Personnel Matters

Will pulled his hands out of his coat pockets and rubbed them together before knocking on the front door of the office. The temperature had dropped at least twenty degrees during the day and was now somewhere around twenty-five degrees with a warning of a blizzard coming sooner rather than later in the day. He was a little underdressed for the weather with just his black hoodie sweatshirt and long tan Carhartt jacket over a t-shirt and a thin pair of mittens to keep him warm. He could see Gina inside at the reception desk and even with her headphones on it wouldn’t be long before she noticed him at the door so he started knocking. She looked up almost right away and he wasn’t sure if she actually heard or if she just happened to look up. Either way, she smiled which made Will happy that she was happy to see him. She leaped to her feet and opened the door for him and gave him a hug.

            “Hey, stranger! How are you doing?” she asked, “Bonnie called earlier and said you’d be coming by to get her check. Why doesn’t she get direct deposit? It totally would have saved you a trip out here in this weather.”

“I don’t mind coming out. It has been a long time since I’ve been here. Sorry I’m getting here so late,” he apologized.

“Don’t you worry about that, and I’ve got her check right over here,” Gina said, going back to her desk and handing it to him.

Will wondered why Gina was still there. In the early thirties, she was still younger than most of the people there and always had a more optimistic outlook on what was happening around her than almost anyone else in the company. And she’d been doing the same exact job for close to ten years.

“Thanks,” Will said, folding the envelope in half and pushing it into one of his coat’s inside pockets.

“Now why don’t you come around here more often?”

“Well, most people don’t spend a lot of time hanging around the places where they were downsized, you know?”

“You do have a good point there Will, but Bonnie’s still here and it would be good to see you once in while too.”

“We’ll have you over sometime instead. How about that?”

“Sure, that’ll work for me, and that’s a better idea too. Oh, by the way, John Dennis didn’t want to give me the check for you, since it isn’t technically yours. Can you believe it?”

“Actually, yes,” he laughed. “The guy’s always been such a stickler. I can’t believe that Sherrill is still there with him too.”

“She is. I think they’ve got a co-dependency thing going on, maybe even a murder-suicide pact for all I know. They’ve never seemed to like each other, but they are back there in that office every day and oh my God, they had to do a sexual harassment seminar last month and it was pretty much the most awkward thing I’ve ever seen.”

“Yeah, Bonnie mentioned it, but didn’t say a lot about it. It must have given her PTSD. John is actually a pretty nice guy though,” Will said.

“He is. Everyone talks shit about him, but he’s just doing his job.”

Just then the door at the end of the hallway heading out to the warehouse opened and Will and Gina both turned to see who was coming.

“Shit, is that who I think it is?” Will whispered.

“It is,” Gina replied with a sigh.

“Well, holy shit, if it isn’t Will Davis,” the man said. “What brings you here?”

“Just picking up Bonnie’s check,” he said. “What going on Brett? I wouldn’t expect you to be one of the last people here.”

Brett Ellison was the nephew of the owner and the man who took Will’s job after the downsizing, despite managing to lose a full pallet of wrenches and screwdrivers in the warehouse a week before the layoffs were announced.

“I was just wrapping a few things before heading out. A few of the guys are out there. Want to say hi before you head out?”

Will shrugged.

“Why not,” he said.

“Well, I am going to call it a day and try to get out of here before it gets much worse out there,” Gina said. “Will, I’m going to hold you to that dinner.”

“We’ll call you, I promise. It’s really good to see you.”

A quick hug and Gina grabbed her bag and headed to the front door.

“Someone will lock up behind me, right?”

Brett nodded, but Will could tell he wasn’t paying attention.

Brett and Will now stood face to face. Both were tall and stocky, Will, at six foot three, a little taller and probably in better shape. Brett looked like he was starting to let himself go.

“Let’s head on back,” Brett said.

“After you,” Will replied, “You lead the way.”

It was only about twenty feet to the door and near the door outside the human resources office were about thirty banker’s boxes with a yellow piece of paper taped on them saying they were a pick-up for Valley Shredding.

Brett opened the door and Will stepped out into the warehouse for the first time since the day he was laid off.

“Hey everyone,” Brett shouted, “Look who’s here.”

Will saw four other people out there, a couple people he recognized right away and they approached to say hi and shake his hand.

“What do you think?” Brett asked. “Miss the place? Wish you were still here?”

Will shrugged. Honestly, he didn’t miss the place.

“I’m passed it now, it’s all good. How’s everyone doing?”

After spending a few minutes catching up and talking about football, Will needed to use the restroom.

“Guys, I’ve really got to take a leak. Is the restroom out here still open.”

“Sure is,” Brett said.

Will walked quickly across the warehouse to get to it and when he came out a couple of minutes later, he found that everyone had left.

“What the hell?” he muttered.

He roamed around the warehouse for a few minutes to be sure, but soon realized that he was probably the only person left in the building. He went back inside the office and found a few lights were son and he walked around to see if anyone else was still there, someone who could be the person to lock up and set the alarm. Looking at the name plates as he walked through the customer service area, there were only a couple of names he still recognized. He peeked into their cubicles as he walked through and could see that Kathy Rutherford must have had another baby and it looked like there was a different husband in the picture now. Jill Kenner had a few more cats, which didn’t surprise him. She was the one most people thought was the most likely to start losing her mind and end up with a house full of cats. He crossed the reception area and headed into the logistics department where it looked like there had been even more turnover than in customer service. He saw that Ken Harding was still there and had evidently been attending a few Second Amendment rallies and had bought his and her semiautomatic rifles for he and his wife. They were both beaming in one photo where they posed holding the rifles high above their heads.

“What a freaking lunatic.”

At that point, Will knew it was time to go, but when he went to the front door, he could hear the wind howling and see the snow swirling everywhere. He called Bonnie and his call went straight to voicemail.

“You won’t believe what happened, Bonn,” he began. “I’ve got your check, but I’ve been left alone in the office. I’ll tell you about it later, but the way the storm’s looking out there, I’m going to stay here a little longer to see if it dies down. Home soon, I’ll let you know when I’m on my way.”

Wondering what to do now that he had a little time on his hands, he remembered the boxes outside of the human resources office. He went back to Gina’s desk and around to the hallway to the warehouse and the boxes lined up and stacked outside the office door. Just to the left of the door was a cabinet with basic first aid supplies and different kinds of aspirin and pain relievers. With no one around to see him and no security cameras, he pocketed a handful of packs of ibuprofen and then saw an open box of vinyl gloves. He slipped on a pair of gloves before touching anything else, and seeing the door to the HR office open, he stepped inside to see the two desks in there set up exactly the way he remembered: John’s across the room in the back left corner and Sherrill’s just to the right in the near corner. A small meeting table with a couple of binders on it sat in the far right corner. John’s desk was very tidy, with little on it besides his keyboard, a couple of legal pads and a tall coffee cup filled with pens, pencils and highlighters. Noticing the corners of a yellow post-it note under the cup, he slid it away to see what looked like a woman’s handwriting on the note reading “Stop Staring At Me!”

“Oh, my God,” Will said with a smile on his face. He looked over to Sherrill’s desk.

“Huh, I wonder,” he whispered as he stepped over to Sherrill’s desk, which was messier, but not too messy to find a larger rectangular post-it under her keyboard in what looked like a man’s handwriting that read “You need to stop judging me. You don’t say anything, but I know you’re doing it.”

He pulled out his phone to try Bonnie again and it again went straight to voicemail.

“Bonnie, you won’t believe what I’m finding in here. Would it be wrong for me to take a few pictures? Maybe a couple? Anyway, I’ll check the weather outside in a few minutes, I’ll get home as soon as I can.”

Feeling the passive aggression emanating from the room, he backed out of the door and decided to see what was in the banker’s boxes. One by one he took the lids off of boxes and dug in to see just what he found. The first three boxes were nothing but miscellaneous catalogs, reports, and some paperwork that didn’t interest him at all. With the next box though he struck the first of a few boxes full of personnel files and taking a closer look he could see that they weren’t very old, with some as recent as two years ago.

“My God, why are they still printing these out like this?” he thought.

He started flipping through the boxes looking to see whose files were in there. He stopped first at Mike Colletti, a guy he had hired, but had wanted to fire soon after. HR had made him wait until there was more cause until one morning Mike was just gone. Flipping through the papers he saw not one, but two sexual harassment claims from the company holiday party a week before he was gone, but Will had never been told that.

Next was Grace Nelson and he soon found out she left because she was one of the women harassed by Mike Colletti. He saw Gina’s file and wondered whether he should check it out and decided he’d only glance through her performance reviews. Flipping through, he saw that she generally got glowing reviews for her work, but it was clear that much of upper management saw her as a weirdo personally. Now with a slow burn growing inside, he found the file of Brett Ellison, which revealed one mediocre performance review after another, citations for regularly arriving late and leaving early, and a sexual harassment claim against him that he disputed and was eventually dropped.

“And to think that is who got my fucking job,” he whispered to himself.

He knew he should stop looking through these, that it wasn’t doing him any good, that it was only making the slow burn inside him smolder even more, but there was one more file he wanted to look at. With some of the files out of order, he needed to look through a couple more boxes, but there it was, the file for Bonnie Wells. He tried to put himself into a more positive frame of mind before he opened the file. He had met Bonnie here. He had worked with her on customer billing issues. She had quickly become his work confidant. He kissed her for the first time at a company picnic. She became the most important person in his life. He then saw a series of memos and reviews describing her work as better than average and her demeanor as plain and ordinary and a hand-written note from the president of the company saying to include her on a list of employees should the need for downsizing happen again. Her tore that out of the folder, but remembered these were all about to be shredded anyway.

Blizzard or outside now, he knew it was time to leave. If the blizzard was still happening, waiting it out in the car would be just fine. He put Bonnie’s file back in the box. As he leaned over he noticed an old heater with coils built into the wall along the edge of the boxes. He flipped the switch on. The heater was old. With cardboard boxes filled with papers right there, there was a good chance they would go up in flames and the dry wall behind them probably would too and before long, the whole building could be engulfed. He had gloves so there wouldn’t be fingerprints left there in case that didn’t happen. He headed to the front door and took a step outside and reconsidered. Bonnie needed this job. Gina needed her job. Many others needed their jobs, not matter how screwed up this company was. Will walked back to the hallway, turned off the heater and headed back to his car to wait out the storm.