The Dreadful Office Birthday Acknowledgment

I've been temping here in Pacoima, CA, for the past couple of months. If you've never been, it can best be described as resembling the inside of an asshole in hell. A warm place you'd prefer to leave. They situate neighborhoods so strangely out here. One side of the street is a long stretch of office buildings. The other is a long stretch of dilapidated suburban homes. One of these homes is occupied by a group of apparently unsupervised, shirtless 14-year-old boys, forcing me and my coworkers to smoke in the back alley, as the boys have been known to fire paintball pellets at people exiting the front door.

I work for a smallish school-uniform manufacturer. My job is to compile data on what color uniforms school kids in certain areas are wearing so the company can tell Wal-Marts in those areas what to buy. What this means is that for eight hours a day I make phone calls to elementary schools across the country and ask the principal's secretary, "What are the children wearing?" The fun of being paid to pose as a pedophile and tickle school administrators' paranoia is spoiled by the sobbing fits de rigueur to the life of a telemarketer.

But today is Lisa's birthday. I discovered this when a thick tree-trunk of a woman, a coworker whom I don't really know, stomped into my shared office and commanded: "Come get some cake. It's Lisa's birthday."

I remained seated. Still. My fingers hovering centimeters above my keyboard, my eyes boring into my monitor, and a thousand miles beyond. A cat's whisper in my mind: "Wait for the footsteps," it said. "When you hear the footsteps, the beast is gone. Until then, you mustn't breathe." After a few seconds that stretched for a hundred years, she stomped away without repeating her command.

If you've experienced The Office Birthday Acknowledgment, pull up a barstool and I'll buy you one. You've "been in the shit" as they say.

The Office Birthday Acknowledgment begins with a Gatherer. The Gatherer, usually a dexterous woman with a stern cadence and athletic build, walks the corridor between cubicles collecting coworkers to participate in the ceremony. Occasionally the Gatherer is new to the task and spreads the word with an excited whisper, as if she is planning a surprise party. But usually the Gatherer spreads the word with a gruff bark, as angry at having to speak to her coworkers as they are at being spoken to.

Then come the reinforcements. Once cake-time strikes, usually only two out of 30 people have shown up. Those two are then sent out to the bathrooms and stairwells to remind those who thought there might be a place to hide that there is, in fact, not.

Next, the Waiting. By this point it is 10 minutes past the designated celebration time (usually 3 p.m.) and everyone has shuffled into the conference room and found their places lining the perimeter of the room. No one sits. If you sit, you might never get out. Remain standing so you can eat your square of cake, mumble Happy Birthday and run to a bathroom stall to weep.

The Birthday Celebrant never arrives on time. He is usually in the middle of a phone call or some other task he is salaried to perform. And since it's supposed to be a surprise, no one asks that he haul ass so we may return to our cubicles and daydream about happy hour. So everyone waits. Silently. The Gatherer may occasionally swear as she clumsily readies the cutlery and paper dishware. But otherwise, no one says a word. Our backs rear up against the wall, our heads down. It looks like the early hours of a junior high school dance. But everyone knows there will be no brave young girl shuffling across a gymnasium to drag a blushing boy onto the dancefloor. No, no one is going to dance today.

If you don't stare at the carpet, you stare at the cake. No one knows where the cake came from or who arranged for its delivery. Sure, there are rumors. But no one ever really knows.

Finally, the Birthday Celebrant is free. Someone leads him to the surprise by asking him to "come down to the conference room" for the first time in exactly one year; the day of his last dreadful Office Birthday Acknowledgment.

The Birthday Celebrant enters with a deep, exhausted sigh. This is our cue. We sing/mutter "Happy Birthday" with less exuberance than if we were reciting the eye exam chart at the DMV. All the while the Birthday Celebrant wears a large grin, chaotic in its contrast to the violent nausea in his eyes. The song ends with a groaned "Yaaay!" and some hushed clapping. The Birthday Celebrant then thanks everyone and begins to slice up the cake. Here is when the Birthday Celebrant is most envied, as he has an activity to divert his attention from having to speak to or make eye contact with anyone in the room.

And now the plates are passed. One by one they make their way into our hands. One by one we hunch our top three vertebrae and begin to eat where we are standing. The dumb scrape of plastic forks on paper plates is the only sound in the room. We eat swiftly. We finish. The cake was awful. Our impulse for survival is now giddy with the sugar. We gently shove our way through the rank and sagging mass of coworker breasts and buttocks, making for the door before we faint. And with a final terse "'Birthday, Dave" we are in the hall and we are free. Free to cower in our cubicles and caress photographs of family.

But today is Lisa's birthday. It was a good seven minutes after the Gatherer left before I moved. That was when I heard the singing. It sounded like locusts. I quickly slid on my headphones hooked up to my computer's CD-ROM drive and let the music protect me.

A few minutes later, my headphones are still on and I'm reading the lyric sheet of a CD insert. I feel a presence. A chill in the room. When I look up I see Xena standing above me with a plate of cake in each hand. I remove my headphones to hear her bark: "Did ya want some cake or not?" I rub my belly in an adorable manner to show that I'm too full to eat and turn down the cake. She curtly turns and stomps out of the room.

I didn't ask for any cake. Then I found out from the chick who shares this office, who got a piece of cake, that there's coconut in it. Fucking coconut! What if I had broken down under pressure and gotten a piece, then bit into a mouthful of stringy-ass coconut? It would have been all I could do to keep from walking up to the birthday girl and grinding my piece into her face before taking a leak on the floor.

Damn.

The good news is I quit this place earlier today. Friday's my last day. As of now, I have no work for Monday.