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f a m o u s without people making money out of it.' ' 'So name one, then.'
    "I could see Margaret's thinking flail, her features dissolving and reforming, and I was feeling just a little too full of myself, knowing that other people in the cafeteria had started to listen in on the conversation.
    I was the boy in the baseball cap driving the convertible again, high on his own cleverness and ascribing darkness and greed to all human
    endeavors. That was me.
    ' 'Oh, all right, you win,' she says, conceding me a pyrrhic victory, and I was about to walk out of the room with my coffee (now the Perfect-But- Somewhat-Smug Young Man), when I heard a lit t l e v o i c e a t t h e back of the coffee room say 'Anne Frank.' "Well.

    "I pivoted around on the ball of my foot, and who did I see, looking quietly defiant but dreadfully dull and tubby, but Charlene sitting next 0 Z M 0 SIS: The inability of
    to the megatub of office acetaminophen tablets. Charlene with her trailer-one's job to live up to one's self-image.
    park bleached perm, meat-extension recipes culled from Family Circle magazine, and neglect from her boyfriend; the sort of person who when POWER MIST: The
    you draw their name out of the hat for the office Christmas party gift, tendency of hierarchies in office
    y o u s a y , ' W h o ? '
    environments to be diffuse and
    ' 'Anne Frank?' I bellowed, 'Why of course there was money there, preclude crisp articulation.
    why . . .' but, of course, there was no money there. I had unwittingly declared a moral battle that she had deftly won. I felt awfully silly and awfully mean.
    "The staff, of course, sided with Charlene—no one sides with
    scuzzballs. They were wearing their 'you-got-your-comeuppance' smiles, and there was a lull while the cafeteria audience waited for me to dig my hole deeper, with Charlene in particular looking righteous. But I just stood there unspeaking; all they got to watch instead was my fluffy white karma instantly converting into iron-black cannon balls acceler-ating to the bottom of a cold and deep Swiss lake. I felt like turning into a plant—a comatose, nonbreathing, nonthinking entity, right there and then. But, of course, plants in offices get scalding hot coffee poured into their soil by copier machine repair people, don't they? So what was I to do? I wrote off the psychic wreckage of that job, before it got any worse. I walked out of that kitchen, out the office doors, and never bothered to come back. Nor did I ever bother to gather my belongings from my veal-fattening pen.
    " I f i g u r e i n r e t r o s p e c t , t h o u g h , t h a t i f t h e y h a d a n y wisdom at all at the company (which I doubt), they would have made Charlene clean out my desk for me. Only because in my mind's eye I like to see her standing there, wastepaper basket in her plump sausage-fingered hands, sifting through my rubble of documents. There she would come across my framed photo of the whaling ship crushed and stuck, possibly forever, i n t h e g l a s s y A n t a r c t i c i c e . I s e e h e r s t a r i n g a t t h i s p h o t o i n m i l d confusion, wondering in that moment what sort of young man I am and possibly finding me not unlovable.
    "But inevitably she would wonder why I would want to frame such a strange image and then, I imagine, she would wonder whether it has a n y f i n a n c i a l v a l u e . I t h e n s e e h e r c o u n t i n g h e r l u c k y s t a r s t h a t s h e doesn't understand such unorthodox impulses, and then I see her throw-

    ing the picture, already forgotten, into the trash. But in that brief moment of confusion . . . that brief moment before she'd decided to throw the photo out, well . . . I think I could almost love Charlene then.
    "And it was this thought of loving that sustained me for a long while when, after quitting, I turned into a Basement Person and never went in to work in an office again."

    OVERBOARDING: Overcom-
    "Now: when you become a Basement Person, you drop out of