Episode 11: A coworker who quit still shows up to our Monday meetings and I was apparently the last person in the office to realize she does not work here Titelbild

Episode 11: A coworker who quit still shows up to our Monday meetings and I was apparently the last person in the office to realize she does not work here

Episode 11: A coworker who quit still shows up to our Monday meetings and I was apparently the last person in the office to realize she does not work here

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Submitted by Dee — Tulsa, Oklahoma. 46. Paulette put in her notice in November. I remember because the week before we'd done the Thanksgiving potluck and she brought her scalloped corn, same as every year, and the Monday after, Rich told us she was leaving to help her daughter with the new baby down in McAlester. We signed a card. Somebody bought a sheet cake. And then that same Monday she was in the ten o'clock meeting, in the chair she always took by the window, and she's been in every Monday meeting since. Eight months of them. I do claims for a regional office here in Tulsa, and our Monday meetings are the kind of thing you stop seeing, like the carpet. Forty minutes, a spreadsheet on the big screen, coffee that tastes like the pot. Paulette sat in on them the way she always had. She'd catch a transposed number before anybody else. She knew which adjusters were behind. When my youngest had his tonsils out she asked about him by name three weeks running. It never once struck me as strange that a woman who didn't work there anymore knew our numbers better than we did. Her desk stayed hers, too, in the sense that nobody took it. Facilities cleared out the drawers, I think, but the little engraved name plate stayed screwed to the front of the cubicle — PAULETTE H., in that gold-colored plastic — and after a while it was just part of the wall you walked past forty times a day. I never thought about who leaves a name plate up for eight months, or who you'd have to be to take it down. Then in July we got a temp. Young woman named Aisha, covering while Rich was out for his knee. Sharp, quiet, watched everybody the way new people do. After her second Monday meeting she followed me back to my desk and stood there a second like she was deciding something, and then she said, low, "Can I ask you something? That older lady, the one who kept fixing the figures. Is she okay?" I said Paulette was fine, why. And Aisha did this thing with her face — not scared, more like she was the one who'd said the wrong thing. She said, "It's just, my first day, Denise told me she doesn't actually work here. She told me don't —" and then she stopped, because she was watching me not know what she was talking about, and she could see it landing. Denise. Rich. All of them. Somebody had sat every new hire down and told them about Paulette. Told them enough that Aisha, four days in, knew to be careful, knew there was a rule about her that everybody understood. Everybody but me. For eight months I'd been the one bringing her a coffee, asking after her daughter, saving her the window chair, and the whole office had watched me do it and let me. They thought I knew. Or they thought I was the one she was coming for, and they weren't going to get in the middle of it. I didn't ask Aisha what Denise had told her not to do. I want to say I did. I stood there and I didn't. I said something about how Paulette's just a fixture, thanks for looking out, and Aisha nodded fast and got out of there, and we have not talked about it since. That was two weeks ago. This past Monday Paulette was in her chair by the window. She'd printed the agenda for me, three-hole punched, because she knows I lose the digital ones. She asked how my boy's throat healed up. I said good, all healed, and I meant it, and I smiled at her, because eight months is a long time to be kind to somebody and you can't just stop on a Tuesday. The name plate is still up. PAULETTE H. I looked at it on my way out and understood, finally, that it wasn't there because nobody had gotten around to it. It was up because taking it down is a thing a person has to decide to do, and stand there and do, and be the one who did it. Nobody in that office is going to be that person. I know that now the way they've all known it the whole time. I walked past it and left it exactly where it was.
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