Chapter 5: The Data

5

The suit Norman wears to his first day of work at Woodard and Curran is his only one, bought for Lou’s wedding a few months before – a light beige two-piece with big lapels and a distinctly eighties cut. He had dreamt for weeks of himself wearing it before he finally found it waiting for him in a South Bend Salvation Army for ninety cents (with the ten percent off from Sylvia’s student I.D.). He wears it now with a wide-collared black button-up shirt underneath, unbuttoned twice, no tie. It makes him feel sexy and confident.

the Data

Woodard and Curran is on the far edge of Portland, across the bay from Cape Elizabeth. Norman’s morning drive takes him across the bridge into the city, then through downtown where he looks down the street that would take him to Laura’s as he passes it and wonders what she’s doing, if she’s awake. He continues across town to a small corporate park not far from the airport.
The company resides in two buildings separated by a hill with a wooden staircase built onto it. The woods that separate its buildings from those around it are thick and come right up to the parking lot, making the area feel more secluded than it is.
Norman parks and somewhat nervously walks with his hands in his pockets into the main building. The office is clean and modern, yet appears comfortably informal. He is told to wait by the receptionist, a late-youth woman with a polite uncertainty to her manner. Norman sits and flips through a copy of Portland magazine until another, more energetic mid-youth woman approaches him quickly with a big smile, a folder full of papers under one arm.
“Hi, Norman,” she says.
He stands and extends his hand to be shaken. “Hello,” he says.
“I just got in, I’m sorry,” the tall, dark-haired woman says. “I’m Kendra. I’m in charge of the SE project. Well, I’m not in charge of the whole project, but I’m in charge of the data entry side of it, where you’ll be working.” As is the case in most of Norman’s introductions, there is a moment when Kendra looks him in the right eye and does a double take, but says nothing. She very tactfully smiles away the moment and turns around. “If you want to follow me, I’ll take you to the room where you’ll be working. Did you have any trouble finding the office?” She starts walking away and Norman follows her through a labyrinth of pathways between cubicles.
The data entry office is in the other building. On their way to it, Kendra points out various locations of interest, such as supply rooms and the place where he is to leave his time sheets. They exit the main building and walk up the wooden staircase to what Kendra calls “the Annex,” referring to the second building. Norman follows her quietly, replying, “Cool,” whenever he is informed of something but otherwise letting his thoughts drift. He does not have high hopes for this job, but for twelve dollars an hour he doesn’t feel he can complain. The job he just left in Indiana was eight an hour for what often amounted to strenuous manual labor. At least here he will be able to sit, maybe even listen to music on headphones.
Kendra leads Norman into the Annex, to a closed door just to the left as they enter the building. She opens it carefully and steps in with a hesitance that makes Norman think of a lion tamer entering the cage.
The room is small, softly lit and windowless. The space is carved into a U shape with the door at the base, a central cubicle wall with cubicle stations on either side coming out from the far wall and ending a few feet from the doorway, stations on both side walls. About half of the stations are occupied, and the occupants all look up and remove their headphones when Norman and Kendra enter. The faint, hastily dissipating reverb of a conversation interrupted hangs in the air.
“Hello,” Kendra squeaks. She sounds excited about everything she is saying, and somehow miraculously it actually comes across as genuine. “Everybody, how’s it going?” she chirps.
“Good,” the young men all say in near-unison like kindergarteners.
“How are you?” someone adds.
“I’m good,” Kendra says with a big smile. “I have a new member for our little data entry family here. This is Norman.”
“Hi,” Norman says to the group.
“Elliot,” says the balding man who has a strong personal presence tinged with the awkward confidence of a geek who has taken up martial arts.
“Norman Newman,” Norman nods.
“Timothy,” says the full-bearded young man with bright blue eyes and a quiet shyness to his voice.
“Norman.”
“Harvey Jangles,” says the hippy with long blonde hair and a goatee. He shakes with both hands and the energy of Chris Farley. He instantly makes Norman laugh.
“How you doing?” Norman asks, laughing.
“Norman, right?” Harvey asks.
“Norman Newman, yeah.” Norman leans past Harvey to shake hands with the handsome young boy with the chiseled face in the corner. “Hi, I’m Norman.”
“Walt,” he says with a bright smile, his headphones still on.
“Is anyone not here?” Kendra asks the group, clasping her hands together matter-of-factly.
“Wayne,” Timothy says, looking around. “And Doucette; I haven’t seen him in a couple of weeks.”
“I think he was in last weekend,” Walt says without looking away from his screen.
“And Marina’s in Russia,” Harvey adds.
“Well, right,” everyone says as if this is obvious.
“Okay, well, you’ll meet Wayne and Jeff some other time, I’m sure,” Kendra says, pulling from under her arm the small folder of papers that she has been carrying. She hands them to Norman. “This is some basic paperwork we need you to fill out that should be self-explanatory. It should take you maybe half an hour to an hour, and you can get to know these guys while you do that and ask them questions if you want. And then when you’re done,” and she turns to the other guys for a moment, “do you guys think you can show Norman what it is we do?”
“Not a problem,” Timothy says.
Kendra laughs for some reason and puts her hand to her chest. “Okay, so I’ll let you guys get to know each other. Norman, it was great to meet you.”
“Yeah, thanks, Kendra.” Norman shakes her hand again and Kendra shuts the door behind her as she leaves.
“Welcome to the jungle,” Elliot says with a grin and a series of dragonish laughs exhaled from between his teeth. He slowly turns up the volume on his computer’s speakers and the Guns ‘n’ Roses song comes up and fills the silence of the room, making Harvey laugh. Norman smiles and nods, not wanting to reject the attempt at humor but not finding it funny enough to warrant actual genuine laughter (though as he experiences the moment he can already tell that in hindsight, in solitary recollection, it will probably make him laugh).
“So where should I sit, to do this?” Norman asks.
“You can sit there, or there,” Timothy replies, pointing to empty cubicles, “or there. I think those are the only ones that aren’t already claimed.”
Norman chooses a cubicle in the corner by the door, and sits down with his paperwork. As he begins to write, the music from Elliot’s computer fades to silence.
“So what kind of bird are you?” Elliot asks.
Norman looks up. “Me? What kind of bird?”
“Didn’t Kendra ask in your interview? She asked all of us.”
“Oh, I didn’t have an interview. I was hired from a distance, from Indiana. I just moved here a few days ago.”
“Ah,” Elliot acknowledges.
“I’m a peacock,” Harvey says in a weird nasal voice. A moment later, in a normal voice, he asks Norman, “So are you, like, a data entry mercenary or something?” Everyone laughs.
“No,” Norman replies, “my brother-in-law got me the job. He works here. Ben Ingman.”
“Ah,” Elliot sighs in acknowledgement. “IT.”
“Yeah, he’s the head of IT here.” Norman sits with his hands on his thighs, staring forward, waiting for someone else to speak for a few moments, then returns to his paperwork. “So I just showed up this morning and here I am. I talked to Kendra once on the phone in Indiana. I don’t actually really have much of an idea what it is that I’m about to be doing, to tell you the truth.”
“Oh, you’re in for a treat,” Elliot chuckles. “You too will come to fear the data.” Elliot is a hundred times less successful at being funny than Harvey, but his geekiness is nevertheless endearing to Norman.
“Here’s what we do,” Harvey says, turning around in his chair to face Norman. “We have two windows, and they are not, as you can see, on the walls. In Access, I mean, we have two windows – the documents and the database. We scroll through the documents and put the data from each one into the database. But really, really what we do – what’s happening underneath it all – is much more important. Every day, every few seconds, in this office, we continually prove and reprove for the world that A does in fact equal A.”
“Nice,” Norman replies with an appreciative grin. “That’ll be the noblest work I’ve ever done.” Synchronicity, he thinks, noting the words Harvey used and how they mirror some of his own ideas. Norman, in his life, has chosen to see synchronicity as a general sign that he is heading in the right direction.
“It’s even more noble than you realize,” Harvey comments from across the divider. “We’re actually working on the biggest environmental lawsuit in the country. In history, isn’t it?” he asks Elliot.
“The biggest amount, I believe, yeah,” Elliot replies. “What is it, two hundred million?”
“Three hundred and twenty million, or something like that,” Timothy says.
“Goodness.” Norman begins to fill out his paperwork while he continues to listen and talk. “What is the lawsuit about?”
“Specific Electric has been polluting several towns at various sites throughout the U.S. since the fifties, it turns out, and they had an insurance policy of some sort that they are trying to cash in on to make back the money they’ve spent on remediation for these sites. But they’re claiming three hundred million dollars, and so the insurance company hired a group of lawyers who in turn hired Woodard and Curran to go through all of SE’s invoices and documents to check that figure. But of course, using an old lawyer’s tactic, SE just gave us everything in their drawers. So we’re documenting cocktail napkins and brochures for mattresses and things like that among the invoices and reports.”
Norman laughs. “That sucks.”
“It gives us more work,” Walt notes, “which is good since the job is temporary until the end of the data.”
“True,” Timothy agrees.
After a few moments of silence indicating the end of that thread of conversation, Harvey asks across the divider, “So what were you doing in Indiana? Is that where you’re from? You don’t sound like you’re from Indiana.”
“Oh, well, I’m from all over, really,” Norman responds. “I was living in Indiana with my ex-girlfriends.”
“I’m sorry, was that plural?” Elliot asks with mock suspicion.
“Yeah,” Norman replies, not wanting to seem arrogant even though he’s just talking about his life. It is a balance he often has difficulty finding when talking about himself, and as often as he is described as arrogant it would seem he is not always successful. “I was living with two women in sort of a … hard-to-describe relationship.”
“I see…”
“I mean, I went to college in Indiana, and then I worked for a few years at this place called the Indiana Academy, which is a boarding school for gifted students, but I got fired for being caught buying a tobacco-use-only pipe by some students.”
“You bought a pipe from students?” Timothy asks with a laugh.
“No, not from them,” Norman corrects, “just while they were in the same store, beyond my knowledge. It was a big fiasco, but I ended up living with the woman who I got kicked out with – my coworker who I was buying the pipe with, Imogen. We moved up to South Bend, Indiana for six months, and then we actually moved out here for a year about two years ago, so I’ve lived in Portland before.”
“Where did you live before?” Walt asks invisibly from across the divider. Norman finds it funny, the way the room is divided so that they can talk to each other, only a few feet apart, but must sit facing away from each other, with big cubicle dividers between. He laughs at the absurd blocking of the scene for a moment before he answers Walt’s question, and this makes Walt add, “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing,” Norman replies. “I lived in Cape Elizabeth, in my sister’s basement last time, just like I am now, only last time it was with my now-ex-girlfriend.”
“But you were living with two girls?”
“Well, Imogen and I moved in with her ex-lover, an old student of mine from my first year as a counselor at the Academy, this girl Sylvia.”
“I see…” Harvey says with a little cackle. “You know, Norman, I can already tell that you are going to fit in here just fine.”
“Definitely,” Walt agrees.
“Why, because I have a history of unusual relationships?”
“Because you seem to be an interesting, open-minded person who’s forward-thinking and smart,” Harvey says.
“Well, that’s very sweet of you to say,” Norman replies with a smile that goes unseen by any but himself, in reflection on his black flat-screen monitor.
“By the way, I like your suit a lot,” Elliot notes, peering around the edge of the divider.
“Thanks,” says Norman, looking down at the suit. “I dig it. Ninety cents.”
“Word,” Elliot says. “Salvation Army?”
“Exactamundo,” Norman acknowledges.
The door suddenly opens with a loud click and a stocky man with long, curly brown hair and burning eyes steps into the room wearing a bicycle helmet.
“Wayne,” Harvey welcomes him with a shout.
Wayne stops in the doorway as it swings open, and he throws down two crossed westside hand gestures. “The Revolution is here,” Wayne vigorously declares. He steps into the room grinning and shuts the door behind him.
“What’s up, man?”
“Nothing much, man; what’s up with you?”
“Hey man, how’s your front tire?”
Norman focuses on his paperwork as the other guys share some small talk that he feels socially allowed to ignore. As he fills out the forms, he marvels at the way he can be summed up by the information he is asked to provide.
After a few minutes his hand grows tired from writing and he stands and tries to quietly leave the room while the other guys are still engaged in their conversation. He passes Wayne on the way to the door and Wayne nods to him, extending his hand and looking him right in the eyes.
“Hi, new guy.” Wayne says.
Norman shakes his hand firmly. “I’m Norman. Norman Newguy.” Elliot laughs.
“Wayne,” Wayne grins.
“I’m gonna go to the bathroom. I’ll be right back.”
“It’s just down the hall on the right,” Wayne informs him, pointing.
“Thanks.”
As Norman walks down the hall past offices where middle-aged engineers type quietly at their computers or sit talking into earpiece telephones, he can’t help but notice the frustration in their eyes, the patina of loneliness on their dying skin, weary from running on their wheels all day, having completely forgotten why they do any of this in the first place. Their half-hearted smiles of welcome swarm him with grasping demons of sadness.
The office bathroom is a large room, mostly empty floorspace. There is a magazine called Worldwide Drilling Resource on the floor beside the toilet and a framed magazine article on the wall about some wastewater treatment plant with a picture of a bunch of guys in radiation suits.
Norman stands in front of the sink and looks at himself in the mirror. A few strands of hair hang in front of his glasses. His reflection reminds him how sexy he feels in his beige suit.
“How did we get here?” he mouths to his reflection, hearing the words in his mind. “How is all of this going to end?”
He goes back in his mind to the moments of the past weekend when he was held to the bed by Laura’s delicious body, his cock planted fully inside her, her hair cascading all down his face and neck. He can’t help but shake his head, marveling at the beauty of those scenes while shooting his reflection experimental attempts at sexy looks.
Slowly, as if he is seducing his mirror image (or perhaps it him), Norman pulls his black shirt out from his belt and reveals his stomach to himself, admiring the curves of his own body, the lines in his stomach and at the sides of his hips. He undoes his belt and pulls his pants down just low enough to pull out his cock. He stares at himself in the mirror, thinking about the movie scene of this moment. Softly, he strokes himself to erection as he imagines Laura’s skin against his own. Ever-so-smoothly, and without his conscious mind even noticing at first, Laura’s image transforms into other previous lovers of his: Imogen, Sylvia, Karen, Janine, Sarah, the handful of European women he had one-or-two-night-stands with back in that epic summer of Two-thousand-one. He closes his eyes from the world, letting his inner perception fill the scene he’s in, and the imaginary sensation of womanly flesh against his own wraps around him like a cocoon in a startling way that makes Norman orgasm. As he ejaculates into the sink, leaning forward so his face is mere inches from the face in the mirror, he slowly opens his eyes and focuses on his own glass eye looking back at him, trying to imagine seeing his face as the face of someone else, to see what his lover might see. He grinds his teeth and stares hard into his glass right eye in the mirror, wondering what it could possibly be a portal to. “I am in love with you,” he makes his reflection say to him, watching the way his face and eyes look when he says it, his lower back spasming with the last remnants of orgasm.
Norman steps back from the mirror and takes in the full visage of his post-masturbatory self – heaving slightly from the minor cardiac exertion, his pants undone and shirt untucked with his still-engorged cock emerging from between them. He feels powerful, like his spirit itself is swelled even more than his cock. He senses the minor spirits of the place around him, the little camouflaged gremlins and cardboard doppelganger beasts that whisper bad ideas and cause minor Heisenburglarian harm like untyping words or whispering despairs, and at his gaze they all seem to scatter like roaches from light to the edges of the building and the bushes outside. Instantly he feels more comfortable where he is; the place feels safer.
To wash away any trace of semen, Norman runs the water in the sink for a minute. He flushes the toilet as a superfluous subterfuge, then heads back with renewed vim to the data entry room.
On the walk back past the offices, he notices the occupants looking around, wondering what just happened and why they suddenly feel more alive, less cramped, and Norman knows it is somehow a result of the power of his masturbation magic.
Back in the windowless cubicle cave, all of the other data enterers have their headphones on, with their attentions softly focused on their computer screens. Norman returns to the station he chose and finds Wayne sitting in the neighboring cubicle. Wayne looks over at Norman with a vacant facial expression, then looks back to his computer, where he is mindlessly clicking his cursor in the blank database fields on his screen, some loud industrial guitars blaring through his headphones.
Norman returns to his employment documents. The quiet chatter of a room full of headphones-listeners surrounds him. For several minutes his thoughts are concerned primarily with his various identity numbers. The information required for employment and tax purposes makes Norman wonder just how much information about him the government actually has, or if it is just these informationless numbers. He stops for a moment halfway through the process and shakes his head disapprovingly at the numbers. How poorly you describe me, he thinks with a smile on his face, a rebellious fire stirring in his heart, his cock still heavy with the last remnants of blood that aren’t done partying.
When he is finished, Norman says to the room, “So…” hoping that someone will hear him over the music in their headphones.
“You done?” Harvey responds quickly, scooting his chair around the edge of the central cubicle wall.
“I am.”
“Alright…” Harvey scoots up next to Norman and shows him which icon on the desktop to open, which pulls up a split-screen program with the database on one side and the documents on the other. Harvey shows him how to scroll through the documents, explains which ones are significant and which aren’t, and, from those that are, which information to put into which fields.
It takes about ten minutes of explanation before Norman has got it, and the conversation moves away from data entry.
“So,” Norman says, entering data with the deft typing speed he has developed as a writer, “how long have you guys been working here?”
“I’ve been here since April,” Harvey replies. “I was one of the first ones on the job, and back then we were only supposed to go through June. Now they say October.”
“Whatever,” Wayne, who is on the other side of Harvey, at the station to Norman’s left, says with a scoff. “We’ll be here next year if Walt and I have anything to do with it.”
“Yeah,” Harvey laughs, “entering four documents a day.” Wayne laughs.
“How many are we supposed to be doing?” Norman asks.
Harvey and Wayne both shake their heads. “They don’t even care, really,” Wayne says.
“They can keep track of how many we each do…” Harvey points out.
“But I have done like four a day for the past three months,” Wayne adds. “I deserve to be fired.”
“Kendra would never fire anyone,” Walt says from the other side of the divider. Harvey looks at Norman, nodding.
“I think this room is actually some sort of nexus,” Wayne says aggressively. “We’re all a bunch of raged-out dudes who just talk about philosophy and politics and starting the Revolution. There is seriously some big-time synchronicity shit going on with all of us randomly being put together here like this, and it turning out the way it has.”
“You are the Revolution, dude,” Harvey laughs to Wayne.
“So what are all of your stories, exactly?” Norman asks, intrigued by the way these guys use a lot of the same language that Norman thought he shared only with Lou and their crew back in Indiana. He loved the idea that, like many ideas throughout history, the idea of the Revolution and the impending artistic/philosophical renaissance that he could feel in the air was happening in the Zeitgeist, and so no doubt was manifesting all over the world, all throughout culture, independently appearing in disparate crews, and even with the same lexicon. “How do you guys know each other - just from this?”
“Wayne and I grew up together up in Washington County,” Harvey explains.
“Yount, bub,” Wayne replies.
“All of us do other things – none of us are just career data enterers,” Harvey says, standing up, at which all the others follow suit, standing and gathering around the open floorspace by the door. “I’m a stand-up comic. I run an improve comedy group here in town, and I do stand up. And, you know, it’s mostly about political or metaphysical stuff that not every crowd can jive with, but sometimes the crowd really digs it and gets it and I can feel a connection, and so something is achieved there, I think.”
“Oh, sure,” Norman agrees. “That’s awesome. I’m not surprised to hear that you’re a stand-up comic, honestly.”
Harvey shrugs, smiling, and even that simple gesture is somehow hilarious.
“So yeah, and Walt here is an actor,” Harvey continues, “and Wayne is, well, Wayne is Wayne; Wayne is the Revolution…”
“My creative outlet is my rage,” Wayne jokes.
“But you also play drums and tabla and you study spirituality and metaphysics…”
Wayne nods in recognition, looking at Norman, then he does a double take at Norman’s glass eye.
Norman nods nonchalantly. “It’s glass,” he says with a little smile.
Wayne’s mouth drops open and then becomes an enormous grin. “Is that a fucking glass eye?” he asks, to be certain. Norman nods, smiling, still making eye contact with Wayne. “Dude, that is the shit! I’m sorry, I mean, who knows, it may be a real drag for you or whatever, but that is – that is the fucking baddest shit I’ve ever seen.”
“Thanks, I agree,” Norman says with a smile. Then he dramatically reaches up to his eye and mimes tearing it out as he says with wry vigor, “That’s why I ripped it out.”
Wayne, Harvey and Timothy all flinch, then laugh nervously. “Seriously, how did you lose it?” Wayne asks.
“I slipped while I was scratching my eye,” Norman says carefully, eyeing the men around him to judge whether they buy it or not.
At first they all nod, the looks on their faces somewhere between compassion and bemusement, but after a few moments Harvey squints suspiciously at Norman and says, “That’s bullshit, isn’t it?”
Norman nods to Harvey with a smile.
“So what do you do, Norman,” Walt asks, “besides enter data and polyamorous relationships?”
Norman laughs. “Well, a lot, I guess. I write. I just finished my first novel, at least my first novel as an adult, last December. I mean, I wrote a couple of silly sci-fi novels as a twelve-year-old but I don’t count those anymore. I also am a musician, an electronic musician and singer. I’ve done four albums of music. What I really want to do is make films, though – I’ve got three scripts I’ve already written and several others planned, and I’ve shot a few shorts, but … nothing really worth showing, I guess.”
“Renaissance man,” Timothy remarks with a little laugh.
“I guess. What do you do?”
“Well, my degree is in Geology,” Timothy responds. “But my main personal effort I guess is just living green.”
Norman nods. “Right on. Elliot?”
“Law student,” Elliot says with a slow nod.
“Hmm,” Norman inexpressively muses.
“But for the forces of good,” Harvey adds, slapping Elliot on the shoulder.
“So you’re from Indiana?” Wayne asks Norman. “You’re not a Christian or anything, are you? I thought they were all uber-Christian out there.”
“No, I can’t say I’m Christian by any means,” Norman replies. “In fact, I think it would be narrow-minded to adhere to any one specific organized religion in today’s world.”
“Word,” Elliot nods.
“But on the other hand,” Norman continues, “I would have to say that I do believe in Jesus and Buddha and Mohammed and Vishnu and all else insomuch as they are Zeitgeist entities alongside Odysseus and Julius Caesar and Charlemagne and Beowulf and Indiana Jones and fuckin’ Bob Saget and…”
“Excuse me?”
Norman succeeds only for a moment at holding back the grin that wants to express his joy at getting to talk about this kind of thing within the first hour of work at his new job. “I mean, all there is to anything is the appearance of it, the perception of it I mean. But the world of fact and science doesn’t account for all that happens in the mind or the variations of perspective (except relativity and quantum physics seem to have touched the surface of that, I suppose). This world exists because we see it, and yet we see all that is in our imagination and that isn’t real also.”
Norman stops for a moment, instinctively, as this is generally where most people look away or roll their eyes in that I-don’t-get-this way that annoys him so much and usually would cause him to apologize or say “nevermind”. These guys, however, are all listening intently, intrigued looks in their eyes, excited grins on some of their mouths, and Norman thinks back to that oft-retold moment when he was five and his mother came across him preaching to his friends about how God is in all things. He decides to continue.
“See, I think that this is all just a shared mindspace, we of course being disparate parts of a single fundamental duality-paradox of awareness itself, of existence itself really, which exists simply because it can’t not, and as our brains have grown, the world of the Zeitgeist – that meta-realm where thought and myth are real, where all that is thought or believed in is given power – the Zeitgeist has also grown. And that’s why the base gods are the nature gods, and the animal spirits, and then you have these fundamental gods of early human society like the harvest god and the weather god and the messenger god and things like this. These are the natural emergent spirits of the Zeitgeist. Our imaginations have been spawning these very real macro-entities that interact with each other, and with us. Cells get together and form an animal that makes distinct choices … can’t this happen with human thoughts, creating macro-entities that begin to have their own nature and self within this new mindsphere? (And now the mindsphere is steadily becoming more and more real, with the Internet and communal virtual environments!) These are the gods, these are our hearth spirits and our modern superheroes … these are the weird broken spirits our celebrities find themselves becoming despite themselves, just because all of us are watching. The spirit of a specific alley that’s maybe seen too many dying drunks and wants to change the world, or a ring that’s been worn on too many killing hands and is starting to enjoy it. You know what I mean? And yet, really, it’s also just us doing our thing. So, yeah, I believe in everything, basically. Everything exists. I just haven’t seen it all yet, which is only to say that I’m not seeing it now. And by I, of course, I mean we.”
Norman’s looks around at his listeners, who are all similarly squinty-eyed and extending their chins forward.
With a snap of his fingers followed by an index finger in Norman’s direction, Harvey says, “That is awesome. Do you know Bill Hicks? He’s a comedian.”
“No, I don’t really know anyone around here.” Norman ignorantly replies.
A phone in the corner of the room rings and Walt, who is closest to it, picks it up. “Hello, party – I, I mean – data entry room.” Pause. “How ‘bout I put you on speaker? Okay.” He puts down the phone and Kendra’s voice appears in the air.
“Hello, gang,” the phone says in her voice, “I wanted to let you know that next week we are going to have the last of the new hires come in. I just finished the last interview, and it went swimmingly.”
“Congratulations,” Timothy says, grinning.
“Thank you. Was that Timothy?”
“Mm hmm,” Walt replies. Harvey laughs.
“What’s so funny over there?”
“Harvey just made a weird face,” Elliot guesses incorrectly, not having looked away from his screen as he continues to type.
“Oh, Harvey,” Kendra laughs. “Well, it went very well, and there will be two more new people in there next Monday – Colin and Marcus.”
“Are they as cool as us?” Wayne asks.
“Well, we’ll see. I hope you guys will approve of my choices. I think they’re both very nice boys.”
“Aw, more boys,” Elliot jokingly whines.
“Well, just wanted to let you guys know about that. How’s everything going? Is Norman figuring everything out alright? Norman, did you figure out those documents okay?”
“Yeah, Kendra, I finished those pretty quickly, thanks,” Norman calls across the room, to the phone.
“Yeah, I showed him how everything works,” Harvey says. “He’ll be fine. He’s a bright young buck.”
“Alrighty then, you guys,” Kendra laughs, “give me a call if you need anything.”
“Later, Kendra,” Timothy says. Walt hangs up the phone.
“That’s the extent of our supervision,” Harvey tells Norman, his eyes bulging with comical excitement. “Awesome? Awesome. You can come in whenever you want.” He scoots his chair back away from Norman with his hands in the air like someone scored a touchdown, then turns back to his computer.
“Awesome,” Norman agrees.
Timothy and Wayne begin stretching where they stand and Walt says, “I need to sit down,” and at that they all return to their stations and the data.
Norman sits upright in his chair and opens the database. It takes him a couple of minutes of deduction to figure out what information on the documents on the right belong in what fields in the database on the left, but once he has figured this out it is a simple process of reading and typing. Norman begins clacking at his keyboard, his eye flitting back and forth between the sides of his flat-screen monitor. After a few minutes, he is in a groove and flashing through about five documents a minute.
“Hey Neo,” says Wayne, who is at the station to Norman’s left, staring at Norman’s fingers with a furrowed brow. He looks up at Norman’s glass right eye, grins wickedly, then looks at his left eye and says, “Slow down, chosen one. You’re gonna put us all out of a job.”