The Office Receptionist

I’m the first to admit that I don’t have much luck with the ladies. They keep their distance and turn serious around me. I guess I lack that physical hotness or pompous confidence. My job has a lot of serious and uncool people who never ventured to the gym or read a GQ article about men shaving their legs. There are also very few women. The once that are there are more interested in computers and sitting in a chair all day.

Let me back up and paint you the full picture. I worked at an e-commerce startup for flower deliveries. There was always a sparkling bouquet on the reception desk. The office itself was empty of flowers. Nobody even cared for flowers. It was just another technology job to us. Writing code for a pig slaughtering house or cheery flowers is pretty much the same. Your head is wrapped around code loops and flowcharts, pretty much like a drainage pipe cares little if 100 year old champagne or your latest shit is flowing down it.

The office space was an interesting contrast. The first impression was gleaming and glamorous. There was a science fiction feel to it. Walls and cubicle dividers had a distinct Star Wars feel to them. They were done by an artist with a Wikipedia page. The chairs were top of the line, shiny showroom things with a dozen polished chrome levers to adjust the chairs into every which way. The ceiling had an elaborate mural that ran through the entire office by another artist with a Wikipedia page.

If you looked closer, the sculpted Martian cloud that was Han’s cubicle divider was punctured by a hundred pencil thrusts. A dog had chewed off the bottom edge. Two chrome levers were missing from his chair and lying on his desk piled high with papers, books, and a stack of empty pizza boxes. There was a big dent, like a punch mark in the wall.

The contrast comes from the history of the office suite. The previous tenant was a high flying cloud startup that was flush with cash. They had ample cash. The owners went on a shopping spree for the most expensive interior design. When they lost a patent lawsuit, the company was shut down overnight.

Then we took over the lease, a scrappy startup that couldn’t afford shit. When we first showed up in the office, it was a moment from the fairytale Snow White. When she entered the dwarfs’ den, everything was perfectly lived in. The office had looked like everyone had simply gone for lunch. There were still personal items, like the inside of a cubicle filled with photos of someone’s kid. A smiling five-year old with missing teeth was smiling as he flung high on a swing. A yellow posted note next to the screen said: “Call doctor at noon.” The coffee mug must have been full at the time. It had dried out completely leaving a very thick film of coffee smudge behind. The food trash had grown into puffy mold.

Our CEO Roger had bought the contents of the suite. The court administrator had estimated three hundred cubic feet of office equipment and auctioned it for a highest bid of $213 per square foot. He sent us scavenging for computers, network cables, and staples. Roger had heard about a rumor that the old tenant had just received a shipment of brand new high-end servers. He gambled that the office equipment wholesale was severely underpriced. It turned out that the vendor had routed the shipment back to their warehouse before it arrived.

So we had settled in and enjoyed the luxuries. I got a nice chair and super large screen for my desktop. The place was slowly falling apart simply due to neglect and also the occasional vandalism that went on unchecked.

Enough about my boring work life. On a day with heavy rain showers, Emalise showed up.

“Hi, I got a package for you.”

She was thrust in front of me, tits up and in my face. Okay, in reality she simply had good posture and was a little bit too close and intimate for normal office distance. She also had a perky smile in her face. Those glowing eyes spoke of being up to something. There was a question in the air. The above the line question was “Will you take the package out of my hands?” The below the line question was something suggestive and loaded, like the package was a mundane action to suggest something entirely different.

The “tits up in my face” attitude had perhaps more to do with what was going on inside of my head. A couple weeks earlier, a few co-workers had taken out Eric to the strip club. It was a bachelor party for him. We were sitting on low couches in a very dim place. One stripper after the next walk up to our table to interest us in a lap dance with her. They each had developed their own shtick to stand out.

This one had jumped at me from the side with her big round, silicone tits leading her whole body. She called out with fake embarrassment, “Oops, my tits are just popping in her.” She made a fake play of how her tits are being the elephant in the porcelain shop bumping into everything by accident. There was a whole coy play of emotion that drew me in. She was baiting us to grab her hand and take her behind the curtain and have as many lap dances as it takes to get us running to the ATM with the $10 service charge to get her more green twenties.

Emalise had that exact same attitude and energy. Her tits were actually in my face as I considered it closer. I was sitting in my chair. She was standing right at the armrest. Her tits were at my face level very close. She could have easily reached the back of my neck and caressed me intimately. She still held the package in her hand for me.

I tried to push the images of stripper in high heels, thongs, and racy bras out of my head. I did not want to make her feel uncomfortable by sending her a sleazy vibe. I pulled my serious office feel over the emotions in turmoil.

“Thank you,” I said, took the package, and turned back to the for-loops on my screen.

She instantly tightened up. Her whole demeanor changed like someone who had just been scolded. The fun and play went out of her face. Her voice sunk a little deeper and very formal. I felt like I had just crushed a playful puppy by telling it that it would have to pull sleds of heavy iron ore 16 hours a day for the next decade of its life. She walked away.

Wait? Had she come onto me? Had she been flirting with me?

I looked at the co-workers around me. Michael was a Chinese immigrant who had doubled his weight by coding a lot. Sarah was so nerdy that if you gave her a vibrator, she wouldn’t know what it was. But she’d get excited taking the motor in it apart. James was a wiry young kid who smoked way too many cigarettes and was obsessed with making his car lighter for better performance. He had removed all the upholstery and plastic covers. The windshield wipers were gone to reduce weight. He had started filing off the gear shift to shave off a few more ounces.

That’s my world. Someone had just flirted with me. I had frozen up.

I watched Emalise carefully. She walked around like a stripper in the office. She always pushed her chest out. Her feet strode. One foot would step right in front of the other to make her hips swing. Whenever she approached someone, she bustled with apple blossom spring energy like those strippers who were trying to sell dances. She left lingering fingers on people’s backs and arms.

In an office without makeup on anyone, her face stood out. She had black hair and very white skin. Her lips were a bright red. Her eyes were brown. Most people’s eyes have a color but look like just a black lump of coal. Her eyes were vibrantly brown. When she stood in front of a window, the sunlight would bring out a brown hue in her hair that perfectly matched her eyes. Her skin was very smooth, maybe 25 years old.

When I walked past the reception desk, my eyes were firmly trained on the hallway ahead of me, but my awareness was fully focused on the peripheral perception to admire her and everything about her, her clothing, her mood, her attitude, the way she moved, and so on. I was afraid to be the typical office guy who hangs around the reception desk for long conversations, while the receptionist strains to remain polite while keeping the guys at a distance.

Han wasn’t like me. He brashly did things in life no matter the perception. He was an avid bicyclist. He’d stride into the office in skin tight bike shorts and shaved legs. He didn’t care that the other engineers snickered at him for wearing clothing that revealed the shape of his butt. He left his feet on his desk when our boss walked by. In the evening, there’d be a beer cracked open next to his computer. The boss was mad about drinking in the office but had been told where to shove it.

Han didn’t have a problem leaning on the reception counter. In fact, he was half lying on the reception counter. With a loud voice, he was telling the receptionist about his trip to Thailand and how he shemale bar entertainers were hitting on him. Emalise gushed about the beach in Thailand.

I’d have been so uncomfortable being seen with Emalise and to have my stories heard by half the office. Girls always told me to quiet down. Not with Han. She was laughing hard. She leaned back in her chair like a splat bug on a windshield. Her arms and legs were dangling out wide. She flipped him off with almost shrill laughter.

The following days, Emalise stripper like attitude had vanished with most people. Similar to how she reacted with me, she seemed to react with most people. Her attitude became office serious. She didn’t bring packages to my desk anymore. I had to come to the front desk and ask her about it. She’d point to the cart figure it out for myself. Yet, she was still that friendly, even more so, with a small group of colleagues. Coming back from lunch, I saw Emalise and Han at the outdoor seating of a Starbucks. She was riding a chair in reverse like a cowgirl. Her hips were humping the chair like it was a bucking rodeo mustang. She swung an imaginary lasso in her hand overhead.

That moment, I realized that I had failed the audition. I could have been sitting there and having fun with her. But I had given her the vibes that I’m not fun by trying to not come onto her. She had come onto me. I should have come right back. I left her hanging out high and dry hanging. I just didn’t know that people do that. I felt sad. I felt like I could punch something. I could have probably found a quiet wall in the office and punched it. But I don’t do those things.

The whole thing would probably have been forgotten like one of a thousand failures with girls if it weren’t for that Thursday. I had tried to live healthier. Sitting for hours is pretty bad for the body. So, I installed one of those apps that buzzes every hour. Then I get up, take the elevator down, and do a lap around the fountain in the courtyard for five minutes. As I pass the security guard Jeff for the office building, he calls out to wait for him. He’s a chubby Mexican American. As far as I can tell, being chubby is his job qualification. Guards usually have to be physically impressive. For a lower rate, simply being large rather than muscular will do. He simply has to stand around and look like you wouldn’t get past him. It’s not because he’d be battle you back, but because he’d be too have to lift out of the way.

As cynical as I am about his job skills or aspiration, I actually like him. He is a cool guy. He likes joining me on my lap and smoke a cigarette. Standing in the building lobby is a boring, lonely task. He keeps telling me about the vineyard that he wants to build. I can’t see how he could save up the money from his security guard job to buy a vineyard, but I love listening to his stories. He always has a tale that keeps me rapt with attention, like the sphinx looking beetle that can travel on clothes of Uruguayan tourists. It’s not the sphinx beetle that causes the problem, but the birds are affected by them. And then Jeff goes into an amazingly insightful story about biology and DNA splicing. You just wouldn’t belief how good that guy can talk about science. When I check up on his stories, it sadly isn’t true. Still it’s excellent science fiction.

That day, Jeff was extra excited. “Come here,” he yelled the moment I stepped out of the elevator. “Come with me to the far end of the courtyard near the bonsai tree.”

I didn’t quite trust him to have a really important reason, but simply another story. Yet, I was pleasant about the distraction from my for-loops. If you have written one for-loop, you have written them all. Unfortunately for software engineers, you have to keep writing them for the rest of your life. Jeff was flush red in the face from excitement and didn’t even bother to light a cigarette. He straightened out the $5 tie on his Men’s Warehouse suit that was two sizes too large.

“Blanco,” he addressed me, “you know how there are security cameras in the garage? In the security office is a wall of screens. Each screen pops between cameras.”

“Yeah,” I reply cautiously expecting to maybe hear something interesting. “Did you catch a security guard sleeping?” I try to tease him.

“No, I caught that hot chick from your office banging a dude in an Audi,” he blurted out.

“What!?” I reply stunned and wild images of Emalise being banged very probably by Han. I feel jealousy. I feel pain from missing out what could be the best thing in my life. I have a burning, searing actually, regret about that moment when she dropped off the package at my desk. I so failed the possibility of that moment. Why didn’t I take a risk and flirt right back to her?

“You can’t see anything because the windows are dark. But they both go into the backseat. He’s leaning back and pulling himself in. She’s crawling in on her hands and knees. Then the Audi starts swinging and humping like mad for fifteen minutes. I tell you when they got the right rhythm, that Audi was going up and down like a bouncy house. When they get out of the Audi, her hair is completely messed up. Her clothes are a mess,” Jeff explained. He was looking at me with excited eyes and counting the points he collected for telling me that.

“Wow!” was all I could say.

“They were fucking in plain side in the garage. Anyone walking by could have seen it. It was in the afternoon. I would have walked, but I only found out when I reviewed the tape at the end of my evening shift,” explained Jeff.

“We got a dedicated screen in the office for that car now. The boss asked about it. We told him that we were trying to nap a thief who had broken into a car. The boss never asked more about it because we told him that the car belonged to an employee of Neo Tech. He hates the CEO of that company. Haha.”

I had to get back upstairs to my office. My five minute break was over. I was stunned. My mind imagined her naked skin on the upholstery. Fuck! My imagination of what had happened in the car was nagging on me. I’m probably like most other office dudes, dreaming about the hottie. I had to do something. I had to take action. I had to take risk. So, in my next five minute stand-up break, I walked over to the reception desk. I was going to talk to her. I would let myself be seen as the dude that was hitting on the hot receptionist.

“So, how are you settling in?” I asked her. That seemed like a friendly and innocuous question.

She looked at me with a cold expression. There was no energy in it. There was no excitement and suggestion of anything. She went to typing on her screen and spoke out the side of her mouth.

“Thank you for asking.”

I was stunned. I didn’t quite know what to say next. I looked at her. She was wearing one of those male shirts that was adjusted to be feminine. The fabric was very crisp. It was a bit translucent to suggest the skin behind the fabric. Her bra changed the color of the pure white. While there are many white shirts, hers was sexy. It raised my mood. It made me want to linger.

“Yeah, did you move here? You don’t look like you are quite from here,” I tried again.

Her body was stiff. Her mind was distracted. I couldn’t even get her attention. It took her a while to answer because she was more focused on the screen.

“Idaho,” she said mono-syllabic.

I was at a conversational dead-end again. I could make a joke about Idaho potatoes, but that would come off as very corny.

“I’m looking forward to the office party,” I said with a smile of enthusiasm.

She started looking annoyed and faced me for the first time directly. “I have work to get done. Do you need anything?”

“No,” I said and walked away. Fuck, trying to flirt with her was like pulling teeth. I definitely don’t have any game.

That hope of having sex with her in the parking garage kept me focused. Damn! Every time I saw her, I just imagined her supple body and her playfulness skin to skin. I kept at the visits at the front desk. After about a week, I had a breakthrough. She asked me a question for the first time. It happened in the elevator on the way up.

“How are you?” she asked me.

I was so excited that she took an interest in me. I told her about my weekend plans for three sentences until I realized that she looked at me a little shocked. My weekend plans weren’t that shocking. Then I dawned on me. She hadn’t actually wanted me to start blabbing about my life. The “How are you?” was simply a conversational thing that had slipped out.

As dim as I come across, pure persistence started working. I found out little bits of her life. I could know ask her about how her sister’s college application was coming along. When I showed up at the front desk, she’d glance up and relax about me being there. When we walked into the elevator together, she’d smile and be ready for a little small talk. She even volunteered information about her little dog at home.

As proud as I was about my progress, seeing Han with her made me deflated. He’d simply grab her and put her on his back to carry her around piggy back style. There was a group of about five colleagues that she was that playful with. They had been like that since the beginning. That’s when I had failed my audition. But I was determined to make my comeback.

In all honesty, I wasn’t making any progress over the next month. There was a chance event though. Our office holiday party was in a hotel, about a block down from the office. There was an open bar. The other engineers played drinking games with for-loops. I think I ended up in an endless loop. I was severely wasted. When I tried to get up, everything was moving. I brushed off everyone that I was fine. I was too embarrassed to admit it and too drunk to know better.

Somewhere, I did realize that I needed to get to a place where I could sleep without driving. Even the idea of interacting with a cab driver was overwhelmingly complex. Somewhere on the office floor seemed a nice enough place. There were empty spaces in the office as we were simply a ragtag crew that inhabited the shell of the formerly high flying company.

I felt the cold air on my face. The street was dark and abandoned in the night. I stumbled. I could smell my own puke long before I needed to puke. I counted down the office buildings on my way down the block. The image of the office carpet was a welcoming sanctuary. The bones in my body rebelled against the coherent idea of going to a specific place.

The first projectile of vomit went against the elevator wall. The vomit got the bottom end of the button panel. Nobody would be pressing the ground floor button tonight anymore. It seemed like a fitting strategy to trap people in the office. The vomit slowly rolled down the wall. There were certain drops that ran faster than others. If vomit doesn’t make you want to vomit, you are really drunk.

Figuring out how to open the office door was a haze. Somewhere between there and the restroom, two female hands found themselves on my shoulder. I didn’t even question where they were coming from. I simply felt the comfort of being more steady and making a more straight line progress towards the restroom. I just went down on my knees and face down the toilet bowl. I let go of that pumping sensation in my stomach that I had been fighting against. Every time when a flush of vomit came up my throat, I felt this heavenly relief and joy.