Decameron: What You Can [X/9]

Aug 06, 2020

This story starts with a lunch and ends with a dinner.

The lunch was a tradition, a new class of interns gets paired off with people in the company who volunteered to show them around. The perks were that you could expense the lunch, so that typically meant a trip down the block to one of the mid-level lower Manhattan business casual spots, not like a steakhouse kind of place but definitely one that charged $23 for a burger and didn’t expect too many people to ask questions. In three months, every single person with any financial tie to this restaurant — the servers, the dishwashers, the suppliers, the owners, the owner’s backers, the landlord — all of them would be fucked financially. We’re not at that part of the story yet. It’s still only February.

Sal took on a few kids to mentor, not really knowing why. He’d had some pretty good luck and was past the point where a $23 cheeseburger was an extravagance beyond the scope of understanding. He’d scrimped and saved for a while there but got a good job and then he got a better one and in a week he’d learn he was getting pretty much the best one in his tiny world — it related to how much of the country was considered his responsibility in terms of the technology related to advertising — and so while lots of people signed up to do the mentor thing for the cheeseburger, and even though he was profoundly overworked, he did it for other reasons.

He said he did it because he liked meeting people on the team, and that was mostly true, but he also did it because he remembered being 22 and new and having more enthusiasm than cynicism and he also remembered the exact name of the person who took him out for a cheeseburger — which then only cost a heinous $18 — when he was starting out and he figured if he couldn’t forget that name it must be meaningful in some way. They never teach you how to be a person who isn’t young but isn’t old. He figured this was how it happened.

There were two of them, Torello and Stephan. Torello was the chatty one — he was in the next department over from him covering the southern region, and was just boundless and full of energy, talking about how interested he was in the subsystem they had them on, how cool it was to work in IoT stuff, chomping at the bit to just do the lowliest, gruntiest tasks that they had on the whole team. He had a passion for it, and Sal envied him more than he cared to admit. Sal at first thought Stephan was quieter, maybe more shy, but midway through realized that Stephan worked on sales, and that he wasn’t shy he was just absolutely enraptured by what Torello had to say, listening — really listening — about the unconsciously dull stuff that was getting Torello’s motor going. Stephan was fixated on him.

He remembered that part of being 22 too.

And so lunch wrapped up and Torello took out his wallet to pay, and Sal laughed for a second because god these kids, and he even pushed back a little and proposed going dutch until Sal really insisted no, the company has this and just the thought of a kid fresh out of college picking up half the check at this doomed little chophouse was too much, they have so much to learn before they become the people they’re supposed to become. And when they walked back to the office Torello was rambling about how mesh communications were the way and Sal heard it while Stephan listened and Sal put in a word when they got back to move their desks so they were closer, because that felt like a good thing to do. Sometimes people needed to look out for other people, because Sal reasoned if he didn’t then who would?

A week later Sal got the promotion and all of a sudden he was in a nice steady job with a big fat paycheck overseeing everything. It was nice, easy, and admittedly a bit cushy. Then two weeks later the world fell apart and everybody had to go home and then the time became the Belt Tightening. Sal had to start making some really awful decisions and ruining some peoples lives on behalf of his boss who didn’t want to be the one to pass along the bad news about the decision he made, but it could be worse, you could have money invested in a restaurant that charges $23 for a hamburger in lower Manhattan. Soon he became pretty familiar with the inside of a lot of peoples’ apartments, and on some calls he had the shabbiest background and then on other calls he had the nicest background and he couldn’t decide which made him feel worse.

For whatever reason he kept coming back to the saddest thing, which wasn’t the friendships and relationships that got harder to maintain, but the ones that never got a chance to happen. Sometimes when he was going through his mental list of things to do and unfinished business his mind would wander to Torello and Stephan. He remembered all the friends he had made at his internship ten years ago and how in the decade since he had been in their wedding parties and then he thought of the incalculable loss that the kids like Torello and Stephan never know they suffured.

At the end of the summer, the internships were wrapping up and it dawned on him that he hadn’t been a very good mentor for a while there. The job was bad, the numbers made headcount dicey and he was being pushed to move all their business out of the company to contractors rather than employees. It was depressing work. He had checked in on the interns a few times — Stephan was considering moving back to Tucson when his Bed-Stuy lease was up at the end of August, and Torello figured since the hiring freeze he’d just try to freelance for a bit and move home if he ran out of money.

Torello sounded like he was interested in getting by, not exactly delighted to work on the bleeding edge of the field. This killed Sal.

Sal thought hard about what he couldn’t do. He was a thirty year old in a steady job. That job had been to execute the will of his bosses and make a lot of people unhappy. He listened to what Torello was saying — just do what you have to do to scrape by and hope you can do what you want later — and he felt a familiar pang. The dreamer he dined with in February had traded the enthusiasm for cynicism. Was Sal happy? No. Could Torello ever be?

Sal thought about what he could do. It would break several rules — it would go against the spirit of his role, and definitely if he was caught he could be pretty seriously reprimanded — but he had to do this. Not for Torello, not for Stephan. He had to do it for himself. He’d regret it if he didn’t.

The next morning, before work hours, he called up Torello and he called up Stephan. As he feared and expected, they had lost touch — budding work friendships were impossible to maintain — but he did what he should have done all year. He offered some advice.

Then, two hours later, he fired them.

His bosses at first questioned the need to fire two interns — they now owed them severance, and they hated paying severance let alone COBRA — but Sal insisted it was only right, he’d caught them flirting and it was against company policy and an example had to be made.

This assuaged them: policy was policy, after all, and nobody ever got in trouble following the rules by the letter.

As for the next item, Sal also solved their problems, following it to the letter. He had just located a specialized firm operating out of a shingle in Bed-Stuy that could oversee the design of the entire IoT system. They were top shelf, but he said that they’d be saving the cost of several full timers and keep the costs off the headcount side of the ledger. They were new — he had it on good authority the arrangement would be finalized over a dinner tonight, but kept that to himself — but that made his bosses think they were getting a bargain. Starts with a lunch, ends with a dinner.

Sal slept well for the first time in weeks. Sometimes people needed to look out for other people, because if he didn’t, then who would?

Decameron is a newsletter recounting the 14th Century set of quarantine tales for 2020. Read the original story.

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Decameron Archive

Decameron: Authors' Note

The End

Decameron: The Decameron [X/10]

Decameron: What You Can [X/9]

Decameron: The Ballad of Gisuppus [X/8]