by Frank Diamond

AUTHOR’S NOTE: A short story of mine called “Going to the Chapel” recently (September 2024) ran in a little literary magazine called The Sucarnochee Review, a publication of the University of West Alabama. There’s no online version. But if you’d like to purchase a print copy of the magazine you can email the editors at sucarnocheereview@uwa.edu. Meanwhile, here is the story below.

Amanda Pine from human resources bursts into the lobby of OH Spectral Communications and practically runs up to Paul Magner at the reception desk. In high heels, no less. 

Clickety-clack! Clickety-clack! Clickety-clack! 

“It is truly so great to finally meet you in person!” Amanda exclaims, taking Paul’s hand in her two and working it like she’s about to roll dice. 

“Likewise!” says Paul, instinctively trying to match her enthusiasm while also instinctively realizing that that might not be the best way to go. 

Be yourself. (But not quite so much yourself.) 

He knows that an HR administrator could be bubbly, but Amanda’s greeting runneth over. Their previous interview had occurred on Zoom, but that medium couldn’t capture the tsunami-like vitality of this young woman. 

Amanda’s welcome should be reserved for some bigwig potential client of OH (pronounced “oh!!!” in promotional videos) and not someone like him, a supplicant seeking a job at one of the few publishing companies that thrive these days. Paul nearly steps back, but snatches composure from the jaws of retreat and holds his ground. 

“Any trouble finding us?” Amanda asks, gesturing for Paul to follow her. 

“Not in the least,” says Paul. 

He’d left an hour earlier than necessary to give himself lots of getting lost time, a throwback to the days before mobile phones and eye-in-the-sky systems; when getting from Point A to Point B hadn’t always been a foregone conclusion. 

When he’d landed in OH’s vicinity, he decided to dally at a coffee shop about a mile down the highway, being careful not to overload on caffeine that would overflow his kidneys. At about 20 minutes before the interview, he hit the bathroom once more and then drove on toward destiny. 

Amanda key cards through several glass doors as they make their way to her office. Paul stands six feet; Amanda looks to be perhaps five feet, and that’s with the heels. The difference makes Paul blush and as their footsteps sync, he’s overcome with the need to say something — anything. 

But what?

“I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me, Amanda.”

Brilliant. Just brilliant.

“My pleasure!” Amanda says, turning her head and flashing a dazzler. “I’m sorry we Zoomed the first interview. But it’s part of the process, now.” Her pace quickens. He follows. They march on. 

He wishes that the corridor was wide enough so that they could walk side-by-side. Following an attractive young woman and allowing your eyes to wander — as eyes are wont to do and not always because they’ve been prodded by lecherous thoughts — can get you in trouble these days. It can certainly deep-six a job interview. So, Paul’s careful to stare ahead though he’d taken some measure of Amanda’s looks. 

And she is attractive. Black hair whose bounciness keeps pace with an athletic stride. Gorgeous face. A model’s face. In fact, she’d been both a model and an athlete (tennis) in college, which she’d graduated from seven years ago. Paul had Googled her. 

They pad down the carpeted corridor, passing offices with doors open. In furtive glances, Paul can make out faces illuminated by the glow of computers. One person not in front of a screen crouches in her chair in the corner of an office, her hunched back to passers-by as she mutters into her cell phone.

These are OH Spectral Communications’ top administrators, Paul knows. But the scrubs, the worker bees — what he’ll be if he gets the job as an editor of a newsletter for high school teachers — sit elbow to elbow in an open floor plan. Perhaps not quite as close to each other than they were before COVID-19, but close, nonetheless. 

Companies love this setup, even though every study Paul’s read about such clustering indicates that they do the opposite of what they’re supposed to do. Open floor plans don’t foster teamwork, they foster discontent. They don’t enhance creativity and innovation; they enhance conformity and groupthink. They don’t boost morale; they boost resentment and timidity. And they don’t in fact save money. They wind up costing more in the long run, not least of all because people working closely together tend to share germs, and that leads to more sick days as well as — to use corporate jargon — “presenteeism.” 

Stop!

Paul thinks: “Cancel these thoughts. This is a job interview. Immediately buy in to whatever bullshit’s being served. Positive! Positive! Positive!” 

“That’s me,” says Amanda, pointing to an open door. 

Paul enters an office that’s nearly clinical in its sterility. No posters. No plants. No awards on the walls. Shades that are drawn halfway let in the muted light of an overcast sky. 

“Sit. Please.” 

The seat’s a lowrider and when Amanda takes her place opposite, she and Paul look as though they could be the same height. Paul wonders if this might be by design. 

Probably.

A framed photo on her desk faces her. Paul supposes that’s her family. Or somebody close. She’s married. There’s the ring. Children? He can’t tell. Maybe. That might come out in the coming chat that Paul already sweats over. He brushes his forehead in what he hopes looks like a purposeless gesture, a mere tic. Do tics count? Do you lose points for tics? 

Stop with the damn tics! 

Amanda’s desk also sports a computer, three piles of folders in a row, an immaculately clean coffee cup, a pen, pencil, and highlighter side-by-side-by-side, and not much else. 

Sick.

The butterflies that had been fluttering in Paul’s belly now ram against his stomach walls. He thinks of his desk at home and his other desks at other workplaces, all of them being able to challenge a hazmat team. Should he say something? Should he casually mention that he admires how neat she keeps her office? No, better not. He’s not a good liar. 

Amanda folds her hands like a schoolgirl, smiles again. “Well, I shared your portfolio with the hiring manager, and she’s definitely interested, Paul,” she says. “We’re making progress. I can promise nothing at this point, but we’re almost there.” 

“Great!”

“Tell us about your background again. Just a summation for us.” 

Us. Twice. 

Paul wonders: “Is this being taped?”

Paul tells her how he’d started out in newspapers and gravitated to trade publishing when newspapers began dying. He’d stayed at his last place of employment, Pike Periodicals, for about two years. 

“I’m looking for another challenge,” he tells Amanda now and — damn it! — can feel himself blushing yet again. 

“And you left Pike Periodicals before securing another job?” 

Danger! Danger! 

“Well, I’d been covering the pandemic for my readership, mostly owners and managers of restaurants, and the pandemic’s gone, and I want to try my hand on the next great challenge of the 21st century: improving our educational system. And that’s why I am here. OH is the largest publisher of educational trade magazines in the country.” 

“The world,” Amanda corrects. “And not just print. We do webinars, podcasts, video. We host seminars. We have our own TV studio. Our own 24/7 news channel. We cover education conferences like no one else. But you know all this already.” 

“Great!”

“And you left your job.”

Amanda leans back. Smiles. Says nothing. By the four-second count, that smile becomes a challenge. Paul finds it difficult to swallow. Amanda’s stare begins to harden. 

Paul clears his throat. 

“Luckily, my wife, Maureen, is a nurse and we have some savings — not a lot, mind you — but enough to get by. And I’m pretty confident that I’ll get another job. I’m not hampered by lack of confidence, you may have noticed.” 

Amanda nods and drops the smile, thank God.

“You certainly have the editorial chops.”

“Great!”

She’s not done with Pike Periodicals quite yet, though. “And you left there because….” 

Don’t say fired. Don’t say fired. Don’t say fired. 

“As I say, just the need for a new challenge. The pandemic settled down.” 

“And so you just left?”

“Well, I never thought I’d say this in a million years because it’s the sort of thing that rock stars or actors say but put it down to creative differences.” 

Amanda smiles. “How so?” 

“They want to turn the magazine into a section of another bigger publication and I had been breaking major stories about the pandemic. I think my magazine should stand on its own.”

“I can understand that.”

“It was just time,” Paul adds.

“OK, then.”

Phew!

“So, you started out in newspapers.”

Indeed. That last bastion of the unemployable.

Paul had the pleasure — yes pleasure — of working with the sort of cranks, eccentrics, and insufferables of every variety that one could only find in newspapers, and they’d given him the nickname “Mr. Normal.” Yes, Paul had been considered normal in that crowd. When newspapers died, Paul felt that he could survive in any industry. 

However, he never kicked one unfortunate habit he’d developed during his days as a reporter. He’d sometimes call out a person — and under the law a corporation is considered a person — on their bullshit. He’d do this tactfully, or so he thought. Apparently not tactfully enough, though, because they’d canned him at Pike Periodicals for committing one of the cardinal sins of the modern work environment: He’d not been a team player. 

So, he’s not exactly lying to Amanda Pine, he tells himself, when he says the problem had been creative differences. Not really, because not going along with the team can result from those creative differences. 

Not a team player. Sheesh! 

The charge wasn’t even relevant in Paul’s case. He’d been the sole editor on one magazine and worked from home because of the pandemic. How much of a team player could he be if there wasn’t a team? Doesn’t matter, he was booted after he’d foolishly asked during one of those tedious daily huddles with “the team” — other editors at other magazines in the division; editors who had staffs — how management at Pike Periodicals would feel if employees there formed a collective bargaining unit? A union? 

This statement had been spurred by his resentment over doing the sort of silly stuff corporations expected these days that got in the way of employees actually doing, you know, their jobs. Paul voiced this supposition because the manager had given “the team” an assignment where each person “shared” a video, article, podcast, slide presentation — whatever — about how best to deal with change. 

A union, Paul had countered. Now that’s change for you. 

“Is this where Pike starts distributing copies of Who Moved My Cheese?” Paul had also asked. Everybody laughed, even the supervisor who wound up firing him. Just further confirmation that humor doesn’t have a long shelf life. 

At 47, getting canned didn’t constitute a major crisis. Better now than at 57 or 67 or, hell, even 77. (He had two kids whom he loved more than anything but acknowledged that raising kids drains bank accounts. Along the way, he and Maureen had had to refinance their house several times and both of them had jumped on the 401K train relatively late in the game.) 

Friends tried to reassure Paul after the firing, pointing to the post-pandemic labor shortage in the United States and the fact that for the first time ever employees held the upper hand in hiring negotiations. Companies had to accede to remote work or at least the hybrid model, and some offered signing bonuses. 

In most industries. 

That’s not the way it worked in publishing, with newspapers, magazines — both trade and consumer — closing, and people with years of experience (people like Paul Magner) finding themselves up against it after getting the axe. 

“You’ve read OH’s mission statement?” Amanda asks. 

“And I approve! Great!”

This elicits a polite smile and he decides to tamp down the quick comebacks. A job interview isn’t the venue for trying out new material. 

Amanda holds forth for a bit. “At OH Spectral Communications, we offer a wonderful menu of benefits that we’ll go over in depth in the onboarding process. These include yada, yada, yada, blah, blah, blah….” When he realizes that he won’t be peppered with questions for at least another five minutes, Paul relaxes a bit. 

Don’t zone out! Don’t zone out! 

Technically, though, Paul tells himself, he is not zoning out. He is listening with one ear, which people do sometimes when they ponder on another level of consciousness. Paul’s father — who had worked from age 8 (on a paper route he’d been technically too young to have) until 80 — never once talked about a company’s mission statement. If there had been a mission statement, it would amount to: “You work hard for us, and we’ll pay you a fair wage.” That would be it and that would be enough. 

That’s sort of the way newspapers had been before they went corporate. Then they too adopted mission statements to which the editorial employees would just shrug and smile and refocus on the task at hand: getting the news. But the newsroom folk worked out a formula. It went like this: The amount of lip service a company devotes to mission statements and core values is in inverse proportion to the amount of bullshit you were likely to encounter as an employee of that company.

Young reporters were taught to beware of spin from any source inside or outside the newsroom. The managing editor’s emails included, under her signature, the adage: “If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.” Those were the days when employees weren’t deluged with hundreds of emails a week, many of which could elicit a groan when opened. 

At Pike Periodicals, for instance, Paul actually winced whenever he received an email with the slug “Team!” He knew that 99% of the time such promptings would be pure bullshit; bullshit being the perfect word for the “guidance” and “training” and “interactions” that so many corporations try to pawn off under a paternalistic sheen. They want you to know that they really care about “our associates” and want nothing but the best for “our associates.” 

Yeah, right. Associates this. 

They also really care about “our community.” Hell, they even care about “our universe.” 

Bullshit!

“Orwellian” would work, as well. But that implies wordplay that serves a political purpose of some sort. Bullshit tends to serve no other purpose than to enhance the status of the bullshit craftsman. (Not everyone can be a bullshit artist. That takes more than just raw talent.) 

It pleases Paul that bullshit works as both a noun and a verb. Orwellian is an adjective and one of the first rules of newspaper writing (and good writing in general) is to avoid using too many adjectives. However, one needed to be careful about just how one used bullshit or even if one should use it at all. Paul found that out years ago when he wrote a column and tried to sneak the word in. 

The managing editor emailed him with the word circled and a big red “no” next to it. Not the op-ed editor. That was telling. The decision had been kicked up the line. Paul went into her office, but she didn’t give him a chance to protest. 

“We’re a family newspaper, Magner,” she said not looking away from her screen, adding that she’d substituted “nonsense” instead. 

“But bullshit is a word! It’s in the dictionary!”

“So is ‘fuck.’ You can’t use that either.”

Paul stomped out of the newsroom, stomped around the block, then came stomping back into the managing editor’s office. “Where are your cojones?” he’d asked. “Bullshit is a perfectly legitimate word.”

She shook her head. 

Paul considered it a moral victory that he almost — came this close! — got her to use bull_ _ _._! In the end, however, “nonsense” won the day. 

Some scholars argue that bullshit had been coined by T.S. Eliot when he wrote a poem around 1910 called “The Triumph of Bullshit.” In it, the poet blasts the very vagaries of publishing that Paul’s managing editor and Pike Periodicals and most publications display, the bowing to the sensibilities of the “ladies.” (In the original draft, the word had been “critics.”) 

From Eliot’s poem: 

Ladies, on whom my attentions have waited If you consider my merits are small Etiolated, alembicated,
Orotund, tasteless, fantastical, Monotonous, crotchety, constipated, Impotent galamatias
Affected, possibly imitated,
For Christ’s sake stick it up your ass.

Paul had never bothered looking up “etiolated” and “galamatias,” though he’ll do that as soon as this interview with Amanda Pine ends. The sensibilities that stand at the gate of publication these days differ much from what Eliot encountered, but they’re no less threatening. In fact, perhaps more so. Write the wrong thing these days — or if someone finds something “offensive” that you might have written 20 or 30 years ago — and you get canceled. No trial of your peers. No hearings. Corporations can fire someone for any reason or for no reason at all. Not much wiggle room for an employee there. 

Wait!

Amanda Pine had just asked him a question. About what? 

Damn!

He should have been paying more attention. Paul tries not to squirm, but he does shift his weight while clearing his throat. 

“Well….” he says. 

“That’s all right,” Amanda says. “By the end of onboarding — if we get that far — you’ll know them by heart.” 

By “we” she means “me.” And now it’s “if we get that far.” Fix this! 

Paul gambles, ticking off OH’s core values on his fingers. “Curiosity, trust, innovation, being a team player, having a passion for success, and ownership,” Paul says. 

Amanda cups the back of her head in her hands, leans back, gazes at the ceiling. 

The core values. That’s what you asked me about. Right? Right!!?? 

She slumps forward, arms coming down on her desk. “Very good,” Amanda says. “I’m embarrassed that I had to think about it for a second.” 

“Oh well.” 

“But only one second,” she adds with another dazzler.

“Great!”

“Let’s talk about the next step.”

Mission accomplished! 

The next step is going to include taking home a 50-question psychological evaluation test, then emailing that back to Amanda and then — if that goes well — coming back in a week to interview with the hiring manager, the woman who would be Paul’s boss and seems impressed by his credentials. 

But Paul’s not taking chances with the psych test. It will be multiple choice. A question could be something like: “When working on a special project, do you prefer to….” 

The choice of answers might include: 

A) Do whatever might be necessary to help the team accomplish its goal! 

All the way down to: 

D) Sit in the dark, cursing humanity and wondering why you ever took this stupid job. 

An exaggeration, to be sure. But with some questions Paul knew that his inclination would be to choose D over A. No. Maureen will take this test. His wife is so positive and upbeat. 

“It’s pretty fast paced around here,” Amanda warns. 

“Great!”

Sweatshop.

“I’ll show you the chapel,” Amanda says. 

Chapel?

Amanda reads his confusion.

“Oh, that’s just a nickname,” she says. She rises and so does he. 

“It’s the place employees go when they want some reinforcement,” she says as they step back into the corridor. “Emotional reinforcement. You know, to be reminded that this isn’t just a business. This isn’t just another job. OH is helping the education system. We’re on a mission. We want to change the world.” 

“Great!”

Amanda glances back at him, eyes not quite so large. 

Does she think I’m being facetious? Enough with the “Great!” 

She says: “You’ll get to know the chapel well soon enough because it’s where all of our onboarding happens. In fact, I know that there’s a group we hired last week that’s going through the last phase. You’ll get to see some of what you’re in for.” 

“Well, I hope so.”

“You’re doing fine, Paul.”

He is. Paul knows this suddenly. He’s going to get this job. He’s a perfect fit, really, in terms of what needs to be done editorially. 

They round a corner and into a corridor at the end of which looms a large door. Very large. Like Arc de Triomphe large. Military columns could march through it. It’s ornate. It’s hand-carved, or molded, because it’s made of metal. 

“Here we go,” Amanda says, grabbing the knocker that seems to be made of gold. Real gold. There must be something electrical going on with the door as well because this petite woman swings it open with ease. 

The first thing Paul notices is the light. The high ceilings are made of glass and even in this overcast day there’s enough light outside to come cascading down upon those present. That light dims slightly when the door closes in an automatic swoosh. 

At the front of the chapel there’s a large video screen with the company’s CEO talking about — and Paul knows this even though he’s only been exposed for seconds — the many virtues of OH. Really, what else would he be jabbering about? 

About a half dozen people sit in pews watching the broadcast or thumbing through books. One man seems to be meditating, mudra hands and all. 

Amanda says: “There go the new hires. Hopefully that’ll be you soon, Paul.” 

Amanda gestures to what she refers to, but Paul is already transfixed by the scene. He doesn’t understand it, but he’s transfixed. Is he meant to understand? Does he lose points for not understanding? 

The newbies stand in a line that leads to what looks like a public square fountain that’s been turned off. Lights that trace the outline of the large rectangular basin spear the still water. 

One of — Paul guesses — OH’s executives says something to a new hire who’s first in line and then turns her around, her back to the water. The recruit holds her nose and simply lets go. Falls back. It’s an act of faith rewarded by the executive and a helper catching the person and guiding her into the water. The executive murmurs something and then he and the assistant lifts the person out.

“Welcome aboard!” the executive says to the new hire, and Paul expects the others in line and even those in the pews to applaud, but the declaration elicits only the bowing of some heads. The person is led away to one of the rooms on the side presumably to towel off and change into her regular clothing and begin her first day on the job. 

The next new hire approaches the OH executive for his dunking. 

Amanda looks up at Paul with excited eyes. 

“Now isn’t that something?” she asks. 

“Great!” Paul responds. “Truly great!”