Tag: WorkP

Dough

.Reading time 54 minutes.

By Elle Richardson
Featured Art: “Peeling the Eye, Denia, Spain” by Roger Camp

You couldn’t look at Mr. Barrett without feeling sorry for him. It wasn’t just his stooping shoulders, wispy hair, or his old, round glasses. It wasn’t his faded dress shirt with one mismatched button sewn on with a darker thread (he didn’t wear the Peggy’s Pretzels uniform like the rest of us), or even his faded black tennis shoes with two wide Velcro straps. It was because he was an old person working. Not volunteering at a WWII museum or watering begonias in his front beds or stamping Bingo cards at the Y, but working in a pretzel shop n the mall for $10/hr.

It was my job to train Mr. Barrett. I presented the pre-made balls of dough and showed him how to roll them out a foot-and-a-half, using for measurement the long, Sharpie-ticked piece of masking tape I’d aligned with the edge of the countertop—one of my best booth improvements.

“That’s what we call the ‘noodle,’” I explained, although I was the only one who called it this. “The uncooked, unformed, rolled-out pretzel.”

Mr. Barrett stared at the counter. His eyes were frosty—maybe cataracts, or maybe the glint of the mall’s halogen lights on his glasses. At his temples, tufts of white hair trembled under the small plastic fan I’d installed above the dough station. Around us, the butter smell intensified, mingling with his medicinal odor.

“I remember when I was in your shoes,” I said. This immediately seemed like the wrong thing to say to someone who was probably sixty years older than me. “When I first started,” I clarified, “the guy who trained me said, ‘Just use your forearm to measure.’ And then I said to him, “Great idea, Sam, but when you’re the 6’2″ Captain of the Swim Team versus the 5’4″ Coloring Club Founder and President, there are going to be some noodle discrepancies.'” Above us, the neon Peggy’s Pretzels sign buzzed out of time to the faint rhythms playing through the mall speakers. “Got it, Mr. Barrett?”

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Etc.

.Reading time 33 minutes.

By K. A. Polzin
Featured Art: “Walking On Fish Bones” by Lesley Weston

“Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera!” Tiny called to me from the loading dock. 

Me: “Okay, I’m coming, etcetera!” I ditched my forklift and hustled over.  

Tiny grabbed his car keys, and we headed out. He knew I knew that today was Taco Truck Day. So he didn’t need to say the words. Every Tuesday and Thursday at lunch: the taco truck.  

Tiny drove. In the car, he said, “You hear that? That’s my stomach actually growling. Audibly. I’m so fucking etcetera.” 

“Me etcetera,” I said. 

At the taco truck, I got carnitas. Tiny got al pastor. Against worksite rules, we both got a Modelo.  

Ramón from the truck usually threw in some kind of freebie. Today was corn salad. We were good customers.  

When we finished, Tiny wiped his face with a napkin and said, “Etcetera?” 

I stood up. “Yeah. Etcetera, I guess.” 

He drove us back to work. 

Tiny, getting out of the car: “Etcetera those pallets that came in this morning.” 

Me: “Yeah, I know. Fucking etcetera.” 

There was only one job on the loading dock: moving pallets. Putting them on trucks, taking them off of trucks. So Tiny could only mean one thing. No need to specify.  

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Mask 13

.Reading time 45 minutes.

By Annemarie Neary
Featured Art by Rachel Hall

They had barely finished the introductions when he asked about the war. The endgame, the likely victor, things no Ukrainian cared to discuss with strangers.  

‘I wish I knew,’ she said. Usually that was enough. 

‘But what do you think?’ 

She managed to keep her tone level. ‘I try not to think. But I’ll do a good job here regardless.’  

She didn’t like his smile any more than she liked his question. But she did want the job. A friend who was still in Kyiv had spotted the ad online. These things are almost never advertised, so Olena emailed right away with her CV.  

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Addicted to Plastic

.Reading time 35 minutes.

By Victor McConnell

When I relocated from Los Angeles to Denver, some of my physician competitors thought I was foolish. I opened my new clinic in Cherry Creek, fitting out the office with clouded glass, marble floors, hammered copper light fixtures, and every other top-of-the-line finish I could think of. Coming from Beverly Hills gave me a marketing advantage right off the bat—the rich suburbanites and the Cherry Creek locals all wanted to know how things were done out there, who I’d treated, and so on. I became a regular at the Denver bars with the wealthiest clientele and had a standing lunch reservation on Fridays at Hillstone; I even befriended a bartender there who, for a small kickback, would gently recommend that some of his regulars come see me. The divorced women in their forties and fifties were the best targets. My practice grew quickly enough that, within five years, I was in the process of setting up a satellite clinic in Aspen and was making plans to relocate there full-time before my fifty-fifth birthday. Five years there, I figured, then retire by sixty. 

I was thinking about that, the life I’d envisioned in Aspen, midway through my hearing in front of the Colorado Medical Board. I had a feeling they were going to revoke my license even before one of them asked me if I thought my actions were consistent with the Hippocratic Oath. Given that the guy who asked was one of the nine board members without an MD, I wanted to ask him what he knew about taking the oath.  

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.Reading time 25 minutes.

5 things getting attacked by a dog taught me about mid-level B2B sales management

By JB Andre

Featured Art: Stephen Reichert, A List of the Reasons of Why I am Getting Into Computers, 2025. Oil pastel, pen and marker on paper, 14″ x 11″. 

First I want to start off by saying that I am OK. An ambulance ride, eight stitches, and a lot of painkillers later, I am safely at home with my beautiful, loving family. Shoutout my amazing wife @CamillaSpringer for taking such good care of me after my hospital stay. I also want to take this time to share my gratitude with friends and family who have reached out to wish me a safe recovery—and to those who haven’t: it’s not too late! I have decided to post about this following the success of my more personal article: “What I learned about leadership when my Grandmother died.” To all of my readers, again I thank you for your well-wishes. Please don’t forget to like, share, re-post, and comment. Follow me if you don’t already for more great business content!

Yesterday morning, I was walking my labradoodle puppy (say hi Max!), or, I suppose, we were coming back from a trip to the park, and crossing the parking lot to our apartment (for those of you shocked that we still live in an apartment, check out my article “The risks of homeownership for early-career entrepreneurs”). About halfway across the parking lot, I saw a nasty-looking dog. About 70, 80 pounds, brown, a mutt with a broad, square face like something between a pit and a shepherd, but low to the ground and stocky. I recognized this dog and knew it was trouble (check out my post “Max got attacked by a dog but he’s OK: Resources on pet care and picking an affordable veterinarian”). It was walking up to us slowly, but I have to admit—I ran! Which brings me to my first of five tips.

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The Surgeon’s Wife

.Reading time 11 minutes.

By Dena Pruett

He tells us he is like that boss, you know, the one from the movie.

“That’s all.” He’ll trill as he flutters past in a mockery of the boss, the movie, us.

 We can tell how a surgery went by the particular way he wears his white coat. On good days the coat is on, collar crisp, the sides flapping up and out as he strides forward, fast and sure. On bad ones, the coat is in his hand, tight and bunched, ready to throw at a chair as soon as he steps into his office.

The rhetoric is as fluid as his fashion. God works through his hands. It’s all divined, preordained. He is but a vessel, an instrument of something higher, more profound than him. Or, it’s everyone else’s fault. The residents are lazy. The nurses and P.A.s slow. The tools not sharp and swift, just out of reach. The patient—too weak. We forgive him these days. He just cares for his patients, the practice. We imagine that deep down he holds himself accountable, feels too much, and this is all mostly bluster.

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Can Mickey Dance?

.Reading time 51 minutes.

By Sayandev Chatterjee

Featured Art: Stephen Reichert, Untitled, 2013. Oil on canvas, 12″ x 12″. “Cirlce” series.

The jarring shriek of the alarm clock slapped Srinath into wakefulness. Fumbling through the tangled mosquito net, he wrestled with the timepiece, finally silencing its insistent bickering. Delicate strokes of sunlight filtered through the louvered windows, painting soft stripes across his cramped hostel room floor. He lay still, his heart thudding as fragments of last night’s dream clung to his mind like cobwebs on the peeling paint above. It was always the same dream.

The clock read 6:00 a.m. Gupta-ji, the boss, had demanded an early start. Srinath could almost smell the polyester and sweat from the Mickey Mouse suit waiting for him at the store. But first, there would be shelves to stock, floors to mop.

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.Reading time 43 minutes.

Mothers in the World Above and Below

By Abby Horowitz

Featured Art: “Persona-03” by Mateo Galvano

Your mother haunts the hardest; that’s what Selah’s told whenever she starts to whine: why hasn’t she come yet to pick me up?

Her mother haunts the hardest, so Selah is at the care center the whole day long, so long that Ms. Drae takes pity on her and gives her second servings of afternoon snack. The other kids trail after their parents up to the parking lot and off to home and there’s Selah again, all alone in a playground full of nobody, or at least nobody that she can see isn’t it possible that she’s got her own ghosts? Oh, get out of your head and get onto those swings, Ms. Drae tells her; then her eyes sink back down to her phone.

Selah swings, she jumps, she slides. Lady-like, please, Ms. Drae calls when Selah’s robe slips up by her thighs, but Selah ignores her. Let the world see her underwear; if only there were someone to look. She takes a clump of dirt and rubs it onto her leg. Look! she says, running up to Ms. Drae, A bruise! But Ms. Drae only rolls her eyes and shoos her away rather than tell her (again) what of course she already knows: you can’t have bruises if you don’t have blood.

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Down in the Valley

.Reading time 37 minutes.

By Mary Birnbaum

The Featured Art is “Sea Library” by Greta Delapp

I was supposed to go on vacation to a National Park, but I don’t vacation. I mean, I did go, but I came very close to not seeing anything at all, because here is how I am accustomed to seeing: There are windows in my home office, but my desk does not face them, so light enters from the side. I am obliquely aware of the day. Sometimes I twist my body to see if the sun has risen, whether fog covers or wind stirs the big green shrub outside. In this small room in my house, I face three computer monitors and their glowing non-sun. I do a real-time job. Creation and consumption of the product are simultaneous; I make live captions for people to read on the Internet, like a stenographer does in court. I do it for seminars and webinars and legal proceedings, in Zoom or Teams or Chime or the platform du jour. My job is to listen and talk at once. What I do is called Voicewriting. It is a job of ears and mouth, an occupation more physical than cerebral, though I’m very stuck at a desk. I receive an audio feed from a remote source and say aloud what I hear as I hear it. Voice recognition software instantly converts my speech to text, which appears in a unique URL, or onscreen in a meeting platform. Someone I don’t know, someone far away or near, reads it as it unfurls. The job is sweaty and live. I’ve parroted defense contractors, nuclear regulators, pastors and poets. It’s echo, not interpretation.

There is no time to fall behind. A dropped word can be fatal to sentence meaning, a dropped sentence is dereliction. Tethered to my laptop by a web of cords, in my black microphone-headset, I resemble an air traffic controller. When a meeting has weak audio, I jack the volume up, and with my palms I press the headphones to my skull, so I am filled with sound and its vibration, then quickly I move my lips and tongue. If I get a very speedy talker, I close my eyes to eliminate all extraneous stimuli. The trick of the job is to tune out your own noise, to be a channel of syllables divorced from sense.

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The Country Husband

.Reading time 50 minutes.

By Jared Hanson

Featured Art: No End To The Desert by John Sabraw

The lobby of the midtown hotel, packed with disheveled travelers asleep on loose rows of waiting room chairs, or fidgeting next to their rolling suitcases in line for the electronic kiosks, resembled nothing less than a Greyhound bus station. Otto cut briskly over the unmopped floors, spinning out into the livelier air over the sidewalk on Seventh Avenue, jogging across the standing traffic and merging with the crowd onto the escalator that carried him down into Penn Station to catch the 3:13 Amtrak Keystone to 30th Street Station. Leaving his conference early, buoyed by the prospect of improved surroundings, carefully weighing his snack and magazine options, he was warily eyeing a copse of NYPD officers and their German Shepherd on a leash, when he heard the pattering of the first shots.

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Iguana

.Reading time 23 minutes.

By Jim Cole

Featured Art: Chameleon by Scott Brooks and Mallory Valentour 

The New Girl’s boss was fired. Then, her boss’s boss was fired.

People said her boss’s boss had, like, this vein of ore trapped deep down in his large body – imbedded, inscrutable. When he said Good morning that wasn’t usually what he meant. When he laughed it was not at what you supposed. Inside, he longed to fire you. 

Everyone said it. Her boss said it. Then he was fired. Her boss’s boss fired an old woman with a limp and a new pair of high heels, he fired a guy who went to his college, he fired a husband and wife who said they loved the company because they got to work together. Then, they got fired together. Everyone knew it: her boss’s boss yearned to fire; avoid him if you could. How many he’d fired, nobody could say. A dozen? Maybe twice that. His hit list was long – everyone. From a distance, and around corners, in the elevator and hallways and restroom stalls, outside on cigarette breaks, they talked about him, they joked nervous, and they called him something: the Reptile. When you talked to the Reptile, the air you breathed grew clammy. He smiled and was polite, he asked about your family’s well-being and your home appliances, and if your weekend was satisfactory and busy, and he looked at your surroundings, and said you had a nice workspace and to have a nice day, then you were fired. It was what he wanted, what satisfied the Reptile. It showed in his eyes and his stiff hair and his gait, in the way he exhaled or didn’t, the way he wore a pearl tie clasp on a pearl-colored tie, and how he pronounced the word bagel. 

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Sidekicks

.Reading time 49 minutes.

By JP Gritton

I guess you’re wondering how I ended up with a woman like Syrena, in the first place. Truth is, it’s Mike’s fault. He’s the one to blame. Or to thank, I don’t know which. It was Mike Corliss who turned to me on this too-hot afternoon beginning of September. The four of us ought to go out sometime. Double Dutch, I mean. And I remember him smiling at me while my guts turned somersaults.  He was a different man those days, full of piss and vinegar. He had a smart mouth on him, and he wasn’t afraid to use it either, which is why Laughton Starbuck kind of had it out for Mike.

“Where’s your protective eyewear, Corliss?”

“My protective eyewear?”

“That’s what I asked you.”

“My protective eyewear’s protecting the dashboard of Sheldon Cooper’s truck. That’s where I left it this morning.”

Sheldon, he used to call me, ’cause he knew it got on my nerves. To everybody else I was Shelley.

I was just a journeyman carpenter back then. I drove Lij’s truck to work and home every day, give my best friend Mike Corliss a ride. Half the time, he’d forget something on the dash: that blue bandana, that pack of smokes, that pair of goggles.

I guess I looked up to Mike, who was a couple years older than me and besides that had a way about him. He told a story better than anybody I know, though you never knew how much was true and how much he’d half-made up. He told me how a honeybee flies through the rain, missing every drop. He told me nobody’d ever saw a giant squid, but even so scientists know they exist ’cause sometimes, he said, a whale or a shark will wash up on the beach, a great big bite took out of it.

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The Killing Square

.Reading time 33 minutes.

By Michael Credico

Featured Art: Unfinished Study of Sheep by Constant Troyon, 1850

It’s the manipulations that end you. I was told this by Sam Shaw after he learned he’d been promoted to the inside. We were on the outside of the outside in the designated smoking area. I was smoking. Sam Shaw said, “What’s suffering worth?” He broke off the shards of animal blood that had froze to his overalls.

I shook like I was caught in electric wires. The cigarette butt hissed when I let it drop into a snowdrift. I could hardly feel myself living, felt like I was alive as a series of smoke breaks.

Sam Shaw said, “Nothing’s dead-end as it seems.”

“Easy for you to think,” I said. “You’re on the inside now.”

I warmed my hands with the heat of the conveyor’s gear motor, clenched and unclenched until my circulation was good enough that I could reach for my cutter and hand it off to Sam Shaw without either of us losing a precious something. Sam Shaw cut into a plastic clamshell that contained a dress shirt and tie combo. He pulled the tie too tight. I told him he couldn’t breathe. He called himself a real professional. I lined up the next group of animals.

“You ain’t dressed for this no more,” I said.

Sam Shaw looked at me and then the cutter. “Take it easy on me,” he said, taking an animal by its pit, cutting it with no regard for the stainlessness of the shirt.

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