Jefferson Wears a Tie

John Mansfield

Jefferson stared sleepily out the train window, watching the graffiti slide by. Every week there seemed to be something new, some bold adventure in line and colour – though it was difficult to tell for sure, as his eyes soon became lost among the jostling turnover of pieces. Jefferson liked the graffiti, and envied those who created it. He thought he might like to do such a thing himself some time, though he had never been much of an artist.

Approaching Flinders Street Station, the train went into a tunnel, and now the darkened window showed only Jefferson’s reflection. He noticed that his hair was sticking up at odd angles, and he vaguely tried to smooth it down with his fingers.

Flinders Street Station at 8:45am was a hideous tumult of pushing limbs, little sighs, and the cacophony of footsteps and recorded announcements, against a backdrop of silent faces. Coffee was being pumped into the veins of the Melbourne business class, crucial to the maintenance of what might have seemed at other times to be unnatural anxieties, anti-social impatiences. Jefferson caught glimpses of taut morning faces, and thought back on the morning’s newspaper editorial, which had rehashed an old story about Left and Right in contemporary politics.

‘And so we have the great reply to Socialism… Anti-Socialism,’ he mused to himself, and wished that someone might have heard his mental joke.

But Jefferson wanted success too – preferably without stepping on anyone’s toes.

As he came out the top of the escalator, entering the large main hall of the railway station, Jefferson accidentally stepped on the toes of a middle-aged woman. He tried to apologise but she scowled and kept walking.

* * *

Jefferson entered the offices where he worked, and as first priority went to fetch a cup of tea. Near the urn the Managing Director was joking with someone from Product Development; they greeted Jefferson cordially, then returned to their desks. Jefferson was a Sales Administration Manager, and had been for the last three years. His inertia was beginning to look bad, but he hadn’t been offered anything else, and his enquiries about other positions had always been met with rather formal promises to ‘look into it’ or ‘keep him in mind’. The ‘Manager’ part of his job title meant nothing: all job titles in the company had been given that suffix last year, except for the real managers, who were now to be known as ‘Executives’ or ‘Directors’, or some combination thereof. If Jefferson ever found his way to the top of a company, he had decided he would give himself the title of ‘Supreme Emperor’.

With his cup of tea steaming, still too hot to drink, Jefferson got to work. After three years in the same job, he had honed every movement and keystroke to robotic perfection. But the quicker he had learnt to do his job, the more work had arrived on to his desk, so that for some time now the workload that had once been assigned to two people had become his sole responsibility.

Later, he sat in the fluoro-lit lunchroom eating soup he had brought from home, and browsing through the magazines so thoughtfully provided. People around him chatted about their planned holidays, as if this half-hour’s respite were a sort of practice-holiday from the drudgery of the desk. Jefferson realised that he had made no plans for a holiday this year.

* * *

The first thing Jefferson had to do after lunch was deliver a heap of finished files to the Operations Executive (Marty). He had been given an unusually short deadline for this workload, due to omissions and miscommunications among his superiors, but he had swept through the task nonetheless, and felt proud in being able to pass it on ready and complete. Marty was busy chatting on the phone with a key customer (giving that crucial ‘personal touch’), so Jefferson had to wait a few minutes before being waved in. Marty accepted the heap of completed paperwork, smiling and saying ‘Great, thanks’. He then looked listless for a moment, clicked, then exclaimed, ‘Oh, those files.’
Marty paused again and glanced at his day-planner, absent-mindedly adjusting his purple silk tie. Then he said, ‘Right. Terry (the Operations Director) says these files need to be done on an LY process. Do you mind just going back and converting them?’

Converting was a blatant euphemism. They would have to be re-done. Jefferson picked up the files slowly. He wanted to say something, or maybe give Marty the chance to say something redeeming. But Marty just kept smiling at him vacantly.

Jefferson clenched his teeth slightly as he applied himself once again to the stack of almost-identical manila folders. He sat hunched over the keyboard, periodically reaching under the desk to tend to the printer as it hummed away, spitting out the reprocessed files. With another cup of tea steaming at his side, Jefferson tore through the task at a furious pace, determined to make a point. By 4pm he was back in Marty’s office, the files completely re-done.

‘Thanks. Glad we’ve got that sorted out,’ said Marty, looking up from the computer screen on which he appeared to be browsing through airline prices.

‘Well, I certainly gave it my best shot,’ retorted Jefferson, pointedly.

‘Great,’ said Marty, automatically, already looking back at the airline’s webpage. ‘How’s everything going down there?’ he asked, while scrolling through a list of destinations.

Jefferson felt his jaw tighten. ‘Great,’ he said.

* * *

Jefferson went back to his desk and started sifting through his ‘too-hard’ basket, quietly seething. He made some calls, arguing with unseen people in other, similar offices about dates and prices, more than once being assured that the facts had been quite different to what he saw on paper before him. Tiredly he wrote reports on these disputes, labelling them to be passed on to upper management, where he knew they would truly languish, forever, and without resolution.

He was disturbed from his work by muffled curses. On the other side of an office partition, two staff, a Cost Control Executive and his personal assistant, were intent on a single computer monitor, from which they could only extract error messages. Jefferson watched the Executive wrestle with the recalcitrant computer, trying the same function over and over, each time rebuffed by the same grey error message. Jefferson read the message, then pointed out, ‘You’ve just got to change the program you’re opening it with, then you can convert the file format.’ He leant over to the mouse, and demonstrated the procedure. The Executive smoothed the lapels of his jacket, and shook his head slowly, murmuring, ‘It’s irrational. This machine is completely irrational.’ The assistant looked embarrassed, and thanked Jefferson.

Jefferson went to the kitchen, realised he didn’t want any more tea, then stared abstractedly at himself in the full-length mirror which covered a panel opposite the fridge. His hair was now neat and orderly, but there were creases in his open-necked shirt. His black slacks hung rather loosely on his legs. He turned from the mirror and began pacing slowly around the kitchen, waiting for five o’clock.

At five he left the office quickly, and headed in the direction of the department stores

* * *

The next day, Jefferson did something very unusual. He turned up ten minutes late for work. What was more, he didn’t just ‘turn up’ late, he strolled in to work at ten-past-nine. His trousers pointed dead ahead with their razor sharp creases, his jacket hung on his shoulders just so, and none could avoid glancing at the incandescent blue of his silk tie. He went to the bathroom first to check his hair and teeth, stopped by the desks of some colleagues to swap small-talk, and when he did sit down, it was only to go online and read the news at his leisure. All this just about took him through to morning tea time.

As the rest of the week passed, and the week after that, everybody began to feel a new presence in the office, though they could not say quite what it was. People spoke at the hot-water urn about the importance of Sales Admin, of the need to keep up with the latest in analysis and reporting, and develop a ‘model for best practice’, whatever that was. There began to be talk of the need for new staff. The Executives, Directors, and Executive Directors heard all this, and took note.

Jefferson did less work than ever before, and as the backlog built up on his desk, he began to tell people with a frank smile how heavy the workload had become. It was clear enough now from the lunchroom talk that Jefferson would soon be moving on from the position of Sales Administration Manager. In the brisk smiling nod of the Managing Director he could see that his blue silk tie was performing its role with aplomb, ‘meeting and exceeding service-level agreements’, so to speak.
But when he went home in the evenings and hung his pin-striped jacket carefully in his wardrobe, Jefferson felt it to be a hollow victory. Even as a Sales Executive, he would still have to crowd in with the rest for the escalators at Flinders Street Station. And when the offer came, as he knew it would, he was not sure if he would be able to accept it.

* * *

Saturday morning, Jefferson woke to the customary feeling of weekend wellbeing. He lounged beneath his duvet for a while, then got up and made coffee, only to return to bed with it and flick through a magazine. In the cocoon of his bachelor’s bedroom, he successfully managed to keep his mind vacant for an hour. He thought lazily about girlfriends long past, adventures he had in highschool, his favourite places when he was growing up. The reverie led him to consider his life at present, and he vainly searched for a glimmer of magic, a special place. But now they were all inside his head. He imagined defending himself against some sort of Happiness Tribunal: ‘Really, I have a very colourful inner life,’ he would tell them.

Jefferson’s day began to drift and fragment. He went out to the shops to get things he didn’t really need. He sat for a while and read, then went out again, walking vaguely around the neighbourhood, waiting for something to happen. On his travels he kept up with the local graffiti, carefully reading the latest political slogans, admiring the new stencils, and smiling at the witty comments that each writer had appended to the work of another. Jefferson went home and drank wine for a couple of hours, finished the bottle, then stopped, suddenly finding himself still-sober.

Sunday was much the same, but more so. The streets were emptier, and Jefferson could feel the procession of weeks stretching out before and behind him. In the evening he went to a film just to pass the time, to distract himself from the endlessness of hours.

That night he slept poorly, and by 5am found himself wide awake. He watched the dim blue light growing around the edges of the blinds, and he knew then that he couldn’t endure another week just like the last, and the one before that, and the one before that…

He got up and went for a walk, again, but this time the streets were truly empty, and quiet as the grave. The crisp dawn air was both peaceful and invigorating, so that Jefferson felt his senses intensify, and when he eventually came upon two Turkish bakers smoking at the door of their factory, he felt as if he could see into their lives, their families, their feelings.

* * *

On that Monday morning Jefferson was very early at the office. As other workers arrived, they didn’t know what to make of him. He sat calmly at his desk, processing files. Where problems or disputed accounts arose, he simply threw the papers in the bin and deleted the file from the system, neatly removing the matter from existence. And when he got up to make tea, his footsteps fell softly among the partitions, as the slippers he was wearing were made from rubber and felt. When he sat back down he was composed and comfortable.

By 11am he thought there was a good chance that the Managing Director might have arrived, so he paid a visit to the great man’s office. The door was open, so he stepped in with a polite knock of warning. The MD looked up, trying to comprehend the cartoonish figure who had appeared so suddenly, dressed in a set of fluffy green pyjamas. Unperturbed, Jefferson sat down without waiting to be invited, leant back in the chair rather stylishly, and began: ‘Good morning Mr Price. I understand you’d like to promote me to Sales Executive…’

 

This story is taken from Total Cardboard issue 7, and remains under copyright. For more information see www.totalcardboard.com