The Organization is Here to Support You, page 24
PRAISE FOR CHARLENE ELSBY
"A fascinating, sometimes dizzying look at the narratives we build out of other people and what they build upon us. Sometimes you have to revel in the obsessive weirdness of the world. Elsby turns the skull into a cubicle for the mind."
HAILEY PIPER, AUTHOR OF A GAME IN YELLOW
“Pitch black humor meets the existential dread of contemporary corporate culture in this tour de force from Elsby. Surreal, hilarious, and heartbreaking all at once, you’ll keep going despite the pain, like a cancer-ridden lung wheezing out another smoky laugh. A must-read if you’ve ever been ensnared in bureaucratic hell.”
EMMA E. MURRAY, AUTHOR OF CRUSHING SNAILS AND THE DROWNING MACHINE AND OTHER OBSESSIONS
Copyright © 2025 by Charlene Elsby, Artists, Weirdpunk Books
First Edition
WP-0028
Print ISBN 978-1-951658-47-2
Cover art by Ira Rat
Editing and internal layout/formatting by Sam Richard
Weirdpunk Books logos by Ira Rat
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Weirdpunk Books
www.weirdpunkbooks.com
CONTENTS
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Part II
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Part III
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Epilogue: Dorian’s Song
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also from Weirdpunk Books
PART ONE
1
I look at the light on my top left monitor, breathing. It’s asleep. Someone went to the trouble to put a light on the power button that grows in intensity, until it reaches a maximum, and then it begins an alternate process, ultimately fading to darkness. It’s smooth and consistent, each breath in the same length as each breath out. You’ll never catch it stuck, out of air, waiting that extra second before it takes its next inhale—not like when you’re sleeping next to another person, and every so often, for a part of a second, they pause, and you think, there’s a chance they’ve breathed everything out, and that this time the cycle won’t start again—until it does. Another death evaded, and another one the next moment. The light on the monitor doesn’t mimic breath, it mocks it, trying to show how easy it is, when a human, any human, at any given moment, just might fail to go on inhaling and exhaling. The monitor keeps on, antagonizing life and its imperfections, feigning sleep, when it might as well be death. The monitor has never seen anything die. It doesn’t know how dependent it is on me to let it go on, keep breathing. But I pay its power bills. I’m the one with anima. Each morning, I consider whether to wake it up, once again, like all the days before, or to unplug it, throw it out the window, watch the cars try to avoid it on the road, until one of them finally hits it, ridding me of it forever.
Each morning, so far, I’ve awakened it. But each morning may be the morning I might not.
Maurice, when he was around, used to argue that employment is a constraint. I have to log in. I have to perform. I do not choose which tasks I complete. I have been bought, he’d say, if he knew where I lived and worked now.
But Maurice didn’t know what it’s like to be really constrained. He’d never needed something he didn’t have. Having everything you need, I told him. That’s freedom. And since not all of us are born rich, we have to work. At least, I would tell him, if I were arguing with him now, at least now I can decide whether or not to go without. At least now I can walk down the hall and buy a Diet Coke, if I want one—whenever I want one. Such a thing seemed so impossible for so long, and Maurice didn’t even consider it, didn’t know what that was like, had heard of it, certainly, but didn’t really believe in it, that there were people in the situation of not being able to have a soda whenever they so choose—and certainly not me. I was pretty, and I was smart. Surely someone would give me everything I need. That’s not how it works, Maurice, I’d say, exasperated.
This is not constraint. Constraint is when someone demands the impossible of you and denies you something you need when you can’t meet that demand. It means you always need something. I, on the other hand, as long as I keep showing up, will always have everything I need. That’s freedom, Maurice.
I continue to argue with my memories of Maurice as I wait until eight thirty.
Freedom is being assured that every moment before eight thirty is my own time, and they won’t have any of it. Even though I’m in the workspace area of my unit, early again (why do I keep waking up earlier and earlier?), I let the machines sleep until eight thirty. I have to be careful. If I start logging on earlier, they’ll come to expect it. I set eight thirty as a start time, because I used to sleep much later, used to be awake much later, but ever since I started working at these machines, I’m tired so much faster, sleeping much more efficiently, and then awake again before I’d ever want to be. My colleagues log in earlier, some at seven thirty, some at seven, some at six in the morning, but those last ones, I doubt them. How would they have the time before to shower, have a coffee, prepare for the day? They must be logging on as they roll out of bed, moving the mouse around between brushing their teeth and brushing their hair, making it seem like they’re at work already when really, there’s nothing yet to do. We all get to log off eight hours exactly from when we log in, so if you log in at six in the morning, you can log off at two in the afternoon. I, on the other hand, am around until four thirty. By four thirty, everyone else is gone and, just like at six am, there’s nothing to do. But sometimes, once in a while, there’s someone left, clocking in overtime on a project that there just weren’t enough hours in the day to finish, and sometimes, I’ll even get a message from them, at which point I get to respond, promptly and diligently, with some response that answers whatever they asked of me, but which really says, “I’m still here.”
After four thirty, it’s my time again. Let the monitors sleep their inhuman sleep, all evening and all night. There’s always the chance that if I turned them on, something would be there to do, something important, something that can’t wait until morning.
How can they not wake up, knowing all that?
But they don’t.
Even if they did, better them than me.
2
Today of all days, it is important to be punctual. For today is my annual performance review. Each year, the stakeholders take part in the collaborative process of determining the quality of my performance. I and my immediate supervisor, along with her immediate supervisor, attempt to recall what it is I’ve done all year, and to reduce that into a one-page summary that can be easily digested by those whose positions rank them even higher. I am a level 07 officer. If I succeed in my tasks for a number of years, I will inevitably become a level 08 officer. To become a level 09, 10, 11, I must leave the realm of officers entirely, become something else, another classification altogether—analyst, advisor, specialist, executive. But I do not want to. I do not want to do that.
I do not want to be promoted so far up that I am alone.
I take solace in how many officers there are and how, in the event of an emergency, another one of me would take my place. There would be no interruption in service. My files would become someone else’s files. I’ve seen it so many times already. Someone whose work is necessary and important falls out of circulation and—all of a sudden—someone else whose work is also necessary and important comes to take their place. The email signature changes, but the production doesn’t cease.
At level 07, we are all one and the same, and that’s how it ought to be.
The more of me there are, the better.
After today, I expect my work to continue as usual.
Because the years don’t stop for the evaluations. The work continues, unceasing, the day-by-day not broken but instead enforced by the annual performance review that at once sums up my existence, but also justifies it and, by doing so, confirms that not only am I performing well, but am being used efficiently by my superiors, as a resource for the organization. It’s as much their performance review as mine. After all, if I weren’t performing adequately, why haven’t my mentors ensured that I have the opportunities to develop the capacities I might need to thrive? Why has the organization failed to encourage my potential, to maximize my aptitudes, to apply my valuable skill set to the problems that plague society today?
We are all satisfactory.
My first supervisor informed me, early in
the contract, that we are all satisfactory. We are not good, or excellent, or very good, and never unsatisfactory, but all and always satisfactory. “Don’t let it get you down,” she said. “They’re always satisfactory.”
“I don’t pin my self-worth on this job,” I had said.
And she nodded, approvingly.
Because here, we are all excellent all year round, and we are all satisfactory when it comes time to measure that excellence. We know that to excel, we must not think ourselves better than any other. We all work hard, and we all perform, and because of our excellent performances, we are all satisfactory. To be satisfactory in the organization is to have succeeded. To want for more is to betray our colleagues, whose work we might be implying to be inferior to our own. It is not. A colleague’s failure to thrive cannot be attributed to a personal failing; it is, as we say, a failure of the organization to recognize and encourage the individual’s potential in relevant ways.
Every individual is an infinite potential.
It is against every rule of decency to differentiate between us, and especially if that differentiation is an attempt to distinguish a better from a worse.
It is against the collective agreement.
When at the end of the fiscal year our wages increase, it is because we have all demonstrated a performance that is satisfactory. When our health benefits expand, it reflects our satisfactory performance. Satisfactory is what we are, what we shall be.
Nevertheless, we must meticulously assess the particular ways in which we are each, individually, satisfactory. We prepare for months in advance, I and my superiors, reviewing my performance plan from the previous year, determining which aspects have been met or not met, justifying the discrepancies, putting a modest check mark next to goals that have been met—to satisfaction, of course—tallying how many goals (of all the goals) one might reasonably expect me to have met, and then determining whether that standard of what is reasonable has been met. If it has, we advance the argument that therefore, my performance as a whole, evaluates to the ultimate annual satisfactory. That single measure of my effectiveness as a valuable member of the organization.
The meeting is at nine am.
There are no meetings scheduled before nine am. We wouldn’t want to leave out anyone who logs in at eight thirty. And someone might be late. If someone were late, we wouldn’t want to assume that it weren’t for some good reason. We don’t carry on without our colleagues, for to do so would be to blame them, to cause them to miss out, when it is well known amongst everyone and formalized as a prefacing statement in the employee handbook that situations do in fact occur. We don’t encourage distrust amongst our colleagues, whose motives are, we must assume, only ever good, and whose tardiness is always due to a justifiable circumstance, for which the organization should certainly provide accommodation—or better yet, avoid the situation entirely, by scheduling meetings a safe distance away from everyone’s presumed arrivals, i.e., some time after those of us who come in late arrive.
At exactly eight thirty, nine if we were late.
I look at my inbox and attempt to calculate, based on the names alone, how long it will take to answer each email. I do not open any, as I do not want them to mark them as Read. As long as I have emails to respond to, I’m busy. I am always busy. I will always be busy, and in order to make sure I keep on being busy, I calculate the time it will take to write my anticipated answers to the sorts of inquiries these people send—though not all of them are known—and I balance that against the organization’s forty-eight-hour response policy. For every email merits a response, even if there is no answer to the question at hand. I should say, rather, that there’s a reply rather than a response. But there are also always contingencies. If there are simply too many inquiries to which to respond, we’ve been known to set an auto-response on the inbox to warn the inquirers that their replies may indeed take longer than the forty-eight-hour service standard, and by setting that auto-response, we have technically responded to the email in time—in very good time, in fact. Immediately.
At nine am, my boss will start the meeting, as it is within her duties to open the meetings. In advance of the meeting, we have worked out exactly how I am good and what I shall require to thrive in the coming year. I can’t be expected to thrive without the proper equipment and resources. It was difficult, this year, coming up with something I still lack in order to fully thrive, but ultimately, we settled on an audio headset, which should optimize my video communications with both internal and external stakeholders. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves; this all still needs to be worked out.
My boss and I have an understanding and, I think, some mutual goodwill. Prior to our entrances into the organization, we both worked in much more high demand positions, for lower compensation. We both sacrificed for the sake of our employer, and we both suffered because of it. We both enjoy both cats and cat pictures, and I let her know whenever Dorian’s done something exceedingly adorable. We both allow ourselves the luxury of a walk away from the desk now and again. Now there is the matter of my ongoing inferiority, which remains assured, so long as she remains in a higher position than mine, with extra responsibilities besides. We differ in that she chose to have a family, whereas for me, it’s not quite right. And you know people always question how worthy of a human you are, if your house isn’t always full of other humans whose needs you must attend to, but it is right for me, and in fact, the best decision I’ve probably made, along with quitting that old job and coming to the organization.
As she appears on my screen, my boss’ expression indicates that it is time for business alone. For the purpose of the evaluation, she has adopted the inscrutable face of a superior. Our interactions today will be purely transactional, although I know, precisely because of this demeanor she has adopted, that our implicit pact remains. We both have roles to play, and there is a game here to win. Other faces appear, older and more superior to Sonya, faces I see perhaps once or twice a year, but whose edicts are nevertheless always apparent in my own work and methods. They are the embodiment of the organization, and I am but one of its fingers, working alongside and in tandem with the others, to accomplish a purpose that was thought of far away from any of us, impulses from the more nearby musculature controlled by a will that’s enacted through these many parts and their collaborative labour. Though from my particular point of view, it’s unclear how what I do at any moment is contributing to their strategies and plans. Nevertheless, if it weren’t so, I likely wouldn’t be around. The meeting starts within a minute of its schedule, in order not to let the clock advance to the next minute.
“My name is Sonya Patronov, and this is the annual evaluation of employee Clarissa Knowles.”
The upper ups start turning off their cameras, now that the meeting is underway. They express, sometimes, that they don’t want to interfere with the proceedings, only observe, and it’s implied that if they’re not paying attention, it’s because they’re working on something on another screen, something very important, something that cannot be questioned. I suspect, but would absolutely neither hint nor aim to demonstrate, that none of that is occurring.
“The employee’s tasks pertain to the ongoing administration of the program. The employee’s contributions to the administration of the program have been invaluable.”
I watch my face on the miniature preview, keeping it neutral. This is not the time to have any defining qualities.
“The employee, as a regular part of her duties, must, in addition to administering the program, respond to inquiries about the administration of the program.” Indeed, my responses must be limited in such a fashion; otherwise, it might be implied that I were doing something other than administering, that there might be some way I’d intervened in the trajectory of the program, or that I had otherwise influenced the results of the program, where such influences were completely inappropriate for a 07.
