Short Story: Some Serve Who Sit Home

Brief memoir of a fired civil servant

Some Serve Who Sit Home

Orville Darcy presided over his expansive desk as if it were a small country and he its president-for-life.

Granted, the mahogany-clad surface was only a foot longer than those of other managers in the agency. But as indisputable testimony to Darcy’s ascendance, his office also had other appurtenances apparent to underlings schooled in the protocols of administrative power. He had three, rather than two, potted plants; two, rather than one, upholstered guest chairs with arms; a full-length couch plus what is euphemistically elsewhere called a love seat; and a circular glass-topped coffee table perched at knee level so that visitors would have ready access to their ubiquitous laptops during serious discussions. (We had government-issue phones, but doing work on them other than checking emails and taking calls was prohibited. It’s not that the devices aren’t secure. But our IT geeks have decreed that using thumbs for data entry is statistically more error-prone than typing on a keyboard. Dictation? No one trusts the bots.)