This fucking guy.
he called me at 7-
pm on the friday. asked
should he go in tomorrow. I asked
what he meant and he said
he’d been told he was terminated.
this was the first that I’d heard
so I called catalina – she said
that she’d call him immediately.
she called me back later –
we were just getting into the wine. she said
this fucking guy. I told him
about this today and it’s like
he was sleeping. we just have to do it
on paper apparently, while we wait
on his visa to renew. that’s
what polly told me to tell him. we’ll still
fucking pay him. I think that it’s true.
he’s a pretty good caretaker, handsome
and incredibly popular. I called him again
and he passed off the phone to his his girlfriend.
she speaks better english than he does
and was very unhappy at me.
____________
D.S. Maolalai
Review by Massimo Fantuzzi
Incommunicability, exasperation, chaos, mismanagement, bureaucratic nonsense not without a hint of ignorance and arrogance: an average Friday night, in other words. Fun (if you are on the right side of the system, that is). Just another day at the office. This razor-sharp workplace vignette works for me like a microscope; look into it, look inside this scrap of conversation, and you’ll grasp the laws that play on the larger stage, making the DNA of it all apparent. But please, more wine. To pretend it’s all okay.