Inappropriate Behavior: Stories Read Online Free PDF

stupidity to make me seriously question the veracity of the yearly financial reports, which show us as a major player in the IC world. I had witnessed fiscal irresponsibility and massive waste offset by arbitrary niggling and concealed by necromantic accounting. I had narrowly escaped involvement in churlish turf wars. I had seen grown men and women reduced to paranoid hysterics by such matters as their table assignment at the company picnic or having their name left off a memo concerning this month’s coffee fund. I had learned that the single most important task one canmaster in business is that of assigning blame, and I had seen the best of the best ply their trade with such a profound lack of conscience that it would be debilitating in normal life. I was even there the day last March when Terrence McNeil—who never learned the corollary to the Most Important Task, that one must diligently avoid blame—came by to show some of his former coworkers in Vendor Support the business end of his Winchester side-by-side. But I had never seen a man in a blue suit crawl across a parking lot before.
    It wasn’t until after the man had driven away that I noticed the other workers on my floor standing at the window watching the same spectacle. I thought of calling someone over and saying . . . what, I don’t know . . . maybe, what the hell? But then, I had done a pretty good job of remaining unnoticed since my transfer to Contracts six months before, wasn’t even sure any of the others on the floor knew my name. I could envision calling to someone and having them look at me blankly—or worse, with alarm, the McNeil incident still fresh in our minds—then phone security, or worse, ask our manager who I was, and the jig would be up.
    You see, I had no idea what I was doing in Contracts, no idea what my job was even supposed to be. I got hired in PR, then two and a half years later, I got a memo saying that my requested transfer to Contracts had come through. Contracts? I went to my supervisor, who was still up to her neck in blaming people for the McNeil business. She said it was a mistake but to go ahead and report to Contracts the next day and she’d get things straightened out. For the past six months I’ve sat at my desk for eight hours a day doing absolutely nothing. When a contract comes to my desk, I pretend to read it, sign it, and pass it on. I read a lot of newspapers and magazines, spend hours on the Internet, thumb-twiddle, navel-ponder.
    And I got a raise, a nice one. And almost to the day of my transfer, the economy went south, or the news started talking about it going south, and all of a sudden I needed the money.I talked it over with Marcie, and since the whole country was laying off people left and right, we decided that I’d take the raise and stay there for as long as I could until I screwed up and they fired me, which, since the IC did not admit mistakes, usually meant a handsome severance package in return for the dismissed employee’s enduring silence.
    So every morning I’d get to my desk and there’d be a stack of three or four contracts waiting there, and every evening I’d leave those same contracts in the outgoing mail. Easy as that.
    So while I was interested in the strange man and his stranger method of perambulation, I felt it was best, given what I thought was a tenuous grasp on my frankly embarrassing income, to simply let the matter pass without comment. Apparently the others on my side of the floor felt the same, because no one said a word about it. They simply turned from the window and left for the day, moving silently out of the hallway and into the elevator.
    When I got home to Marcie, I told her about the man and how he crawled across the parking lot. Marcie is a painter. Her work was just beginning to appear in some of the smaller local galleries. I told her she should paint that, get a mental image of what I was talking about, and paint