to scold me for forgetting he is a vegetarian. She knew I wasn’t happy with Julie leaving our department. She later told me I could have been friendlier to Gus.

The next day, Sonya called in sick. Bud was making outbound calls and I was handling all of the customer service calls. Chloe was taking the inbound sales calls and Mitch was handling all of Sonya’s customers in addition to his own. Gus showed up in a polo shirt and dress slacks. He handed me a bag of beef jerky and gave Chloe a couple of apples. Gus sat with Mitch. Mitch scratched out some directions for taking calls. Gus was to start taking inbound calls in three days. This is why Julie thought he would leave. It’s a lot of pressure for someone who has never worked in phone sales as we all had. Gus listened to Mitch take phone calls. Mitch guzzled for cups of hot coffee, a jelly donut and some tortilla chips between calls. This was all before ten in the morning. Mitch was the king of eating very quickly. He never seemed to get caught chomping on a call. I often spit whatever I was eating into a napkin if I was on inbound. The call volume seemed higher than usual. Marissa said there were wildfires in California delaying our shipments. She said we could expect lots of calls from the West Coast.

As the calls continued to come in, Chloe, Bud, Mitch and I struggled to keep up. We all switched to inbound calls hoping to alleviate some of the overcrowding on our phone lines. Other office clerks offered to return calls left on our voicemails. We were grateful for the help. Marissa also started taking incoming calls from her office down the hall. By one in the afternoon, I had six customer profiles on my screen and ten calls holding. Gus was sitting next to Mitch. He seemed to be attentively listening as Mitch handled each call. Bud was holding his own. Chloe kept up but was glued to her screen. She didn’t notice when it happened. Bud said he heard something outside his headset but wasn’t certain what. I was so shocked; I didn’t know how to respond. Mitch was gagging. He was chocking on popcorn. He fell off his chair. Chloe immediately stood up as she was still on the phone with a customer. She didn’t look behind her. Bud didn’t hear or see anything that was happening right behind him. I froze. Mitch was lying on the ground and I was paralyzed. Gus looked at me and said to call for emergency services. I did as he directed. He then knelt down on the ground and moved popcorn pieces out of Mitch’s mouth with his finger. He rolled Mitch, who was twice his size, to one side. Gus applied pressure to Mitch’s stomach and a whole kernel of corn came flying out of Mitch’s mouth hitting Bud’s gym bag.

Mitch took a breath. Gus and I smiled. We thought the crisis was over but it was not. Mitch grabbed his left arm and started shaking. I knew he was having a heart attack. Marissa and Gus seemed to know what to do as I stood watching. I called the paramedics and couldn’t move beyond making that phone call. Chloe eventually turned around and started crying. The paramedics came and took Mitch away. I called Mitch’s wife and asked her to meet us at the hospital. Bud, Chloe and I sat in the hospital waiting room holding hands. We periodically looked at one another but looked more firmly at the cracks in the floor tiles. Mitch was in surgery. His wife had her face planted on the door to the operating rooms. I heard the outside emergency room doors automatically open and turned around to see Gus. I dusted off the seat next to mine and said to him, “Welcome friend.” I took Gus’s hand in mine. Our team waited for Mitch to come out of surgery.