Philip's Really Bad, But Useful, Day

Philip was angry. No one who knew him would have been surprised. Philip was often angry. Okay, he was good at his job, really creative, and so people made allowances for his temper. They had learned to keep out of his way and even grab anything precious out of his reach. Some remembered the cover artwork he had thrown from the meeting room window, when others had suggested some changes. How it had lain, forlorn, at the foot of the skyscraper, and people had side-stepped it as they made their way along Fifty-fourth street.

One poor woman had been startled by its arrival from above and spilt her coffee over her previously pristine blouse. Her whole day had been ruined. She had arrived at work in a temper and shouted at her assistant.

Her assistant had retreated to the rest-room to cry and had bumped into someone on the way in. This second person had dropped her report on the floor and it had become wet and stained.

She had stumbled through her presentation and felt dejected for a week afterwards. Her boss, disappointed at not impressing his client, had told her to do better. He arrived home in a foul mood and kicked the dog.

Anger is like that, isn’t it? It sort of spreads out in a ripple effect of sadness, like a rumble of thunder, apparently fading away into the distance, but actually just moving on to spoil someone else’s day.

Philip didn’t know about any of this. Philip didn’t know his anger was a bad thing. He told himself he was assertive, forthright and focussed. He thought being good at what he did excused his behaviour. He was wrong. Fate would have to step in to teach him a lesson.

On this occasion, he was angry with the new intern. Her name was Maggie and no-one had warned her about the graphic designer who had anger issues. They weren’t being mean, they were just so used to the existence of Angry Philip in their everyday lives, they forgot to say. They had become inured. Poor Maggie was in for it. Maggie had decided to tidy Philip’s studio. Some-one at Careers Advice had told her to be proactive. She decided to be proactive in the direct of Philip’s studio. It was a disaster waiting to happen.

Maggie was standing by the sink cleaning Philips’s pallette and paint brushes. Philip was old school, he liked standing at an easel, splashing paint purposefully onto a canvas. It made him feel at one with Da Vinci or Van Gogh. All that bother about transferring his art to digital form, could be left in the hands of minions, as far as he was concerned. It wasn’t a good idea to get between Philip and the tools he used to support his sizeable but fragile ego. Maggie didn’t now that.

Seeing what Maggie was doing caused Philip to let out a roar of rage which would not have disappointed an angry bull. He ran towards her and wrenched the wet implements from her grasp and returned them to his artist’s table. This action had quite startled Maggie and she had let out a small scream, but this was as nothing to her screams yet to come. Philip turned on her and grasping her shoulders, he forced her towards the open window. It seemed that Maggie was going to go the way of that piece of artwork and head downwards where she would spoil the day of some unsuspecting passer-by, who would take it out on their assistant and so on, you know the drill. Not to mention the action having a bad effect on Maggie herself of course.

So, fate stepped in. It seemed the appropriate time to teach Philip a lesson he would not forget, and to help out the intern, who was really a nice, helpful person.

As Philip pushed the unfortunate, young woman out of the window frame, time slowed down. It slowed down for everyone except Philip. He was still pushing away, shouting in the intern’s face, full of rage, but little by little he began to notice that his actions were not having the effect he expected. Maggie seemed to be suspended in mid-air, her feet caught, frozen in the moment of leaving the carpeted floor. Her torso was hanging in the air like Wylie Coyote before the terrible fall. Her face, contorted with fear, was opened-mouthed in a scream, but no-one could hear. Philip stepped back, panting and sweating, and Maggie remained where she was, not falling, not returning to the studio, just stuck in the moment.

Philip stepped back, startled. He ran his hand through his artistically long hair, then placed the hand, and its partner onto the knees of his chino’s, whilst he bent over and gulped in great lungfuls of air. He turned from the nightmare scene at the window and looked back towards the office’s interior. His colleagues were all caught motionless in a tableau of shock. Some were simple standing at their work-stations staring in his direction, their mouths showing great ovals of disbelief. Others were frozen in mid stride, apparently running towards his office to intervene or pressing their faces up against perspex partition, wide-eyed.

Suddenly, Philip was afraid, he couldn’t understand what was happening. His sense of self and self-rightousness seemed to be as frozen as all these figures around him. What had he been about to do? He turned again to the frail figure hanging outside of the window. He rushed forward and tried to drag the woman back in. First he tried to pull her by her feet, and then tried using her arms. He even reached out to grab her around the waist, causing him to stared dizzily downward towards the pavement below. He felt a wave of nausea, knowing that, unless he could change something, that was where Maggie was heading, and it would all be his fault.

Philip decided to find help. He ran to his manager’s office, where the man in charge was sitting at his desk reading a memo. The creative director, Mr Brownlow, was scowling and had a pen poised in his hand and heading for his mouth, for a good chewing, probably. But he was motionless like all the rest. Philip panicked, he ran back into the main work area, weaving in and out of the desks, where colleagues stood, or sat, like figures on a film reel that had gotten stuck. He stopped to shake some of them, but there was no change. He raced in and out of each side door, where the statues that had been his colleagues filled the spaces with their static forms. He rushed to the elevator and jabbed the button, hoping to hear a ping and see the lift doors open, but no such comfort was forthcoming. The lift seemed to be stuck between floors 1 and 2.

Philip ran back to the director’s office and stood behind the seated man. Then he saw what Mr Brownlow was reading. Philip’s personnel file was lying open on the desk and the director was reading a memo from the CEO. It read:

Aaron, I know Philip Scanton is a brilliant artist and we would all miss his input, but it really is getting to the stage where people are starting to complain. Many a good employee seems reluctant to work with him, and some of our assistants have been reduced to tears due to his behaviour. Some of us, myself included I might add, are just plain scared of the man, at least afraid of what he might do one of these days.

As he was a protege of yours from way back, didn’t you go to college with his mother or something, I am leaving you to deal with this. He needs to slow down. He goes at his work like a bull in a china shop, which is very admirable, but when he uses the same approach with people, it cannot be accepted. I am worried that our clients will get wind of this and go elsewhere. Do you remember when he threw that artwork out of the window? Unacceptable! Unprofessional! Nobody is above the law or mores of society and business etiquette.

Deal with him Aaron. One way or another, things have to change.

Martin

Philip sank down to his knees and began to cry. Images from his childhood flooded back. He was standing on a fishing dock, holding his first rod, and his father was standing over him, berating him for not catching anything. Philip could feel the fear as his father shouted in his face. His father had a terrible temper.

Philip’s mind took him back to another time, when he had been caught out in baseball and his father was yelling at him from the stands, calling out about how useless Philip was, how he was a failure, how he would never amount to anything.

A third scene arrived in Philip’s reeling brain. He gave his mother a painting he had made at school and she was lovingly pinning it to the wall, praising Philip for his skill. Then his father had burst in. Pushing Philip’s mother out of the way he had grabbed the painting. Holding it in front of Philip’s face, he had torn it, bit by bit and let the fragments fall the to floor, all the while he was telling Philip that he shouldn’t bring home half-baked pathetic attempts. If Philip was going to try something, then he had to put his all into it, he had to perfect his art, let nothing and nobody stand in his way. Nothing else was good enough for his father.

So, Philip had dedicated himself to painting. He had studied the masters and tried to emulate their skills and techniques. He devoted all his spare time to this, eschewing friends, parties, romance, all in the pursuit of perfection. He had received approbation from his schools and universities, he had walked into jobs on the basis of his talent, but his father had never uttered a word of praise for Philip until the day he died. This made Philip very angry.

After a while, Philip dried his tears on his sleeve and rose to his feet. He gazed again at Mr Brownlow, who now seemed to be placing the memo onto his desk with a sigh. Philip pulled up short. His manager was moving, albeit very slowly. Philip dashed back out into the main office. He couldn’t be sure if anyone there had moved, but the lift display now showed that the elevator had reached the second floor.

Without hesitation but with a good deal of trepidation, Philip re-entered his studio. Maggie was almost fully out of the window, the high heels of her shoes pointing accusingly in the air. Again, Philip tried to pull her back in, but to no avail. Then he had an idea.

Philip ran down the stairs beside the lift and made his way to the parking basement. He hoped against hope that his car would start and like a miracle, it did. It wouldn’t go very fast but he slowly drove to a department store a few blocks away. Making his way to the beds department, he helped himself to three or four mattresses, piling them high on the trolley he had procured at the entrance. He drove back to Fifty-fourth street and manhandled the mattresses until they were positioned under the falling body of the hapless Maggie. Then he waited.

He had to wait for an hour or so, watching the unfortunate woman descend centimetre by centimetre. In the time he had, he reflected on his behaviour, how he had wasted a lot of his life trying to please his father, when his mother had been right there, believing in everything he did. How, sadly, he had grown up angry, grown up to be the man his father was. He wondered what trauma had formed the old man’s personality. Unlike his father though, Philip had been given a gift. His mother was still alive. Philip was determined to make it up to her, to make her last years happy, if he could get out of this current predicament. Then he would try and make amends to everyone he had hurt along the way, he would try and make friends, he would try and be a better person. He vowed as much out loud.

As he spoke, Maggie’s form plopped softly onto the waiting mattresses, and then something even stranger happened. She began to rise up again. Bit by bit, she moved through the air towards the open window. Philip gazed at her and then looked around. People seemed to be moving backwards. The mattresses moved back into Philip’s car of their own volition and then the car sped off in reverse, returning a while later and parking itself in the garage.

Philip raced up the stairs to his office, puffing, he looked out of the window and watched as Maggie rose, her clothing billowing in the breeze and re-entered the window. She rushed her way back to the sink and paint flew up from the drain back onto the palette.

Looking around, Philip saw that all his colleagues were making their way backwards to their desks and lifting the papers they had dropped. This was his chance, he thought. He positioned himself by the studio door and held his breath. As he watched, the water from the faucet changed direction. Instead of running back into the pipe it began to run in its true direction, slowly at first, then speeding up until it reached its normal velocity.

Maggie turned to see Philip at the door. She looked a little startled and afraid, in case she had done something wrong, but was reassured to see a smile on Philip’s face.

“Thanks for doing that, Maggie. I always forget” he said, “I’m just going to see Mr Brownlow for a second and then you and I can have a chat about how things work around here. I bet you have some bright, new ideas”. Maggie smiled.

Philip knocked before entering Mr Brownlow’s office, Aaron, and any other staff who noticed, were surprised, because Philip usually just burst in, shouting.

“Sorry to bother you, Sir” Philip said, “but I thought you might like to know I am going to enrol in some Anger Management classes. I think my behaviour could do with improving”

Mr Brownlow looked astonished, but managed to nod and say, “Good idea son, your mother would be pleased….By the way, do you think she would mind if I called her up and asked her out to dinner? It’s been too long since we had a chat”.

“I’m sure she’ll be delighted, sir”. Philip smiled, turned and made his way back to the studio, stopping along the way to pick up a coffee for Maggie from the coffee machine.