A fellow employee who started around the same time I did appears to have shuffled off this mortal coil, by which I mean that my boss mentioned he was not longer with us and I would get to be trained in some of his tasks as well. (This is actually really fun. Her approach to training an assistant is for that assistant to meddle in pretty much everything, which I totally approve of.) And this event, though sorrowful, was by no means unexpected, since his approach to the job was more of a sociable solitaire-playing sort that made sure his facebook profile never suffered from his employment. He was very successful at this, and his friendliness does make the loss sincerely lamentable.
The funny thing is that I spent the rest of the day feeling furtive and more or less like a rabbit that expects a dachshund to come bursting out of a nearby bush. I turn my cellphone off while I'm clocked in, and have been getting up early to make business calls before work and then follow-up on my lunch break. I feel guilty about making coffee while being clocked in (unless this computer is frozen). I am almost always entering data within two minutes of clocking in, and only allow myself to look up dog breeds/colors that need to be researched for data entry purposes, rather than ones that look interesting (again, unless the database is frozen). Email is, of course, verboten. And if I am criticized on the conversation front, I would expect such criticism to take the "so, how's life as a mute" angle. And yet I spent the rest of the day guiltily trying to remember if I'd given the ax any excuses to come looking for me now it had whetted its appetite.
The moral of today's story, children, is that for some of us the guilty conscience is more or less a perpetual motion machine, whirring away in the void.
