BARTLEBY THE TEMP, Part I
I am a rather careful woman. I do not take chances, and I can read people quickly, so I am rarely fooled. But Bartleby broke my heart. No, not in the way you’re thinking. It would have been much easier if I had been in love with him.
I worked in the Valley for a software company, CircuCorp, as a manager of temporary employees. I was good at my job. It only took a five-minute interview with a temp for me to figure out if I could trust him with the main customer database, or if I had to send him to the back room to fold brochures.
The first rule of managing temps is not to get too close. You don’t want to find yourself starting to care about someone you’re going to have to let go, and since they’re temps, eventually they all have to go. This was a hard lesson for me to learn. My first few months at CircuCorp, there were nights when I went home and cried because I knew it had been the last day for a single mom who really needed the paycheck. One time I even made cupcakes for a great group of temps only to find out midway through the morning that the project they were working on had been cancelled.
So, I learned to keep my distance. I still tried to make people comfortable and productive, but I didn’t get personally involved. This meant spending more time in my office and less time taking cigarette breaks with the people I managed. I suppose it made my job less enjoyable, but at least I was able to go home at the end of the day and leave the office behind. But then Bartleby came along, and now I don’t think I’ll ever be able to put him out of my mind.
It started in early 2000. The world had survived the Y2K crisis, and while the dot com bubble was leaking air, it hadn’t popped yet. CircuCorp had upgraded its computers and found that a database program on the old machines was incompatible with the new system software. No one could figure out how to electronically transfer the information, and the old program wouldn’t print full data reports, so everything had to be re-entered by hand. You’d call up the data on one computer screen and type it into another computer. This wasn’t the most exciting project, and I didn’t even think it was all that necessary. When were we ever going to need customer information for software we didn’t even support anymore?
The workspace didn’t help matters much either. Since the data was on these old computers, the temps had to work back in a storage area that had been nicknamed “the CPU graveyard.” It was a dimly lit room, with extension cords running across the ceiling, full of old circuit boards and dozens of boxes of outdated documentation. I tried to set an upbeat tone for the project, but it didn’t go well from the start. The old computers were very slow, and the original information had been entered, let’s say, eccentrically. I had a pretty good bunch of temps for the project, though. At least I had figured out how to manage the three of them-Taylor, Nancy, and Clover.
Taylor was a short, intense man about my age who lived on caffeine. He would come in every day with a huge mug of coffee and a thermos of strong tea. Throughout the morning he’d switch off drinking sips of each. For the first few hours, his keystroke speed was incredible. But by lunch his body gave out. In the afternoon he moved slowly, was irritable, and made more errors. By four o’clock he’d interrupt other temps and take long bathroom breaks. If his work hadn’t been so good in the mornings, I would have considered letting him go. I made the mistake once of suggesting that he needed to pace himself throughout the day, maybe even go easy on the coffee.
“Hey, you’re not my mother!” Taylor had shouted. ”You get a good day’s work out of me. You’ve got no right to criticize me personally.”
Then I had to pull rank and tell Taylor that as his supervisor it was my responsibility to inform him as to the strengths and weaknesses of his work. He apologized for yelling and came in the next day with his usual double-fisted fix. We went on as if nothing had happened, but I made a mental note not to criticize Taylor in the afternoon.
All in all, Taylor was easier to get along with than Nancy. Nancy had recently dropped out of college and felt that life had done her wrong. She was smart enough, but she had a hard time getting started on anything. She was always fiddling around with her desk, worried that she’d get Carpal Tunnel Syndrome or eyestrain. She constantly readjusted her chair, shifted her screen position, and reversed which hand used the mouse, all the while complaining that the room was too dark. And then there were her allergies. She was always coughing or sneezing or scratching her eyes. Between fixing her workspace and blowing her nose, Nancy never seemed to get much done in the mornings. But by the afternoon, she somehow found her equilibrium. As it turned out, just as the quality of Taylor’s work started trailing off, Nancy’s picked up. Therefore, I was always careful to consider the time of day when I gave out an important project.
Clover, as you might have guessed from her name, was the child of hippies and something of a free spirit herself. She wasn’t great with routine work, but she had an amazing problem solving ability. I had the others channel their difficult files to Clover, and she’d inevitably find a way to fix them. It never seemed like she was working that hard, always bopping her head along with the music on her Discman, but I knew she was worth two temps for all the aggravation she saved me. So, I looked the other way when she made her regular munchie runs to the gas station on the corner.
Despite the work of these three, the project started to fall behind schedule, and I had to eat crow and ask my supervisor for permission to hire another hand. He agreed to let me take on a short-term temp, and the agency sent over Bartleby. Bartleby was a thin, quiet man who wore a pale blue t-shirt. He was very polite, but he had an air of unhappiness about him that I felt as soon as he walked into the CPU graveyard that first day. After telling him about the project and his task, I asked if Bartleby was a family name.
“No,” he replied. “It’s my name.”
Bartleby wasn’t much for small talk. We were tight on space so I put Bartleby in a corner behind a row of old computer terminals. We didn’t have any chairs on hand, so I had to set him up on a couple boxes of old computer manuals. I apologized and said I’d get him a chair soon, but he didn’t seem to mind. At least his workspace was in front of a window, though it only looked out onto the dumpster by the parking lot.
Bartleby was different right from the start. When I ran the program on my computer to check his data entry speed, I thought I had forgotten to reset it at first. The computer listed him as having done an incredible amount of work. But when I peeked in on him behind the broken computer terminals, I decided that maybe he really just was that fast. He somehow timed things so that he was typing on one computer while the other processed information. Often he used both computers simultaneously, typing different information with each hand. It was amazing to watch, and I would have considered myself lucky to have landed such an obviously overqualified temp if it hadn’t been for his personality.
Bartleby never smiled or initiated a conversation. He was the only non-smoker in the room, so he never took cigarette breaks. He even worked through lunch, though I told him that he was required to take a half-hour break and that he wouldn’t be paid for that time even if he worked. Bartleby nodded that he understood but went right on entering data.
Because the project involved two different computer systems, we had to produce printouts of completed files and scan them by eye for accuracy. Since any mis-entered information would be lost forever, I insisted that temps not scan their own work. The temptation to just let a mistake slide by would be too great. Instead, printouts were kept in a bin near the front of the room, and, when people needed a rest from the screen, they would take a couple sheets, spread them out on the break room table, and compare information. One day not long after Bartleby started, I noticed the pile was getting high, so I asked him to grab some printouts and come into the break room with me. I hadn’t shown him the scanning procedure yet, and I figured this would be a good chance for me to get him out of his shell.
In a mild but firm voice, Bartleby replied, “I would prefer not to.”
This annoyance I didn’t need. I walked around the broken terminals so that I could see Bartleby. ”I didn’t ask you what you wanted to do,” I said, lowering my voice, but enunciating very clearly so that he wouldn’t miss my displeasure, “I said, get a printout and let me show you how to scan it.”
“I would prefer not to,” Bartleby said, never looking up from his computer screens. He kept typing away, one hand on each of his keyboards. I could have fired him then and there for being insubordinate. I had gotten rid of other temps for less. But I also knew that the reason the printout box was overflowing was that Bartleby was entering as much data as all the other temps combined.
I looked around the room. No one seemed to have noticed our exchange, so I called over to Taylor to have a cigarette and scan printouts and thought nothing more of it.
But a couple of days later, I walked into the room and grazed the stack in the printout bin. A huge pile of paper fell on me, almost knocking me to the ground. I quickly looked around for someone to yell at, but no one was at the computers. Turning, I saw Taylor, Nancy and Clover, all sitting in the break room scanning sheets of paper.
“What’s going on with these printouts?” I demanded, storming into the break room.
“Can you believe it?” Taylor said, wide eyed. It was still early in the day and he was at the peak of his energy. ”It was worse when we got here this morning. We’ve been doing nothing but scanning.”
“You know,” Nancy said in an irritated voice, as it was morning, “if you were going to start a second shift, you could have told us. Some of us might be interested in earning some overtime.”
“I didn’t start a second shift. I don’t see how all those printouts got there. Where’s Bartleby?”
“He’s still in his fortress,” Clover said. ”We asked him to come out here with us, but he preferred not to.”
I ignored Clover-usually I discourage temps from complaining about each other-and went back into the storage room. I peered over the old computer terminals and found that the room was not empty. Bartleby was typing away.
“Bartleby, could you hold up for a moment? We’ve got a backlog of printouts and we’ll all need to do scanning this morning to catch up.”
He stopped typing and turned to look at me. “I would prefer not to,” he said, and turned back to his computers.
“Is there a problem here, Bartleby? There’s nothing particularly difficult about scanning. It will take me two minutes to show you the procedure and then you can go off on your own again.”
“I would prefer not to.”
“Look, I appreciate all the work you’re doing here, but scanning is a required part of the job. I need everyone working here to do it, and I can’t treat any one employee differently than the others. I’m only asking you to do what everyone else is doing.”
I paused. Bartleby said nothing.
“So, Bartleby, will you come out and help with the scanning?”
“I would prefer not to.”
Before I could respond, I realized that Nancy had come back into the room to pick up more printouts. She stared at Bartleby and me.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “I’ll take care of it.”
“You know,” Nancy went on, “if anyone is going to get a special assignment, it should be me. I’ve been with this project the longest and I’ve taken college level classes in programming. It’s not fair for Bartleby to get special treatment. His entry speeds are always going to look better than ours if he doesn’t do any of the scanning.”
“I know, Nancy. I’m not giving Bartleby special treatment. In fact, he’s going to help with the scanning now.”
“I would prefer not to,” Bartleby said, not looking at either of us.
“What do you mean you’d ‘prefer not to?’” Nancy said, imitating Bartleby’s monotone. ”There’re lots of things I’d prefer not to do. I’d prefer to have someone else doing part of my work. Hey, I’d prefer not to have to work at all. I’d prefer if you’d-”
“Nancy, that’s enough. I’ll take care of this. Please go back to the break room.”
Nancy scowled at Bartleby. She snatched a printout off the top of the pile.
“You know, you’re not so perfect. I found an error on the SCHL-SCHW page you did.”
Bartleby waited until Nancy left the room. “It’s not an error. The original entry had the state abbreviation for Alaska wrong. It’s AK, not AL.”
“Listen, Bartleby. I don’t understand what’s going on, but I can’t have you getting everyone upset. I don’t care how fast you are; if you’re a distraction, you’re not going to work out here. Do you understand?”
Bartleby nodded slightly but said nothing. I could see that he wasn’t any closer to being helpful. I was again of half a mind to fire him right then. I’m not quite sure why I didn’t. It wasn’t just that he was such a fast worker. Part of me felt sorry for him. There was something about Bartleby’s unhappiness that I couldn’t let go of. I guess I took it as a challenge to snap him out of his funk. It would take so little for him to be a great employee, yet I knew that if I let him go, the temp agency would never use him again. He was like this sad, little puppy that someone had kicked. I knew that if I could just help him get through whatever his problem was, I could change him. This was what I was good at, motivating people. Bartleby was a tough nut to crack.
I left the room and called the temp agency to ask a few questions about Bartleby. They couldn’t tell me much. He had just started working for them. They offered to send over a replacement.
“No, don’t do that,” I said. ”He’s not a problem. There’s just something about him I can’t figure out.”
I asked them to fax over his résumé. They said they would. I decided to put Bartleby out of my mind, sneaking only occasional glances into the storage room. Everything seemed fine, though everyone except Bartleby seemed to be taking more cigarette breaks.
It turned out to be a busy day. I was coordinating another project on the other side of the building, so I didn’t have much time to sit around my office. It wasn’t until the end of the day that I got a chance to run the work reports on my computer, but when I did I couldn’t believe what I saw. Bartleby’s entry numbers were incredible, impossible even. The entire backlog of printouts was due to him. Now he was doing as much work as ten people could normally do. I practically ran to the storage room. I found Bartleby alone, the stack of printouts steadily increasing.
“Bartleby, I’d like to ask you a question. Can you tell me how you’ve been able to do so much work recently?”
Bartleby slowly turned to face me. Then he explained that he had increased the processing speeds on his computers and fine-tuned some of the software. I was impressed but a little concerned. You don’t want to have anyone messing around with the machines without authorization. I asked Bartleby to show me what it was that he had done, but he said that it was hard to explain. I hinted that if these improvements could be made to the other machines, I could see about increasing his hourly wage. I didn’t actually have the authority to do that, but then again, he shouldn’t have been playing around with the computers, either.
Bartleby stayed quiet.
“Bartleby,” I said, lowering my voice, “Are you saying you won’t show me what you did?”
“I would prefer not to.”
So why didn’t I put an end to things then and there? Looking back, it seems like that’s what I should have done. But it was almost quitting time and I was getting tired. And I could see all the work he’d done. Besides, if he wasn’t hurting anything (and on these old computers what was there really to hurt?), why should I be harassing the guy just for showing some initiative?
“Fine, Bartleby. Just talk to me before you make any more improvements.”
