Self Inflicted | Chapter 6

"This was no human relationship. Humans greet. Humans connect. Humans miss."

The office was not empty despite this being the earliest Alexi had ever arrived to work. He had stayed this late before, grinding away on projects that were not possible to complete by the deadlines given, but he had never been one of those adults who got to work by five AM and were somehow able to leave by four. Alexi walked past a few members of both camps on the route to his desk: two who had stayed late and three who had arrived unreasonably early. It was easy to tell them apart. The determined, usually older, crowd of worm-having-birds sat leisurely with coffees and Redbulls at hand. They had deep eye bags from being unable to get to bed by the necessary 9pm. Sleeping so late led to their morning alarms being snoozed three or four times, each ring rousing their partners with weary indignation. Just one amongst the ocean of conflicts that strained their relationships. Though the stress had carved patterns onto their sallow faces, the mourning doves attempted to rev their engines, shuffling to and fro, unpacking their things, and scrolling through their emails. Those who had stayed at work overnight also had coffees and redbulls, but usually three or four. Cans and a buildup of trash from the dinner and snacks they had ordered to power them through the darkness, littered the floor around them. That was the thing about working over night, they turned the lights off. It was some sort of cost cutting measure, or more likely an attempt to hide their image of overwork. People on the streets couldn’t see that the building was still buzzing with activity. Elevators and computers still worked, it was just the overhead lights, black from 9 PM-4 AM. The overnight group felt quite energized by the light, from both the tubes above and the sun beginning its ascent, and worked with redoubled effort. The typing got faster. They were locked in. If they had made it this far into the morning, they knew they would be unable to go home to sleep, and looked peaceful having accepted this truth, whereas at 3 AM they might have been able to finish and go home to sleep for a few hours, and so moved feverishly. Their hair was unkempt, their eyes bloodshot, but they had a surprising brightness in their faces.

Alexi noticed all this and felt at peace for one moment. He had stopped thinking about the disaster his life was and instead focused on the world outside of himself. It didn’t last long. As he plopped down onto his chair (Alexi was generally a plopper by nature, unwilling to maintain muscular control during the eccentric portion of the sit, free falling after he had ensured, through a half squat, that he was roughly above the chair or sofa), his desk mate Ding Yu wished him happily, “Good morning!” He grunted as a reply. A feeling self pity immediately came over him. Ding was in her late thirties and had been with Initech for over ten years, though she and Alexi held the same position. She was decent at her job and very jovial, but Alexi felt jealous of her because she was someone for whom this was enough. Working all day, going to bed and coming back to work fulfilled Ding. Her ambition had settled down to this, maybe try to climb up this career ladder, maybe get a raise and a new bigger apartment to not get to see much except if you were lucky enough to have time off for Thanksgiving, maybe raise her ungrateful children. Nothing more. She didn’t feel the burden of not knowing which of one hundred potential paths to walk down. She did not feel the need after work to draw so as maybe to be an artist, or to study statistics so as maybe to be an economist or meteorologist or trader, or even to brutally self reflect in order to figure out what it was that stifled her relationships to a mere surface level. She didn’t learn about new ways of being from the people she met and think, “What would my life look like if I was doing that? If I had started doing that five years ago?” She had it made: A contentment to pursue what she had pursued, and the love of a better than her husband though perhaps she did not deserve it. God can they just shut up!

The cleaning staff make their rounds early in the morning. They clean up after the night owls, clearing desks and wiping down surfaces. They empty trash bins and replace their liners. They unpack the snacks and refill the coffee machine. Then, with the empty boxes, whose contents were placed just so in a beautiful cornucopia of corporate benefits, they loudly rip the tape and pull apart the self intersecting tabs to flatten the boxes. This clamor was what occupied Alexi’s attention now.

“Its like he’s intentionally making as much noise as possible. I’m trying to think!” Alexi yelled in his head and crumpled the paper on his desk. He turned to look at the source and saw a man to whom he had waved goodbye just a day ago. It was always the same people. For the last two years, it had been the same three people pushing rolling trash bins around with their superhero-esque utility belts of solvents and rags. Two Hispanic guys and an Eastern European looking old lady. His initial annoyance turned to horror. “I don’t even know their names!” He had waved hello and goodbye to them, mostly to the Slavic woman, once or twice, yet he had never had any relationship with them. He had even often completely ignored their presence when he was “busy” not looking up as they passed, not acknowledging them as though they were like birds living in his backyard tree, free to come and go, existing in separate worlds. This was no human relationship. Humans greet. Humans connect. Humans miss.

Alexi rushed over to the stack of boxes. The man looked up in confusion at the crazed boy still wrapped in his big coat and gloves.
“Here, I can help,” Alexi offered and lifted up a box from one of the stacks.
“Oh, no need.” 
Alexi put the box under his armpit and bit the front of his mittens to remove them. 
“No really, its ok.” 
“No, no, I aant to hell you,” Alexi insisted with the mittens still in his mouth and began to tear at the box he had picked up.
“Oh, wait!” the man shouted, but Alexi, in a rush to rectify his relationship with this human, did not pay attention to the fact that this box was quite heavy.
He pressed with his quite chubby fingers into the untapped centerline of the box, pulling apart. Alexi gained confidence as the box began to rip and pulled harder. The box split open! One hundred and fourty four individually packaged Sun-Maid raisins erupted around the well meaning boy. The geyser of red shocked Alexi, knocking him over. He sat stunned.
The cleaner rushed to help Alexi up, “Are you okay!?”

After apologizing profusely, helping to clean up, running away to a conference room on the other side of the floor, and burying his head in his arms for quite a while, Alexi checked the calendar on his phone and saw that he had a meeting in 10 minutes. God, I gotta kill myself. Alexi sighed and rubbed his face with his hands. He rubbed hard moving the skin of his cheeks over his eyeballs. He felt exhausted.
“Why am I so tired?” Alexi asked aloud.
He walked back to his desk interrogating his memory when he finally recalled that he had literally slept outside in the snow. Alexi pitied himself and his situation, and began working on an excuse to take the day off but concluded that there would be too much work to do the rest of the week if he did.

He joined the zoom call two minutes late, as did most participants, all hoping to skip the idle conversations about the price of Bitcoin or the weather that necessarily precede meetings that cannot yet start without the biggest players present.
“Alright lets get started then,” Alexi’s boss Jake began to everyone's relief.
Jake sat inside what looked to be an office set, with a diploma from Harvard on the wall behind him, a large potted plant on the floor and more hanging plants coming down from the bookshelf behind him. Two members from the client’s team, unfortunately no one with any decision making power, sit in two identical looking blank white rooms hoping to convey the desires of the CEO for the raise. Alexi joined the call with no camera on. It is frowned upon to have no visual for calls with clients, but sometimes you accept your fate, knowing turning it on would be worse with the camera on–and console yourself that maybe it would be OK since this meeting wasn’t with the client’s top brass.

“As we spoke about before, there were several debt vehicles that could assist in capturing the capital needed for project Valhalla. We’ve done some initial modeling to help sell what we believe to be the clear winner for your situation, convertible bonds,” Jake explained directly.
He did not walk through the other options, most of which we had not actually modeled, and went straight into the numbers for convertible bonds. The client’s didn’t really know what was what and didn’t push back on the options. They stayed quite silent for the first 20 slides through the story and high level explanations, but had a lot to say when we finally got to the explicit contract we think investors would buy into.
“Hold on, there’s no way we Gabriel will agree to a 12% coupon,” Balajeet the client’s “strategy analyst” exclaimed.
“We believe, based on our understanding of the fundamentals of your business, that this would be the most compelling offer,” Jakes canned response came back.
“No way man, if that's the best deal you can make then there's nothing to talk about here.”
“What specifically are you concerned about?” Jake asked even though the answer was obvious.“The idea is to fund project Valhalla not to get trapped into repaying this financial burden for 100 years.”
“The numbers suggest that project Valhalla would definitely be worth this investment, and our initial modeling actually shows that complete repayment can be completed in less than 15 years.”
“What modeling are you even talking about? I am not gonna..”
Alexi’s head fell and he was jerked from his sleep. He saw his muted grey box as the only participant left in the Zoom room. “Oh shit!” Alexi panicked and checked his email. Phew, the only message he had from his MD said to re-run the model once the client sent the updated numbers and to “get the presentations team to make the slides fucking beautiful” for their next meeting.

“You look like shit,” Patrick leaned over the cubicle wall to express his opinion.
“I feel like shit,” Alexi mumbled, unable to differentiate if the words came from his own thoughts or from someone saying them in real life.
“Hello? What happened to you?” Patrick waved in front of Alexi’s face.
“What do you want?” Alexi looked up at the blonde giant.
“There's no deals ending today, what are you working so hard on? "Alexi did not respond and went back to the spreadsheet that he had opened an hour ago.
“He came in super early today,” Ding, all smiles, piped in.
“Wooooah you never come in before me, is there some sort of secret project your on? What is it? Tell me!”
Alexi had the thought that if he was in better spirits he might have enjoyed making Patrick squirm in his own ambition, but he felt nothing.

For some, working hard is the metric above all else with which they judge themselves. They might brag about how little they slept that week, how many lines of code they had written, or even that they ranked up in a video game. The fruits of their labor is implicit, by working hard they were further on the path towards imagined greatness than you were. These worker bees equate effort with prestige. The most complex, challenging, and necessary tasks require the most hours put in, the most grind, and they reassure themselves that through the sacrifice of their social psychic and community bodies, what they have chosen to waste their time on is meaningful. This alone was fine, such spiritless adults are necessary to make the world go round, but what Alexi found particularly annoying was how the dull drones sought validation in their meaning from others, demanding respect, pleading with the chaff to acknowledge how impressive and necessary the niches within which they’ve narrowly defined themselves are to the progress of human good and not solely in the pursuit of greed–though the money too, they are oft to remind us, is a bonus.