An Ounce of Prevention
by Michael Ernst
-----------------------------------------------------------------------Flats or heels? Melissa stood, hands on her hips, and looked into her closet. Today would be her first day at a new job, so she wanted to look good, but they had seemed pretty casual when she'd interviewed last week, but on the other hand (or was this the first one again?) it was better to be overdressed than underdressed, which was in turn better than undressed, which she was now, and she had to leave very soon. Melissa shook her head to clear the nonsense, added a pair of low heels to the outfit she'd chosen the night before, and rapidly completed her toilet. She was on the road in twenty minutes; half an hour after that she reported to the personnel office of the McCarthy Research Institute. By the time she had completed a pile of paperwork, signed a nondisclosure agreement, heard lectures about her benefits and the importance of safety and the amount of time she was permitted to spend in the bathroom, been perfunctorily poked by bored doctors while describing her childhood diseases and inoculations, received a badge featuring her bug-eyed picture, and found her way to the building where she would be working, it seemed like days had passed. Mr. Hutchins ("call me Frank") took her to lunch at the company cafeteria. All of the food looked like plastic; Melissa finally decided on a garden salad, which, she surmised, couldn't be ruined too badly.
After they'd taken their seats, her boss spoke affably around bites of a Super Combination Burrito. Melissa tried to keep her eyes off the burrito and on his face, but her eyes kept straying back to it as to the scene of a terrible accident. "I assume already run the personnel gauntlet this morning." Tempted to roll her eyes, Melissa permitted herself a nod and a small smile. "Did the bald guy with the tufts of hair sticking out of his ears tell you all about our swell insurance plan?"
"No, it was a woman."
"Ah, the Dragon Lady. Stocky, severe-looking, flinty eyes, always wears a suit she bought in 1953." Melissa nodded. "They say she smiled once, but that was before I started working here." Melissa tried to remember whether his yellow badge indicated between five and ten years of tenure or between ten and fifteen. Her own was a gaudy green which didn't go with her outfit at all.
"Do you have any questions about McCarthy, or about the NDE group in particular? Last week I was so busy finding out how fast you could type and whether you knew the difference between a mouse and a rat, and which is which, that I didn't have much time to fill you in on other details." Melissa asked apologetically, "What exactly does your group do?" She threw out one of the few academic-sounding terms she knew. "Is it pure research?"
Frank shook his head. "No, I think you could say that. It's about 80 percent research, and 20 percent playing practical jokes on one another." Melissa smiled wanly in response to his self-satisfied smirk and thought that, unpleasant as her last job had been, perhaps it had been a bad idea to resign with such finality. Fortunately, Frank's style settled down once he'd started talking; with an indulgent smile he left off his attack on the burrito and did his best to explain his group's raison d'tre. Meanwhile, the grease pooled at one end of the oblong dish. Melissa tried to pay attention to what he was saying instead of wondering how long it would take the runoff to congeal and whether, if one were to pick up the burrito afterward, the solidified fat would stick to it like a waxy base.
"NDE stands for Non-Destructive Evaluation; we investigate ways to test substances and devices without damaging them. A lot of tests are like striking a match to evaluate it. Sure, you find out whether the match was good, but it is worthless afterward, and that experiment tells you nothing -- except in a statistical sense -- about other matches." Frank explained that this method wasn't good enough for their customers. Melissa nodded attentively at breaks in the monologue and decided that eating her salad would take her mind off Frank's food. She was wrong. Frank went on to discuss the NDE philosophy in greater detail (Melissa slipped her feet out of her shoes, wished she'd chosen the flats after all, and thought about what she would wear the next day; she owned so little clothing that went with green) and to stress that although their testing was non-destructive, they did work with some dangerous materials and that safety concerns were of paramount importance. Melissa solemnly agreed and wondered where on earth he'd gotten that tacky tie. He went on about his group's fine record of safety and the elaborate precautions that were standard practice. His earnest sincerity about these safeguards was a strong contrast to the ennui of the morning lecturers, whose soporific delivery of rote material had left her with a sluggish feeling, as if she'd had a bad night's sleep. Frank seemed like a nice guy, even if he was a little out of it and had a sadly stunted sense of humor which brought to mind a plant left too long without sunlight. He was by turns sensitive to those around him -- he was attentive enough when he stopped talking long enough to ask Melissa a question -- and wrapped up in technical concerns. A typical engineer.
Eventually he outlined Melissa's duties. Her primary objective -- he made it sound like a hill about to be assaulted by a company of Marines -- was to run interference with the bureaucracy so that he could do "real work." She was relieved that she was not expected to fetch coffee or make eleventh-hour telephone calls to locate a baby-sitter. Sick of running her last boss's errands, she had begun to encourage tradesmen's frequent misconception that she was his mistress. "Are these the shirts that Brian's wife dropped off or that I did?" she would ask the young man at the dry cleaner's. "It wouldn't do to mix them up," she'd add with a lascivious wink, then saunter out, hips swaying. The rumor get back to her boss's wife before she quit, but she hoped it did afterward. She smiled, and Frank thought that she was responding to his feeble joke about keeping a capacitor from charging by taking away its credit cards. He had finished his burrito, and the pool of discolored, oily fat had disappeared as well. Frank remarked on her half-eaten salad, but Melissa said she wasn't very hungry.
"worry overmuch about your productivity at first," Frank said as they walked back. "Just get the feel of the place and meet the people. ask the group members to introduce themselves and to make you feel at home." He muttered something about a test that afternoon, and Melissa imagined a room full of managers in shirtsleeves and pocket protectors seated at wooden desks, brows furrowed and tongues sticking out of the corners of their mouths as they filled out bubble forms with their #2 pencils.
Frank pointed out Melissa's desk, which sat bare and forlorn in a fence of waist-high partition walls like an empty doghouse in an abandoned backyard. Frank's office was just the opposite. Papers were piled on every surface except the chair, computer keyboard, and cappuccino machine. Books lay propped open under half-full coffee mugs, boxes made the entrance nearly impossible to negotiate, and Post-It notes wallpapered the area near his desk. Melissa instinctively recoiled. "worry," he assured her, "never ask you to search through here. Besides, if you were to try, you'd probably mess the place up so that I couldn't find anything."
Melissa spent the next few hours raiding the supply room, organizing her desk, acquainting herself with the computer, and meeting people who came by to welcome her. The phone rang rarely, and Frank was out somewhere, so she figured it was okay to just sit and read about policies and procedures, computer programs, requisition protocols, company picnics, executive perquisites, and parking permits. Whenever she leaned back to take a break, her eyes were caught by a ludicrous poster of a rabbit with a shocking pink Band-Aid on one of its ears. Frank had pinned it up in the hallway, and its legend read, "Only A Dumb Bunny Thinks Safety Is A Matter Of Luck. Make '91 A Safer One. MRI."
Around mid-afternoon, when she was poring over a manual which, on first glance, had appeared to be written in English, she noticed a lanky red- haired fellow leaning against the low wall of her cubicle; he was staring appreciatively down her blouse. He obviously approved of her Maidenform's delicate scalloped edging of sheer patterned lace, but had he noticed the satin center bow ...
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