Chapter 3 2

2 more humid in the office.I cautiously walked between the desks of my colleagues and walked to my corner.As soon as I sat down at the typewriter, I felt my thighs stick to the black leatherette upholstery of the chair.It turned out that the air-conditioning system was out of order again. In fact, it didn’t make much difference whether the system was normal or not. It was just a fan installed in the ceiling. When it was turned on, it stirred up the air, just like stirring soup with a spoon. like that.But watching the blades of the fan remain motionless, the morale of my colleagues was clearly affected: it gave the impression that everything had come to a standstill.People are inherently lazy, so they simply don't want to do anything.Everyone was leaning against their desks, blinking their eyes weakly, panting with their mouths opening and closing, looking listless.Fridays in the office are always bad.

As soon as I typed a few words on the wet typewriter weakly, Mrs. Weizers, who was in charge of food preparation, came in from the back door, stopped and looked around.She had the usual Betty Grable hairdo, pumps with holes in the front, and a sundress with the faint traces of shoulder pads on her shoulders. "Hi, Marianne," she said, "you've come just in time. I'm checking the tinned rice pudding, and I've got to have a taste of it first, and the ladies don't seem very hungry this morning." As she spoke, she quickly turned around and walked towards the kitchen. The food preparation staff seemed to have endless energy.I stood up from the sticky chair, feeling like a volunteer who was picked from his peers by his superiors to go to the front line.However, on second thought, I happen to have a full stomach, so another breakfast is out of the question.

In the spotless tiny kitchen, she explained to me as she scooped up equal portions of tinned rice pudding in three glass bowls: "You're doing research, Marianne, maybe you can help us. We Can't decide, is it better to have three flavors for the same meal, or change one flavor for each meal? Or can you pair them together - for example, one meal is vanilla with pepper, and the next meal can be replaced with vanilla Plus caramel toffee. Naturally we wanted to sample as little as possible, because the conditions associated with the meal mattered a lot — the vegetables, for example, but also the color of the tablecloth.”

I tried the vanilla one. "How do you rate the color?" She asked hurriedly, picking up a pencil to record, "Is it natural, or slightly artificial, or extremely unnatural?" "Would you like to add raisins to it?" I said, trying the Caramel type.I don't want to offend her. "Adding raisins is too risky," she said. "A lot of people don't like raisins." I put down the caramel and try the orange one. "Are you going to serve it hot?" I asked, "or do you want some cream?" "Well, the original plan was to serve it as a snack," she said. "Naturally the manufacturers want it served cold. You can add cream later if you like, which means we're fine with that, but from a nutritional point of view It's not necessary from a point of view, it's been fortified with vitamins, but right now we're just testing the taste."

"I think it's better to change one taste for one meal." "It would be great if the survey was conducted at three or four o'clock in the afternoon, but we still need to collect the opinions of a family..." She tapped her pencil thoughtfully on the rim of the stainless steel sink. "Yeah, well," I said, "I've got to go back." It wasn't my job to advise them. Sometimes I don't know exactly what my job line is, sometimes I go to the auto repair shop to check the quality of piston gaskets, stand on the street and hand out pretzels to suspicious old ladies. on the head.I was employed by the Seymour Research Institute, and I was very clear about my responsibilities—that is, I was responsible for revising the questionnaires for the firm, and turning the obscure or overly vague words prepared by the psychologists into simple questions. The person who understands it, and the person who answers it understands it.Questions like "Where in the percentile do you place the value of the visual response?" are simply not OK.I found the job after graduation and felt lucky at the time - more so than many people - but four months later, my responsibilities are still vague.

Sometimes I feel like I'm being groomed for a higher-level role, but I don't have a clear idea of ​​the Seymour Institute's organizational structure, and I can't imagine what that would be like.The entire company occupies three floors and is structured like an ice cream sandwich: the top and bottom layers are crispy, and our department is the soft middle layer. Upstairs we had executives and psychologists, they were called Mrs. Upstairs because there were men there, and they were in charge of negotiating with clients.I once glanced into their office, which was carpeted, expensively furnished, and silkscreened on the walls by seven modern masters.Downstairs we have machines—mimeographs, IBM computers for counting, collating, and tabulating information; The personnel had ink on their hands and seemed to be working overtime, with a tired look on their faces.Our department connects the two, and our task is to look after the human resources, the market researchers.Market research is a small family business, similar to a hand-knitting hosiery company. Our researchers are all housewives who work in their spare time and are paid on a piece-by-piece basis.Although they don't make much money, they welcome the opportunity to get out of the house.People who answer questions are not paid, and I often wonder how they would want to participate in this kind of activity.Perhaps they believed the wording of the promotional text that they could help improve the quality of household goods, just like scientists.Or maybe they like having someone to talk to, but I think most of them take a little pride in being asked for their opinion.

Since our department works primarily with housewives, the office is exclusively female, with the exception of the hapless handyman.Our office is a large one, and the color tone is mainly green like the general organization.At one end of the room, separated by frosted glass, was the office of Mrs. Pogue, the head of the department.At the other end of the room are several wooden tables. Some middle-aged and elderly women sit at the table and read the materials written by the investigators. They use colored crayons to tick off the completed answer sheets. They have scissors, glue, stacks of paper, it looks like a group of elderly people in kindergarten.The rest of us sat in the middle, with a motley crew of desks.We also have a very comfortable room with calico curtains for those who bring their own lunch, there is a tea and coffee machine, although some colleagues bring their own coffee pots.We also have a pink bathroom with a sign on the mirror reminding people not to let hair and tea clog the sink.

So, what kind of opportunities might I have at Seymour Institute?For one thing, I can't be a member upstairs, and secondly, I won't go downstairs to manage the machine or read the answer sheet like the woman on the other side of the room all day, because that means downgrading.It's conceivable to be something like Mrs. Pogue or her assistant, but as far as I know it's going to be a long time, and maybe I don't want it yet. The higher-ups told me to revise the questionnaire for the wire cleaning ball, saying that it would be needed soon. I had just finished the draft when I saw Mrs. Grote, the accountant, walk in the door.She had come to talk to Mrs. Pogue, but stopped beside me on her way out.

She was short and prim, with hair the color of a refrigerator's metal tray. "Ah, Miss McCubbin," she said in a rough voice, "you've been here four months and you're eligible for a pension scheme." "Pension plan?" I told me about the pension plan when I first came to the company, but I forgot all about it. "Is it too early for me to join the pension scheme? I mean, do you think I'm too young?" "Well, it'd be nice to be there sooner, wouldn't it?" said Mrs. Grote.Her eyes flickered behind rimless glasses, and the chance to get an extra charge on my paycheck was something she couldn't wish for.

"I think the pension plan is better off," I said, "thank you." "Oh, but it's mandatory," she said with a businesslike tone. "Mandatory? Does that mean I have to attend?" "Well, well, if everybody won't pay, who's going to get a pension, right? I've got all the papers I need, and you just have to sign here." I signed it, and when Mrs. Grote left, my mood suddenly sank; the business was not really a serious one, but it disturbed my mind.It's not just that I feel useless to have to accept rules that I'm not interested in nor have a hand in making (that's something you've been taught in school), it's that I'm superstitious about signing my own name of fear.Now that my name has been signed on that mysterious document, it seems that it will forcibly bind me to a future life that I still cannot imagine.I seem to see an image of myself at some point in the future. I have already been shaped, and I have worked at the Seymour Research Institute for countless years, and now I have paid off.pension.I seemed to see a cold room again, and I had to rely on the electric heater plugged into the wall to keep warm.Maybe I'll also have to wear hearing aids like a lifelong maiden aunt of mine.I would talk to myself all day long and little kids would throw snowballs at me.I tell myself don't be stupid, maybe the world will blow up before that time comes.I remind myself that if I don't like it, I can leave the place tomorrow and find another job, but these thoughts don't comfort me.I figured my signature would go into a file, and that file would be kept in a filing cabinet, and the filing cabinet would be locked in some storage room.

At half past ten, I'm glad it's time for coffee.I understand that I should actually give up the rest as compensation for being late in the morning, but I need time to relax. There are three people in my department who are about my age, and I usually go to drink coffee with them.Sometimes Ainsley got impatient with the other toothbrush testing colleagues and would come over from her office to join us. This is not to say that she has any special affection for these colleagues of mine. She refers to all three of them as office virgins.They don't really look alike to each other except for their hair, which is dyed blond. Amy the typist has withered blond hair fluffed over her shoulders; Mrs. Pogue's assistant, Millie, was from Australia, with short, sun-tanned hair.The trio repeatedly asserted their virginity over coffee and pastry on more than one occasion—Millie, with Girl Scout staid practicality (“I guess in the long run, it’s better to wait until we’re married.” Okay, right? Get out of trouble."), Lucy worries about gossip: "What are other people talking about?"), who seem to think that every bedroom is bugged, The outside world is constantly listening to what's going on; Amy, who's always worried about something wrong with her body (everyone in the office knows that), always says she's sick of talking about it, and maybe she does.They were all keen to travel: Millie had lived in England, Lucy had been to New York twice, and Amy wanted to go to Florida.They have to wait until they have had enough travel before getting married and starting a family. "Did you hear that the laxative survey project in Quebec has been cancelled?" Millie said as soon as everyone took their usual seats in the restaurant.This restaurant is crappy, but it was across the street and closest to us. "The workload of this matter is already large enough - to conduct product testing at home, there are a total of thirty-two questionnaires alone." Mi Li is always the most informed. "I'd say that's just wishful thinking," Amy scoffed. "I don't know how you could get thirty-two pages of questions on that thing." She went back to scratching the nail polish off her thumb Come.Amy always looks unkempt, with lint on her clothes, peeling lipstick on her lips, golden hair and dandruff on her shoulders and back; Leave fragmentary traces. I saw Ainsley approaching and waved to her.She squeezed into our seats, greeted everyone, and pinned a lock of hair that had fallen out.Several office maidens also greeted her, but not very enthusiastically. "I've done this kind of survey before," says Millie, who has been with the company the longest among us, "and it works. Because according to research, anyone who is willing to answer more than three pages of questions is more or less far away." No laxatives, I mean, those people will finish the questionnaire." "What research has been done?" Ainsley asked. "I'll bet the table hasn't been wiped," said Lucy, speaking aloud so that the waitress, with whom she was always annoyed, could hear.The latter, wearing a pair of cheap Woolworths earrings and a sulky face, was clearly not the office virgin. "The laxative investigation in Quebec," I whispered to Ainsley. The waitress came over and she angrily wiped down the table and asked what we wanted.Lucy was deliberately fussy when it came to baked puff pastry—she ruthlessly specified that no raisins should be served on the puff pastry. "She brought me one with raisins last time," she told us, "and I told her I hated raisins, I never eat them, huh." "Why just Quebec?" asked Ainsley, puffing smoke from her nostrils. "Is there some psychological reason?" Ainsley studied psychology in college. "Hey, I don't know either," Millie said. "The people over there are probably constipated. Don't they eat a lot of potatoes?" "Are potatoes really that constipating?" asked Amy, leaning forward across the table.She stroked a few locks of hair back from her forehead, and immediately a light mist rose, and some small dust fell gently from her head. "It can't be just Potato," Ainsley said. "It must be a collective fault complex, perhaps overburdened with language problems; they must be extremely depressed mentally." The rest of the people looked at her dissatisfied, and it was obvious that they thought she was showing off. "It's hot as hell today," Millie said. "The office is like a furnace." "What's new in your office?" I asked Ainsley, trying to lighten the mood. Ainsley stubbed out the cigarette. "Yeah, we did have a funny thing over there," she said, "a woman tried to kill her husband and short-circuited his electric toothbrush, and a guy from our office got to testify that in normal circumstances You can't short out a toothbrush. He wants me to go with him as his special assistant, but that guy is a pain in the ass. You can tell he's disgusting in bed, too." I suspect Ainsley has made up the story, but her blue eyes are wide open.The three office virgins squirmed.Ainsley had a way of making them feel uncomfortable by bringing up this and that man she'd met. Fortunately, what we asked for was delivered. "The bitch brought me raisins again," grumbled Lucy, picking out the raisins one by one with her long fingernails and setting them on the side of the plate.Her nails were beautifully manicured and painted in iridescent colors. On the way back to the office, I spoke to Millie about the pension plan. "I didn't know that was mandatory," I say. "I can't figure out why they're being paid for that scheme so old women like Mrs. Grote can shave us when they retire." "Yeah, I couldn't figure it out either," said Millie, not enthusiastically. "It's going to get better. Hey, I just hope they fix the air conditioner."