The Throwaway Year (4 page)

Todd’s way of celebrating her accomplishments was to allow her to leave the treadmill but she now had to use the recumbent bike for half an hour.
Somehow she thought that by sitting it would be easier, but that was not true.  The weekend was the only time that Hayden had for herself.  After she gave Todd his pound of flesh on Saturday or Sunday, she took care of cleaning her home, paying bills, or visiting with Dani.  Then it was time to prepare for the upcoming week; preparing her meals, getting her clothes together so that she wouldn’t have to dash around wondering what to wear when she had not a minute to spare in the morning, and not an ounce of energy left in the evening.

She had her life regulated down to the minute.
It allowed her sweet emptiness, mindless activity where she had no time to think about anything beyond the task at hand. It was hard, but it was also slowly healing her.

Time might heal old wounds—but so did focusing on something more unpleasant like knotted muscles, a grumbling belly and total exhaustion.
The only thing she couldn’t quite regulate was the last office that she had to clean each night. At times they worked until 10:00 P.M. and she had to sit in her car silently stewing that she wouldn’t be in bed until midnight.

It wouldn’t do her any good to clean while they were still present if they were going to refill the ashtrays that she’d just cleaned
, or piss on the floor of the restroom that she’d just mopped!  To say that she was annoyed by it all would be an understatement.  A few times, she had even fallen asleep behind her steering wheel, which was bad.  Yet worse was when her mind would begin to wander back to MyKell.

Hayden watched the lady with the 1950s’ bouffant hairstyle leave the office, using her key to lock up.  Stifling a yawn, Hayden brushed past the older woman who gave her a suspicious look.  Hayden used her own janitorial service issued key to unlock the just locked door, ignoring the woman who had stopped to watch her as she entered the large office.

Hayden moved quickly, dumping the trash
and huffing under her breath.  When these people left their cubicles for the night, they also left half eaten food and drinks on their desks and they left their chairs almost halfway out into the aisle. Well she wasn’t supposed to touch anything on anyone’s desk—even if it was a bunch of sticky napkins from where someone had made a half-hearted attempt to clean up a spill.

It gave her a new appreciation for her own
workstation at her fulltime job.  Now she made double sure to keep the liner in place and to push her chair up to her desk at the end of the day. There were 26 cubicles in this office and it took a chunk of the night to get all of the chairs pushed up to their desks so that she could get to her vacuuming. Of the 26 cubicles, there were three that remained neat and she was grateful that some people had apparent home training.

She hadn’t been the least bit curious about what they did here.
She knew a boiler room when she saw one. They were a bunch of telemarketers. How many similar places had she dropped off or picked up MyKell from? Jobs like this had a high turn around so who cared if the carpet under your feet was stained, especially when the guy sitting next to you was probably living out of his car and hadn’t bathed in days? Telemarketing was a job of fast money and lots of…
sitting.

Contemplating her sore hamstrings
, Hayden suddenly thought of a solution. She returned to the manager’s office that she had just cleaned. She tried reading the faded stenciling on the outside of the door but FOX, VINYL, and A S was all that she could make out. So she snooped around the messy desk only long enough to write down the phone number and name of the company.

Cleaning this pigsty wasn’t worth the small amount of pay that she was getting.  Maybe she would fare better working sales.  MyKell had done it for years and she knew the ends and outs of it
, though she’d never sold anything in her life.  Yet if MyKell could do it, then she sure as hell could too. So the next day, Hayden called the owner of the company, Robert Fox.  He gave her an impromptu interview over the phone.

“You have a very pleasant phone voice Miss Michaels.  I understand that you’ve never done sales before
, but we have a script and I think you will do fine.  If you like, you can begin tomorrow, and I see no reason why you wouldn’t be able to work later in the evening.  After all, we have customers on the West coast.  Miss Michaels, welcome aboard.”

“Mr. Fox I have to give two weeks notice.  Would it be a problem if I started after that?”
She had considered just quitting her cleaning job with no notice but this place was just way too nasty not to make sure that the cleaning company found someone to replace her.

There was a brief hesitation.  “I think we can work with you on that.”

“Thank you Mr. Fox.”  Hayden hung up pleased as she did a mental calculation of how much she was sure to make at the higher paying position.

~***~

Two weeks later, she was walking through the door of the same office complex that she had been cleaning for the last month and a half.  However, this time, the office was a bustle with activity. She paused inside of the door as 19 sets of eyes met hers.  18 sets of eyes turned away, quickly dismissing her.  She looked at the one person that hadn’t looked away.  It was someone sitting at one of the tidy desks; one of the few people here with home training.

Or…
maybe not. He stared at her with dispassionate grey eyes as he talked on the phone, and the polite head nod that she was about to give him was quickly abandoned at his rude stare.  Hayden headed to the back of the room where Mr. Fox’s office was located. She knocked on the door now understanding that the faded stenciling read: “FOX VINYL AND MAP ADS.”

“Come,” said a gruff voice from inside, which sounded nothing like the polished man that she had spoken to over the phone two weeks before.  Mr. Fox was holding an ink pen, which was poised over a document.
His eyes swept over her body before settling on her face.

“Hayden Michaels?” h
e asked. He was sixtyish, fit and not totally unpleasant to look at.

She moved forward and offered her hand.
“Yes.  I’m Hayden Michaels.”  He stood and accepted her hand. After a polite exchange of greetings he had her sit in a plastic chair before his desk.  He spent the next half hour “training” her and then showed her to an empty desk out in the main room.

Ah
. It was the second neat desk in the room. No wonder… it was empty. She glanced over at the third neat desk and noted that it too was empty. Her faith in mankind once again diminished.

“Pam will be your on-the-job coach.  If you have any questions
, just ask her, though it is very simple and I don’t think you will have any problems.”

Hayden hid her doubts.  That half hour discussion in his office wasn’t very much in the way of training.  When she looked over at her OJ coach, whose workstation was right next to hers, she saw the little old bouffant lady from the other week.  The woman appeared to be in her late fifties with painted on eyebrows and crimson lipstick.  Yikes.  Pam gave her the once over before plastering a fake sm
ile on her thin wrinkled lips.

She walked over to Hayden and offered her hand.  Hayden accepted it, shaking it carefully as she was so thin that it felt like she h
ad the bones of a little bird.

“
Aren’t you our cleaning lady?” Pam asked loudly. Mr. Fox raised his brow in surprise.

Hayden found herself already disliking Pam.  “Not anymore,” she responded. 

“Oh, I didn’t realize that you… um worked here before.”  Mr. Fox interjected and Hayden wanted to say that it would have been on her application if he had asked her for one.

“So you didn’
t like it, huh?” Pam asked with a smirk. Hayden suddenly wished that she could skip this part too; where she was expected to be nice to people simply because they were her co-workers. Where she also had to politely listen to them share stories about their tedious lives.

Hayden could feel her build up of tension suddenly disperse as she decided that there was absolutely no reason why she had to be that person.
This was about getting to the money, and there was no time to expend on friendship, foolishness, or frivolity. So she gave Pam a neutral look.

“I’m Hayden Michaels and I understand that you will be my…
OJ coach?  Mr. Fox gave me some information but I have some questions if you don’t mind?”

Pam sniffed when it appeared that she
couldn’t needle the new girl.  “Oh… sure.”  Mr. Fox left them to it, retreating back to his office.  As soon as he was gone, Pam’s pleasant smile disappeared.

“You can double jack with me and listen to how I do things.  Just watch what I do.
You and I will be working the back half of the Detroit phonebook. There’s a copy of last year’s on the floor over there.”

Pam returned to her desk and pretty much disregarded Hayden as she went about making her next call.
Hayden retrieved the phonebook from a messy pile on the floor. The pile contained phonebooks from different cities; Norfolk, Columbus and then she saw Detroit.  She grabbed it, finally seeing the vinyl cover where she would sale ad space.

It was covered front and back with ads for businesses, restaurants, hotels
, etc. She noted that there was a clipboard hanging on the wall near Pam’s desk with a mock up of a phonebook cover. Looking around the room, she spotted other clipboards with their own mock-up phonebook covers for the cities that were being called by the other telemarketers. It clicked into place when she saw people periodically jump up to jot initials or check marks on them indicating which ad space had been sold on the covers for the cities that they were calling.

Hayden opened the box that Mr. Fox had given her containing a new headset which she put together quickly before wheeling her chair to Pam’s workstation.
  Pam pointed to a place on her phone where Hayden could plug in to listen to the conversation; double jack.  The older women didn’t offer her any explanation of what she was doing as she rapidly flitted around the script and fired amounts to her customers—amounts that were different than the ones listed in the script given to Hayden.

When that call ended, Pam picked up her copy of the yellow pages that lay sprawled on her desk and scanned it without bothering to tell Hayden what she was looking for.  Hayden knew from MyKell that this was called cold calling.  When
telemarketers don’t have a lead, they have to cold call.

Pam began the process over, asking if the caller wanted to advertise on the vinyl
phonebook cover and then discussing how much the ads would cost.  If the customer seemed uninterested, she then chopped the price down, and if there still was no interest, Pam grumbled a half hearted goodbye and hung up. After about half an hour of this, she stood up and announced that she needed a cigarette.

Pam
didn’t invite Hayden to join her and just walked away to go to the canteen.  Hayden was too busy jotting down notes to care.  Once Pam was gone, it gave Hayden the freedom to pick up the woman’s order forms that were to go to the printers.

It was just a mess of crossed out amounts and circled names and she could not make hide nor hair of it
, so she disregarded it wondering if she might have actually been better off staying the cleaning woman. Then Hayden scanned through the training material that Mr. Fox had given her and found a list of ad sizes with price amounts. Based on what the board indicated, more than half of their cover had already been sold. She tuned to the other people in the room, listening to what they were doing, and in that way, Hayden began to teach herself how to sell advertisement space on a phonebook cover.

Todd was on the treadmill right next to her bike and he was pounding away at a full out run.
Hayden had been pedaling for 30 minutes and he had not slowed his pace once. She had long since stopped equating Todd’s fitness with his muscle size. The man was a freaking rock!

Wiry muscles lined his arms and he often times wore loose fitting shorts that did little to conceal thundering legs and a boulder butt.
Long ago she had considered him to be an Average Joe that looked a little like that actor Adrien Brody—well Adrien Brody with a hyped up body. Not a bad combination in her opinion, but she now gave him much more credit in the looks department.

However
, Hayden’s appreciation of Todd’s looks was no indication of any type of romantic notion. Her trainer was quite obviously in love with his wife and her two sons from a previous relationship. Besides, the idea of love just made Hayden feel cold.

After another five minutes of rapid pedaling, Hayden managed to throw him a scowl.
“What are you doing, trying to show me up?”

Todd gave her a sheepish look and slowed his run to a fast walk.
“Sorry. I decided to do the Zombie Run this year. I haven’t jogged in a while and I need to get back into condition.”