8810, Page 2

  Chapter 2 – Training

  I arrived ten minutes early just to make sure that I told Larry hi so I could show him that I wasn’t like Ankle, and that he could count on me to be on time. He grunted a ‘good morning’ to me, and I swear there was the slight smell of Bourbon in his office. I made my way to my desk, feeling the poorly filtered air filling my nose and agitating my allergies. The office was relatively quiet this time of morning as people were still waking up, and it was too early for the phones to ring.

  I sat at my desk and turned on the computer waiting for it to load up. My log in worked today which was nice. I opened up my email to find that I already had fifteen unread messages. Most ended up being welcome messages from faceless mass address lists.

  One calendar invite told me I had a meeting with the department trainer. From the looks of it, the meeting was three hours long. I wish I had brought some no-doze.

  Soon Manager lady was in and she took me on a tour of the office, introducing me to various members of the staff. I didn’t remember any of their names, but tried to come up with nicknames for each. It was a trick I learned to remember people. One that I did remember was Adrian. She sat in the cube next to me. She was nice, one of those people who says ‘thank you’ when you ask them a question. It was also nice sitting next to someone around my age. Adrian couldn’t have been older than twenty six or twenty seven. Across from her was Star Wars, or at least that’s how I knew him. He was a rather odd man, in his late thirties best I could tell. He was tall like Ankle, wore his pants like Urkel, and sported a powder-blue fanny pack.

  There was an assortment of spaceship replicas on his desk and a song in some language from the Star Wars movies on his wall. Maybe it was Ewok—I wouldn’t know. I didn’t linger long at his desk, and he bid me farewell with the traditional, ‘may the force be with you.’ At that same moment, Adrian had made a choking sound, and I was pretty sure she was trying to take a drink and had been caught off guard.

  The morning dragged on full of nothingness, which in truth was kind of nice. It would have been better if Riders didn’t have their IT people remove Solitaire from all of the computers but hey, I was still on the clock. Manager-lady gave me a map of the building that was three pages long. On each page was a large box: that was the building; then there were smaller boxes inside the big box that were supposed to be conference rooms. There was nothing mentioning elevators, bathrooms, or stairwells. In short, no points of reference at all. It was more like modern art. All of the conference rooms had names that had nothing to do with what part of the building they were in. There was the Littleton room, the Aurora room, the Boulder room. All great names if you were new to the Denver metro area and wanted to know the surrounding cities and counties; but I was from Denver and lived in Littleton. At least I was represented. I could only imagine the shame the people in Centennial had to endure: they didn’t even get a bathroom named after them.

  It was almost time for my marathon session with the department trainer. The meeting was to take place in the Glendale room. Our computers had AOL Instant Messenger installed on them so I was able to IM Ankle and find out which room Glendale was. Just my luck—it was the room next to Larry’s office. I marked all of the corresponding pages with compasses documenting the new insight, but I still didn’t think that map was going to be much help.

  At nine, I grabbed a legal pad and a pen and started towards the Glendale room for training. I saw Adrian walking back from the fridge, or maybe she was coming from the department store, which was ingeniously called NWG for ‘need it, want it, got it’; at least that’s what people thought it stood for.

  Adrian was cute, average height, and thin with shoulder length chocolate brown hair and matching eyes. She was wearing a light perfume, which I appreciated. There was nothing worse than sitting next to the perfume lady.

  “Hey Bill, where you headed?”

  “I’m starting training, should be lots of fun.”

  She looked somber for a moment. “Look Bill, just stick it out and I promise it will get better.”

  She reached out and squeezed my arm in an almost apologetic way, then walked back to her desk. I shook my head not knowing what to make of, well whatever that was. When I entered the Glendale room there was a slightly pudgy guy with spiked black hair and huge ears sitting at the head of a large conference table pecking away at a ancient looking laptop. I sat down and he looked up and held out his hand for me to shake. His handshake was firm but his hands felt clammy or maybe it was pomade. He looked like the kind of guy who spent most of the day running his hand through his hair in frustration.

  “Hi there, I’m Chris. I’m our department trainer; people around here call me Yoda.”

  As he spoke, he scratched his oversized ear. “Oh because of your ears; okay that’s cool.”

  He looked at his hand a little confused and a little hurt. “N…no because I train everyone and know a lot of stuff like Yoda; um, not um my ears. Well let’s get started.”

  Yoda busied himself with the laptop again and I kicked myself.

  “Ok well you need to learn how to audit, so let me go over the basics. We do commercial lines insurance here and this class that you’re in now is for Workers Compensation policies, ok?”

  “Alright, so that’s if you get hurt at work, right?”

  “Yes. You will be learning how to classify employees and figuring out how much we need to charge people.”

  “Classify?”

  “See, depending on what kind of work a company does and more important what kind of work employees do, insurance rates are different, thus there is a classing system. For example, a door to door salesman in all but a few states would be classified as 8742. We here in a clerical job, we are 8810. Obviously there is a higher chance of a salesman getting hurt than someone in an office.”

  That was only the beginning. Yoda went on for the whole three hours! I listened to him talk about classifications and exposures and rating and a bunch of stuff that went right over my head. When the three hours were almost up, he explained that I was going to be in class every day for two weeks until I was done with the course. Then Yoda was going to look over all of my audits for a month to make sure I didn’t jack them up too bad.

  Don’t get me wrong, Yoda was a nice guy and he had a good sense of humor, but despite his best efforts, I was ready for bed by the time class was over. To my complete and utter horror, just as I stood up to leave, he gave me a book to read. Well, it was actually a three ring binder, but still—it was all about insurance and obviously written by lawyers. My life as I knew it was over.

  Back at my desk, I had an IM waiting from Horsechick, at least that was their screen name. I typed, “umm, hi…who are you?” in the message window. Adrian popped her head around the corner.

  “It’s me. How was class?”

  She came around then sat on my desk. Right as she sat she popped up like something shocked her. “Oh, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t just sit on your desk like that.”

  “Don’t worry, I didn’t pay for it.”

  She smiled and sat back down. “Thanks, so what do you think?”

  “Well it was boring, but Yoda seems cool. How’s your day going?”

  She nodded at Star Wars and grimaced. “He farts!” she said in a whisper.

  “What?”

  “He sits at his desk and farts, then fans it away. It drives me nuts.”

  “Are you serious? I would never fart around a chick.”

  “You’d better not.”

  She looked over her shoulder at him and shuttered.

  “On a different note, Ankle went to lunch already. He has his scheduled because he’s on the phones. So since he already left, do you want to go?”

  “He told you his nickname?”

  She laughed and I heard an exaggerated huff from Star Wars’s direction. “Yeah he did, so?”

  “I would love to go to lunch, thanks.”

  We went to a place called Black Cow. It was a sm
all deli and pretty good. We had to make lunch fast. I think she wanted to get away from Star Wars, but I appreciated her taking me.

  As a sat at my desk, I cracked open a Coke and opened the training manual. The rest of the afternoon passed in a haze, and I felt myself slipping into a coma. Come to think of it, I wanted to be in a coma; it couldn’t be worse than this.

  I’m not sure when I stopped seeing the world around me or how long it took, but I felt my head bobbing lightly as I tried to stay conscious. There were pretty lights all around me and I felt light and wonderful. Then I noticed my mouth and chin were cold and wet. A dull pain erupted in my nose and I felt myself slipping out of my chair. I caught myself and rubbed my sleeve across my mouth wiping the drool away.

  Adrian scooted around the corner. “Are you ok?”

  She looked worried for a moment but after taking me in, she started to laugh. “You fell asleep, didn’t you?”

  Star Wars harrumphed at her and she repeated her playful accusation in a whisper. “You fell asleep?”

  “Maybe,” I said feeling my face getting warm as blood rushed to it.

  “That’s priceless. I have to tell Manager-lady—she’ll love it!”

  She flitted off and came back with Manager-lady close in tow. She was laughing. “Adrian just told me you fell asleep and hit your head on your desk.”

  I tried to sound outraged but I felt the smile creeping across my face. “Well maybe if this place provided a safe work environment like is mandated in the workers compensation act of 1901 or something like that then it wouldn’t have happened.”

  They both guffawed and Manager-lady spoke. “Do you think you can handle the hazardous work for the rest of the day?”

  “Yeah, I think so. I only have twenty minutes left, but thanks for your concern.”

  They both went back to their cubes and I checked to make sure my nose wasn’t bleeding. I did hit it pretty hard. I ignored IM’s from Ankle asking how my head was feeling. I was ready for the end of the day.