It turned out that Robert wasn't disappearing down a tunnel but, rather, trying to escape my workplace nightmare. I caught up to him, soon enough, with all the authority that $9.00 an hour can wield. "Your poem sounds kind of like song lyrics," I tore right into my critique. "You don't need to state your name in the song. I mean, poem. You can just finish by saying, 'by Robert Harmon.'"
"It is song lyrics," he shrugged his shoulders with no small amount of agitation. "It's about me. I didn’t want to do it, but the temp agency requires it now, as a way to break the ice during new assignments." I had never heard of that, but then, they were always trying something new. When I started they gave me a desk nameplate with my name on it that I could take around from job to job. I soon "misplaced" it.
"You write it then," Robert finally dismissed me with exasperation, and he continued copying this several million page document with lots of staples, wrinkled pages, and different sizes of paper. I was happy to divert my attention to something else for awhile.
"Okay!" I sat down with an office pen and some copy paper. "We'll try this..." By lunchtime I had a new introductory poem for my reluctant coworker:
The very fact that I'm here indicates
a problem; perhaps not unlike the
problem that is life itself. Life itself
being all, and encompassing love
and despair in equal portions. Life
itself a problem. Abandon all hope
you who reside in this office, and
from those depths, we go on.
--Robert Harmon
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