character sketch: "I'm heading in to the office..."

I hear him long before I pedal up beside him, a distinctive 'click-clickety-click-swish!-cli-cli-cli-clickety-clickety...' He is a penguin in tap shoes. From behind it's quite the sight, really. He's knock-kneed, partially due to genetics, partially due to the extra 40 pounds he's packing, mostly on his belly and thighs. You can tell, even without seeing him from the front, that his pleated black business casual pants ($45 ~ including the faux-leather belt ~ at Randy River) bunch at the crotch, and I make a guess that his white business casual shirt ($30 on sale during Sears Days) tugs a bit at the neck buttons rendering use of the clip-on tie impossible, and though the shirt fits snugly over his high, round belly, it balloons out in the back. He is wearing plastic-soled business casual shoes ($28.84 at WalMart), which he slips in when he hits the icy patches while he hurriedly shuffles across the uneven gently uphill sloping terrain to meet his bus. 'click-clickety-click-swish!-cli-cli-cli-clickety-clickety...' I personally think he'd have been better off with rubber-soled loafers, even the ones with the tacky fringe and tassels, for navigating the hostile sidewalks today.

Despite the forecast calling for temperatures in the -20C range, he isn't wearing any kind of gloves or scarf, and his male pattern baldness is on display for anyone who cares to look. I imagine he works in a warehouse office, middle management of some sort, a paper pusher who really couldn't describe what he does all day except it involves a lot of miniature crisis management, like making irate phonecalls to Toshiba to try and figure out why the red light on the boss's phone won't stop blinking. Once upon a time he'd have been called a secretary; he doesn't have anyone to supervise, yet the title on the engraved tag to which his punched plastic name label is affixed says instead, 'Floor Supervisor.'

On the weekends, his buddies and him play old school D&D. While sitting around in his basement suite on the dilapidated sectional he got from his buddy when his buddy got married and his wife made him buy new furniture they'll hash out the weeks' events. "How was work?" someone will ask. He'll talk big about his job to his buddies, making it sound Very Important and Stress-Riddled, peppering it with just the right amount of disdain for his suboardinates and disrespect for his superiors to seem adequately disgruntled. According to him, everyone he works with is an idiot, the people he deals with outside the office are all morons, and the delivery people in the warehouse couldn't find their own asses with a GPS and a guide dog. Secretly, he loves his job.

I hear a faint electronic ringtone that sounds vaguely familiar. From the pocket of the dated leather jacket he probably got as a grad present in 1990 he pulls out a cell phone and nods, slips, sprints for the bus doors, nods again, saying, "Yeah... Yeh, yeah - I'm heading in to the office as we speak..." As he hangs up, the door closes, and I place the ringtone: Dr. Feelgood.

Comments

Another eloquently put, description of a random individual .
Anonymous said…
his mom probably cut the labels out of his clothes when he was a kid. He can't help it.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

Unless otherwise noted, writing and watermarked images on this blog are copyrighted to Hope Walls.