Each
week someone from HR sends out a mass email listing all those who have
not submitted their billable hours in a timely fashion. If you’ve been
on the list two weeks in a row, your name goes up in red.
I
scan the email for names of people I might know. For my own name. Even
though I haven’t been delinquent. You see a list with names on it in
red, you check for yours.
It’s
long enough so you have to scroll—maybe fifty or sixty names, from
practically every department of every agency. The red ones glow with
shame. What dramas lie behind them? What pathologies, what turmoil? What
does it take to put a name up on the list in red? Divorce? Mental
breakdown? Drug addiction?
Probably nothing. But you never know.