Take Me Off Your Speed Dial

Take My Number Off Your Speed Dial

“Take my number off your speed dial. I don’t have that phone any more.“

This statement gives me equal feelings of relief and despair. Much like the cell phone itself, which bestowed feelings of empowerment and freedom while at the same time pinned me in space and time to the rest of the electronically enslaved population.

Excuse my introspection. My reflection. I am mired in one of the stages of mourning—if that is what it is called—for my lost job. I was fired. I am in the early stages of my understanding of this loss. I will bring you up to date while you fiddle with your cell phone and take me off of speed dial. They took my phone away. You can get me at home in the early evening. Just like the good old days.

Stage one— “pole-axed”. This sounds physically painful but it is not. It is comparable to the early stages of drunkenness in an unfamiliar bar or at the wedding of a complete stranger. It is an out of body experience. During this stage most of ones time is spent watching oneself from the vantage point of a fly on the ceiling. I was not uncomfortable listening to “Firing Man’s” brief, cold summation of my career and it was not in the least painful. It reminded me of novocaine. The final moments were awkward. He extended his hand. I, being a Jew of unabashed emotional capacity, forgetting, or rather ignoring the last five minutes of professional realignment, threw my arms around him and hugged him. It is a moment (much like the residual pain of the extraction of the tooth itself after the novocaine has worn off) which haunts me.

This moment of emotion, The Hug, is what I am thinking about when I wake up in the morning without an alarm clock at the exact moment when an alarm clock should sound. I know now that I will think about that foolish emotional moment for a long time. I will pay for it. I will pay for it with a diminished sense of self-regard. It makes me feel weak. Sometimes I think that it also made him wonder about me. Was I the right one to fire? Did he get it wrong? But there won’t be a moment of self-doubt for him. That is not the way he is structured. When I left his office I ceased to exist as a concrete being. I became an anecdote.

Stage two—“confusion”. There I was walking out of the offices I had walked through for years seeing people I’d casually encountered, spoken to so many times during my long employment …but it is all different. There is no attachment. I do not belong here any more. Where do I belong now? These thoughts and feelings are not separate stages of development. They are all mixed up. One does not end and the other begin. They flow into one another. I am still “drunk” as I walk past the receptionist and into the elevator. I am not sure if I said hello to anyone. It is the beginning of the workday. People are just coming in to the building while I am on my way out. Where should I go now? My wife is scheduled to pick me up at the train station at 6:13 P.M. She could be there earlier except that it is Tuesday and she is at work herself. I don’t wish to bother her. I have no ride home and I have no place to sit, think, be, for the rest of the day in the city. I do not want to wrestle with my thoughts for ten hours while I walk around Manhattan. Like a milk horse loosed from his wagon I mindlessly walk back to my job-site on Broadway and 56th street thinking about everything and nothing—with the illusion that I must collect my personal belongings.

The following is a list of same:
One pair of black boots.
One box of apple-cinnamon herb tea
One extra pair of reading glasses

I collect these things from a gang-box in the pump room on the 26 mezzanine where I have set up my “office” for the administration of a project that now has no relevance for me. The foremen for the carpenters, the electricians, a couple of the trades men, come in to the pump room to say good morning. To ask me questions about the days work. Clarify a ceiling height. Discuss the dimensions for the sprinkler heads in the fire rated ceiling of the hallway…. I like these guys. We have begun to work well together over the past few months. It is the one thing I can think of right then and there that I am exceedingly proud of. I had to prod the architect, client, engineers, and project manager for the information that was missing from the job documents and provide it to the trades. We have taken this miserable orphan of a space with confusing, disjointed, misaligned systems and details and molded it into a real job. . The trades now have the information to build the job and they believed me when I told them I would be there to get them the answers when the questions arose. It took weeks of patient and persistent effort to gain their trust. We were working together like a team. They knew what I expected of them.

I tell each one of them in turn, standing over my raw plywood worktable, that I am leaving. Their disbelief and warm regard buoys me. The fact that my dismissal takes place right before the Christmas holiday raises their genuine indignation. It adds insult to injury. Tradesmen are comfortable with periods of unemployment—it is a fact of life for them. It is the timing that smacks of deceit and treachery. Once the subject has been fully expanded upon—the handshakes, the buffering jokes and a few words of mutual praise for our mutual efforts—they begin to question the future of the job itself. Their concern for the the job is straightforward. I am not put off by their self-interest—I expected it—and I try to assure them that someone else from the company will maintain the schedule and flow of information. But they know all the other superintendents and project managers associated with this project. They laugh at the idea that there will be someone responsible to replace me. Someone who will take the job as seriously as I have. They are about to “fall into the crack” but they laugh and pump my hand and tell me it was a great job and it is a small world and we will meet again and I know they are right. Their concern for me is straightforward. It is a small world.

Stage three—“Fear”. I recognize now that I have been afraid for a long time. It is not something that just began that morning in the “Firing Man’s” office. I have been afraid my whole life. It is built into the background of my biology. Fear is a component of all my actions, decisions, thoughts… But now it had come to the fore. It is spelled with dollar signs. It is the plastic healthcare card in my wallet. It is in the mailbox. It is “Please Remit”. It is the cost of each oil change, grocery bag, replacement toothbrush, toilet flush, and box of Girl Scout cookies that my family wants and needs. Suddenly it feels true, that “there is nothing to fear but fear itself” because it is at the root of all things in my life. It becomes a sub-plot to all things in my life. Fear to the fore!!! It’s not just for breakfast any more!


Stage Four—“Anger”. I think about all the folks who are still working where I once worked and I wonder who among them deserves their job more than I deserved mine? I was good enough to hire. Good enough to work for thirteen years. Good enough to do the jobs that no one else wanted—the too small, too dirty, too tight on money jobs. Good enough to slide from position to position when it suited the company-—when they needed someone to fill a slot.

Hey “Mr. Firing Man”, do you remember the time when the “President” called me into his office and I sat on his big couch and he and I talked? That was one comfortable couch. He asked me how I was doing and I told him what he wanted to hear. He didn’t want to know that I missed my old job in the wood shop with the smell of mahogany and glue and the company of the carpenters who worked for me. That I hated the new job that you told me I had to take. That I hated the big teak desk in my new office—the one with a view of Park Avenue. That I hated the dark gray suits that I had to wear every day and the meetings and that I didn’t know how to cope with the office politics and the overbearing personalities of the other project managers in the other offices. That, though I hated it all, I wanted more than anything to prove my worth to you and to succeed in the role that had been forced on me. That I didn’t want to disappoint! That the week before I’d sat in my seat on the commuter train in my suit and tie and I couldn’t move when the train had pulled in and gone dark in Grand Central Terminal… and that I broke down in tears because of the stress. Instead I told him everything was wonderful and then you came into the room and gave me your evil eye. (Do you practice that look in the mirror? It is a very unflattering look, you know. Effective, to be sure, but not the kind of weapon one should use on one’s employees and friends.) I tried to understand what I was doing wrong that you should turn that “look” on me and that’s when you told me to get out of the office.

Did you feel you had to protect the “President”? From me? You had to protect your school chum buddy from what? Were you afraid we could become friends? That I would have his ear? Believe me, I did not envy either of you—your positions, your possessions or your aspirations. I only wanted to be employed. You needn’t have feared me.

I am angry for that hug. I can’t get past that hug. I want that hug back, “Mr. Firing Man”. You didn’t deserve it. You didn’t deserve the small portions of my life when I gave them to you. The fact that I like to sculpt—you found that amusing. You had your little jokes on my account. I was your little joke for a long time. You and your little click of clinch-jawed, school-chum buddies with your inherited ties to the Republican party and your box seat at Yankee Stadium. Forget that I was never close to a seat at the table, or a seat in Yankee Stadium…or on the presidents’ couch…I was never more than a step from the door, was I?

And at the Christmas party, you gave me that mean little look again. I never want to see that look again. I knew at the party that you were going to fire me when we next met in you office. I could tell from the look. But that look tells more than you can admit. It tells me you are out of touch. You think I was not a company man? That I was not on your side? You’re wrong. You’re wrong. You may never know for sure but I can tell you, you’re wrong.


Stage Five—“Escape”. I became despondent at the prospect of sitting around the house during the holidays. There is no prospect for finding a new job until the New Year is under way. I can not cope with the flood of feelings and endless, circular thoughts, powerless to act. Do you remember the movie “Animal House”? When the fraternity was being punished for low grades and bad behavior and they were put on probation? Do you remember what they did? They went on a road trip. Revelation.

I packed my little VW, put my youngest son into the passenger seat and took off. If it had not been for torrential rain, high wind and tornado warnings we would have gone to Louisiana but we ended up instead on the banks of the Little Econ River and the spoil islands off the coast of Florida. We drove until we were tired, ate sparingly of the pork belly of America, and spent the night of Christmas in the home of dear friends. Jews wandering the land. I did not think of work once. I did not have to see that mean little “Firing Man” look once! I shot a hundred photos of the Blue Ridge Mountains and of my son fishing in a muddy brown river in central Florida. I am home now looking at them. There is still fear and anger in me but there is also peace around the edges.

At first after I was fired I thought “things will get back to normal soon” but now I know there is no “normal”. There is only the continued progression of events shaped by fear and anger and love and circumstance. There will be a new job sometime soon with a new cast of characters and a new e-mail address and a new phone number but until then, my old phone number—the one you used to contact me for years—is no longer valid. Please take me out of your speed dial. Call me in the evening, on my home phone. I am in the book.