Speaker 1: Harrison starts the episode and I don't trust Robert today.
Speaker 1: You want me to start? I don't trust Robert today.
Speaker 1: It's time, Garrison, it's time for you to learn. Wow,
Speaker 1: my advice is a tonal shrieking. I am not doing that.
Speaker 1: Everyone's gonna be like, oh, Garrison's just copying Robert's tone
Speaker 1: and cadence. You mean you mean they're making sounds with
Speaker 1: my mouth. Yeah, that's that's how. That's how, that's how
Speaker 1: communication works. Start the episode with that and trigger everybody
Speaker 1: like me. You use a microphone, it's very real. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you thieve we're recording. Let's let's do this. Hey, it's
Speaker 1: time for stories. We love. We love stories here at
Speaker 1: Etiquet Happen Here pod the podcast about how things are
Speaker 1: kind of falling apart and too maybe some ways to
Speaker 1: put them back together. Um, I'm Garrison. I'm starting this
Speaker 1: episode today. I'm not sure why roberts here. I'm real hungover.
Speaker 1: Robert is real hung because I didn't trust Robert to
Speaker 1: do his job today. But I trust you, Garrison. You
Speaker 1: didn't really not trust me to do my job. I know.
Speaker 1: That's that's that's fun. We also we also have Christopher
Speaker 1: here and and we have uh writer Rebecca Campbell. Hello, hey,
Speaker 1: and uh, why don't you briefly explain who who you
Speaker 1: are and what what's what's going on today? Okay, Well,
Speaker 1: I'm a Canadian writer and sometimes I'm a teacher, but
Speaker 1: mostly I just write really sad stories about climate change
Speaker 1: and ghosts and aies and near future stuff like that. Um.
Speaker 1: This story I'm reading is called thank You for Your Patients.
Speaker 1: It came out and Reckoning for I guess last year.
Speaker 1: And uh, it's based on my partner's time when he
Speaker 1: was working in a call center and the kind of
Speaker 1: nightmares stories that I heard from them every time he
Speaker 1: home from work. But it's also about me being on
Speaker 1: the other side of the country from the part of
Speaker 1: the world that I love the most, which is the
Speaker 1: Pacific Northwest. Um. And you know, watching Fukushima a few
Speaker 1: years ago and watching wildfires a few weeks ago, and um,
Speaker 1: being separated from the things that are important to you, um,
Speaker 1: as they're all falling apart. Well, I'm just excited that
Speaker 1: this podcast is now two fifths Canadian, so that's that's
Speaker 1: the main thing I'm excited about. Uh. No, oh my god,
Speaker 1: I just a tim Horton's cup just appeared next to me.
Speaker 1: It's terrible donut home I have I do have a
Speaker 1: Tim Hortons cupt in my kitchen. Um, anyway, let's uh,
Speaker 1: let's let's let's start this, start this, start this reading,
Speaker 1: Let's eat this popsicle stand as they say a thing,
Speaker 1: Let's continue, Let's let's eat this. Okay, thank you for
Speaker 1: your patience. I'm lucky because they replaced a bunch of
Speaker 1: chairs last month and I got a new one. A
Speaker 1: good chair is important when you spend ten hours a
Speaker 1: day in a cubicle talking to strangers about their problems.
Speaker 1: I've been here three years and worked on most of
Speaker 1: Western Morgan's services, which means I can, with no thought,
Speaker 1: help grandma set up her WiFi, or troubleshoot banking software,
Speaker 1: or set up your cell phone plan, or help you
Speaker 1: with some app designed to find your soulmate that nevertheless
Speaker 1: feels you with hopelessness. I can't help you with the hopelessness.
Speaker 1: It's nonstandard, but I'm Western Morgan's floater, and Jordi, your
Speaker 1: Kirsty just dropped me. Where the calls are heavy or
Speaker 1: turnover as high. On Twitter, I can answer questions within
Speaker 1: five seconds of some asshole in Toronto saying, what the
Speaker 1: fuck my TV doesn't see the house network, and I respond,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry to hear that Toronto asshole. Let's see if
Speaker 1: I can help. I'm at possible to rile because I've
Speaker 1: heard everything, every possible stupid question, every strange request regarding
Speaker 1: lapsed policies and mispayments, every paranoid rand, every sort of
Speaker 1: impotent rage. The management is shitty and the customers are irritable,
Speaker 1: but there's beauty and problem solving. The really bad stuff
Speaker 1: started at the end of last month, when I had
Speaker 1: to do on one on one majority team lead for
Speaker 1: the floor. I've been fielding a bunch of questions regarding
Speaker 1: a recent patch that had broken everything. I had this rhythm,
Speaker 1: hitting my thirty second age T and typing without thinking,
Speaker 1: Mark here, how can I help you? But one on
Speaker 1: one is mandated interruptions, So I listened to Geordy brainstorm
Speaker 1: about improving morale. They stopped having barbecues because it was
Speaker 1: too expensive, even when the burgers were sawdust and soy. Also,
Speaker 1: no one wanted to be outside because Detroit was still burning,
Speaker 1: and the PPM up to something like Beijing. Listen to
Speaker 1: this Western Morgan idol. Jordy told me we judge three
Speaker 1: of the top right calls, and we have a thing
Speaker 1: and someone walks away with a Timmy's gift card like
Speaker 1: fifty bucks. Jordi said that like it was a good thing.
Speaker 1: What about a key fob? I asked, we can't get
Speaker 1: out with what without one? After hours? But only management
Speaker 1: could hold or the winner gets to wear Janes or
Speaker 1: keep their phone for a shift. That didn't write an answer.
Speaker 1: The most frustrating thing about Western Morrigan is that team
Speaker 1: leads have to hold your phone like you're an untrusted
Speaker 1: teenager who's been grounded. I feel like I'm lost in
Speaker 1: a cave or a space station. When I do a
Speaker 1: lot of overtime. I arrived when it's dark, and I
Speaker 1: leave when it's dark. And while sometimes I go around
Speaker 1: the corner for coffee or McNuggets, it always feels like
Speaker 1: I'm just visiting the world. I don't know what's happened,
Speaker 1: if a government's fall on, or if an ice shelf
Speaker 1: has collapsed, if Detroit is burning again, or maybe California
Speaker 1: or the Great Lakes are dying at a slightly faster
Speaker 1: rate than they were before I left for work, never
Speaker 1: knowing what's going on outside. I sit in my good
Speaker 1: chair and say that sounds frustrating to everyone, no matter
Speaker 1: who's talking or what they want. Let me see if
Speaker 1: I understand your problem. You could judge, Geordie, Stead said,
Speaker 1: still talking about Morrel. You're impartial. You hate everyone. I
Speaker 1: don't hate everyone, Georgy, I said reflexively, though, to be fair,
Speaker 1: I hate a lot of people here. After my mandated
Speaker 1: fifteen minutes with Jordy, I saw that Misty had a
Speaker 1: problem with my documentation, which has been rough since they
Speaker 1: changed policy on me. She's in the Philippines, where most
Speaker 1: of the real work happens. Upper management is all in India.
Speaker 1: They only have us because they need Canadian accents on
Speaker 1: the phones, and they get tax breaks bringing jobs to
Speaker 1: one of the more desolate parts of the country down
Speaker 1: when from Detroit, rampant West Nile and of the province's
Speaker 1: heavy metals processed at the plant out by the ball
Speaker 1: of the baby's born. Here are girls something to do
Speaker 1: with residual b p A. Misty is on the other
Speaker 1: side of the Pacific in Lagaspi. But you think she
Speaker 1: was right here considering how aggressively. She organizes us your
Speaker 1: ship at filling out forms. Mark the rite up is
Speaker 1: going to kill your rank. We're stack ranked. Every shift
Speaker 1: it gets you points you can redeem. You can redeem,
Speaker 1: which honestly is worth it for the grocery store gift cards.
Speaker 1: Just tell me what I did wrong, Lagaspie. We were
Speaker 1: in the middle of a rough month. The flu hit
Speaker 1: everywhere at once, and no one could afford to lose
Speaker 1: the work, so we had a bunch of people come in,
Speaker 1: sick coughs and juicy sneezes all over the floor, and
Speaker 1: half the time you got on the elevator and everyone
Speaker 1: was gray faced and weaving. I came in over the
Speaker 1: weekend to cover Mobile because they lost half their staff,
Speaker 1: so I'd been on for eight days by Monday, when
Speaker 1: Jordy was manic trying to call people in so he
Speaker 1: wouldn't have to go on the phones. He always says,
Speaker 1: when we're smoking outside and he's pointedly not looking at
Speaker 1: the place where the gam building used to be, It's
Speaker 1: not the extra fifty cents an hour, it's the fact
Speaker 1: I don't have to deal with people. He hated taking calls.
Speaker 1: He offered me overtime so I started coming in at
Speaker 1: six and leaving at ten, and I didn't even notice
Speaker 1: the weekend. I do remember going home those nights and
Speaker 1: thinking how hollow my room felt with my roommates playing
Speaker 1: Call of Duty in the living room, and how my
Speaker 1: body seemed to vibrate caffeine maybe your pseudophedan. I heard
Speaker 1: phantom time warnings and chimes, and when I closed my eyes,
Speaker 1: I could see the screen and call after call flooding
Speaker 1: the queue. By Saturday, Western Morgan was a haunted house,
Speaker 1: but I still wasn't sick. That sounds frustrating. Let me
Speaker 1: see if I can help. I was dealing with this
Speaker 1: woman on Vancouver Islands who couldn't generate invoices. We'd been
Speaker 1: at it for two hours and I could feel her
Speaker 1: getting upset when I told her to wipe the whole
Speaker 1: system and start again. I could help her with that,
Speaker 1: but she was like, no, we'll lose two weeks of work.
Speaker 1: There's nothing I can say to that, so we keep
Speaker 1: troubleshooting even though it's pointless. Okay, I said, you can
Speaker 1: go back to your route invoice and try. Oh, she
Speaker 1: said what, And that was it. I didn't hear anything
Speaker 1: but the line itself, which just went dead, that kind
Speaker 1: of absence you get when someone hangs up on you.
Speaker 1: Are you there, ma'am? I called back, but I got
Speaker 1: a reorder tone, not voice mail or an old fashioned
Speaker 1: busy signal, but the one that means the whole system
Speaker 1: is busier, blocked or down. I dropped out of the
Speaker 1: queue then, which you're not supposed to do, obviously, and
Speaker 1: went looking for Jordy, who was chatting with Kirsty about
Speaker 1: Western Morgan idol. I asked if they knew anything, but
Speaker 1: of course they didn't. And when I asked if I
Speaker 1: could at least grab my phone to see what was happening,
Speaker 1: Kirsty did a kind of elementary school teacher sigh. Documentation
Speaker 1: for three eight zero your overdue mark. Collar dropped. I
Speaker 1: saw that explanation happening across the board. Looks like the
Speaker 1: problems at their end. I didn't find out until Moe
Speaker 1: came back from Brake Street to wet in the way
Speaker 1: you are if you run out into that rain blowing
Speaker 1: in from Detroit because you don't want it to touch
Speaker 1: your skin, saying earthquake on the West coast, You know
Speaker 1: anyone out there? I thought about the woman trying to
Speaker 1: get the invoice together for a tiny order of sea
Speaker 1: salts from some equally tiny place on Vancouver Island. Her
Speaker 1: business so miniscule it's still fit into our cheapest subscription.
Speaker 1: In my unsubmitted documentation for Misty, I had written that
Speaker 1: her voice sounded like a hopeful but slightly overwhelmed great
Speaker 1: aunt trying to make the remote control work. No one,
Speaker 1: how bad like nine point six, the worst since forever,
Speaker 1: like for hundreds of years, Jesus, I said, Jesus, Jesus,
Speaker 1: I've had similar moments on calls. When the shooting happened
Speaker 1: in Montreal, not View ma Real, but the one with
Speaker 1: the kids ran downtown from McGill and the photographer caught
Speaker 1: the girl as the bullet tour at her right kneecap.
Speaker 1: I was on the line with this dick wad in
Speaker 1: a coworking place on Maisonneuve, who was talking, who was
Speaker 1: asking to talk to my supervisor? Then midwine, he stopped
Speaker 1: talking like he suddenly didn't care about my attitude. I
Speaker 1: could hear his phone pinging, sir, are you there? Can
Speaker 1: you hear that it's happening on the street. I can
Speaker 1: see a faint popping, voice raised and doors slammed. Then
Speaker 1: he cut the call. I kept in the queue. I
Speaker 1: helped someone update, I did a subscription renewal. The next person, though,
Speaker 1: needed a backup, and that took forever. So we chatted
Speaker 1: about hockey until she said, did you hear about Montreal? No, ma'am,
Speaker 1: I said, thinking about the sound I may be heard
Speaker 1: before his phone cut. Firecrackers, backfires. Some guy shot up
Speaker 1: the whole downtown. I think it was terrorists, who knows,
Speaker 1: fl Q or Muslims, maybe Red Power fifty dead, but
Speaker 1: it was going up every single time ever fresh the page.
Speaker 1: She kept going on like this while we did a backup,
Speaker 1: and then I made sure everything worked. And it had
Speaker 1: been like three hours at that point, and I kept
Speaker 1: thinking of the guy in his silence and what was
Speaker 1: going on in the streets while we talked about his
Speaker 1: log in and how unprofessional I was. I don't have
Speaker 1: any friends in Montreal. I went there once to drink
Speaker 1: when I was eighteen, but that's it. I just had
Speaker 1: that guy and the thump of footsteps fleeing the coworking space.
Speaker 1: When I took my break, the rain was falling again,
Speaker 1: the faintly gray kind that runs down the sidewalks and
Speaker 1: the gutters, and when it builds up enough you can
Speaker 1: see it's a little milky because it's full of ash.
Speaker 1: If you think too hard about what's running into your
Speaker 1: eyes as you stand outside smoking until your pack is empty,
Speaker 1: you go eat a twenty four box of tim Bits
Speaker 1: or six Big Max, or you stopped for one beer
Speaker 1: on the way home, and only leave when they push
Speaker 1: you out the door. Geordie was outside. I gave him
Speaker 1: a cigarette, even though he doesn't smoke either, and he said,
Speaker 1: it doesn't seem to be getting cleaner. Wasn't it supposed
Speaker 1: to get cleaner. He grew up in Detroit, though he
Speaker 1: was already over here when it burned last year. Maybe
Speaker 1: it's safer. The ham is worse. I thought the ham
Speaker 1: was supposed to go away. When they sent in the
Speaker 1: cleanup cruise. We watched the warm, ash colored water run
Speaker 1: down the gutters until it was ankle deep. This city
Speaker 1: is a wetland, and there isn't far for water to go,
Speaker 1: so it ends up in people's basements. All that ashy,
Speaker 1: bony water unning through foundations and drains, a constant trickle
Speaker 1: in the background, sort of like the faint pop you
Speaker 1: might hear while you're on the phone with a guy
Speaker 1: from Montreal wants to talk to your manager. Does it
Speaker 1: feel Jordy said, and lit another cigarette. What Jordy I
Speaker 1: hate how often he doesn't finish his sentences. Does it
Speaker 1: feel like it's happening more? Now? The sort of thing.
Speaker 1: I dropped my smoke into the rain water and I shrugged.
Speaker 1: Then I said I wish I knew what to tell you,
Speaker 1: which wasn't a real answer, and I used my tech
Speaker 1: support voice when I said it, because I didn't want
Speaker 1: to have that conversation. On my first break after the earthquake,
Speaker 1: I smoked and watched the rain and videos on my phone.
Speaker 1: Someone live streaming the moment it hit bored talk about
Speaker 1: food or weather, than a strange look on their face,
Speaker 1: their eyes dart upward. Then the phone falls overhead. Footage
Speaker 1: from helicopters of downtown Vancouver, all those green towers swaying
Speaker 1: and falling, and the bridge swinging until the cable snap
Speaker 1: like rubber bands, the worst in recorded history, worse probably
Speaker 1: than the last megathrust in seventeen hundred. I just kept
Speaker 1: thinking of that woman and the sort of quiet shock
Speaker 1: in her voice her, Oh is that? And then nothing,
Speaker 1: and I was standing out in the rain, still warm,
Speaker 1: when it occurred to me that I might have heard
Speaker 1: her last words. I kept thinking about the texture of
Speaker 1: the silence after the call dropped, and what had happened
Speaker 1: the moment after that, if that had been the worst
Speaker 1: of it, the shock of the whole world rumbling, or
Speaker 1: if it had been worse for her after that or
Speaker 1: right now or tomorrow. I only had ten minutes because
Speaker 1: call volume was increasing. My throat started to tickle in
Speaker 1: the world just suddenly out of nowhere, started to look glassy.
Speaker 1: The light thick from the ceiling squares, and my skin
Speaker 1: prickled when I ran my hands over my arms, which
Speaker 1: were covered with goose bumps. The floor was nearly empty
Speaker 1: except for Jority running around supervising and not taking calls,
Speaker 1: and the cue was packed. My first call was round
Speaker 1: way north along the coast Prince Rupe heard a woman
Speaker 1: calling about a password reset. I want Mark, she said,
Speaker 1: he helped me before. Can I talk to Mark? While
Speaker 1: I was documenting, I thought, fuck it, I'm gonna tell
Speaker 1: Misty what the old woman told me while we were
Speaker 1: waiting for the password reset email about how when you're
Speaker 1: that far north, you don't notice time passing, and you
Speaker 1: feel good in an unimaginable way in summer, luminous and hopeful,
Speaker 1: and how in winter all you want to do is
Speaker 1: die and drink yourself into a coma. So you know
Speaker 1: it balances out. After that, I reopened three zero. An
Speaker 1: elderly woman, I wrote on a phone, trying to print
Speaker 1: invoices for locally produced sea salt, looks over at the
Speaker 1: rack of glass jars in which she keeps her stock
Speaker 1: because she hears a rattle, then another. Then she says, oh,
Speaker 1: is that and nothing else, because at that moment, the
Speaker 1: force of rashimas lit the Cascadius abduction zone, on which
Speaker 1: Vancouver Island rests like a cork in a bottle. Centuries
Speaker 1: of continental tension released. I type that, then I hit send.
Speaker 1: Then I added a secondary note on her file. At
Speaker 1: eight thirty two p s t A nine point eight
Speaker 1: hit the Cascadia subduction zone, and Misty was right there
Speaker 1: on chad hive, not telling me it was inappropriate. She wrote,
Speaker 1: rest their souls, and I was comforted by those temporary words,
Speaker 1: which surprised me. My grandparents were on minda now in
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventy six earthquake, You got anyone there? No,
Speaker 1: I heard the hum from Detroit. It was somehow a
Speaker 1: relief to know that across the world, Misty was in
Speaker 1: a similar room among people evaluating documentation for apps and
Speaker 1: I s p s and accounting software. People saying that
Speaker 1: must be frustrating. Let's see if I can help. Something
Speaker 1: occurred to me. Do you hear anything about tsunamis no
Speaker 1: word so far? Do you have your phones? You can
Speaker 1: get the alerts. They'll let us know we're so bad.
Speaker 1: I'm taking calls, so I won't be fixing your dog
Speaker 1: until tomorrow. I wondered if Kirsty would let us know,
Speaker 1: or if she would dither about it until all we
Speaker 1: could do was climbed to the top floor of the
Speaker 1: building and watch a way consume what was left of
Speaker 1: Detroit before it swamped us to five more calls, and
Speaker 1: I refilled my water bottle, the one with the slogan
Speaker 1: on it fueling small business with the tools to succeed
Speaker 1: that some now lost Western Morgan contract brought in. And
Speaker 1: I was looking at my skin reflected in the sink,
Speaker 1: which was the color of those pale, lumpy smokers. You
Speaker 1: see outside the entrance the color of a raw filet
Speaker 1: o fish. I felt adrenalized, like a moment before it'd
Speaker 1: been terrified, but I could not remember how or why.
Speaker 1: I wondered what it was doing to me inside. All
Speaker 1: those cells now remade into virus factories, turning to goog
Speaker 1: and wash and sloughing off while the virus proliferated through
Speaker 1: my system, and I left traces of it on everything
Speaker 1: I touched. The water ran over the top of the
Speaker 1: bottle clear. So far the ash hasn't worked its way
Speaker 1: in through the city's water system, or maybe it has,
Speaker 1: and it was invisible like the microplastics in the lake.
Speaker 1: So you're gonna judge it, was Jordy. We're gonna do
Speaker 1: it next week. I was thinking, we set a time limit,
Speaker 1: like five minutes, you and me and Kirsty judge it.
Speaker 1: I'll grab a fifty for the Timmy's card too, man,
Speaker 1: I said. Georgie just stared at me. You're getting sick.
Speaker 1: You know what you need to do. He went on
Speaker 1: about ekenesia and flu effects, and I thought about the
Speaker 1: tsunami that was or was not traveling across the Pacific,
Speaker 1: or just hammer your system with antioxidants to take a
Speaker 1: double dose of night quill. Without thinking, I pulled my
Speaker 1: phone out of my pocket. You know you can't have
Speaker 1: that anywhere on the floor. I was already googling Pacific
Speaker 1: tsunami alert, and it was rolling rainbows, and I stared
Speaker 1: at it so hard that it seemed to take over
Speaker 1: the whole world. And then I shivered. But Jority was
Speaker 1: still talking, don't make me write you up. I don't
Speaker 1: want to deal with it, okay, I said, It's about
Speaker 1: privacy for our users. They need to know that they
Speaker 1: can trust our integrity, our word, and our system. The
Speaker 1: poster on the far side of the break room said integrity,
Speaker 1: word and system. I saw that the alert had been
Speaker 1: issued for Japan. That's when he took my phone. You
Speaker 1: fucked the dog. I have to write you up. I
Speaker 1: don't want to write you up Japan. And six hours,
Speaker 1: eight pm I'd still be on. Then, while very far away,
Speaker 1: a wave crested on the sea coast, filling the river
Speaker 1: basins and the car parks. I know you don't have
Speaker 1: to surrender your phone, even if they can require you
Speaker 1: to leave it at home. I know they're not supposed
Speaker 1: to lock you in either or let you smoke within
Speaker 1: three ms of the door, even when the ashes falling.
Speaker 1: They're not supposed to pay you in points. You can
Speaker 1: then exchange for grocery store gift cards, which you need
Speaker 1: because the new minimum wage wasn't even covering rent. But
Speaker 1: I needed a job. The next call I got was
Speaker 1: farther south, closer to the epicenter. The first thing I
Speaker 1: did was asked about the earthquake. Oh, we felt it,
Speaker 1: and there's a tsunami warning. But we're far enough inland
Speaker 1: it shouldn't be tsunami warning. So when I go try
Speaker 1: to log in tsunami, I keep getting the same error.
Speaker 1: It says my accounts frozen. What does that mean? I
Speaker 1: need to do some invoices And yeah, I just got
Speaker 1: the text like half an hour ago. Landfall is like
Speaker 1: an hour. The account was frozen due to misspayments. So
Speaker 1: I pointed that out and the guy insisted no. He
Speaker 1: set up an automated transfer, and he kept me on
Speaker 1: the line while he chatted with the banks tech support
Speaker 1: on another line to sort out the direct deposit, and
Speaker 1: then I reactivated his account. All this time the tsunami
Speaker 1: traveling towards the coast or the shallower bottom would raise
Speaker 1: the waves height by narrowing its length. Because the last
Speaker 1: time I'd been outside, I'd looked at a gift on
Speaker 1: Wikipedia that demonstrated how tsunami's crest as they traveled through
Speaker 1: shallow waters. The last thing he said wasn't thanks it
Speaker 1: was there. It is. The tide's going way out. I
Speaker 1: hope everyone's out of downtown. Then he was gone, and
Speaker 1: I can imagine it, the water running away from the
Speaker 1: shore like a huge exhalation and then collecting into a
Speaker 1: rising wave that would destroy them all the tsunami warning
Speaker 1: I wrote in chat hive, hoping Misty was there. Kirsty
Speaker 1: responded instantly that is not appropriate. Chat hive is for
Speaker 1: important work stuff. We haven't heard anything, but we were swamps,
Speaker 1: so who knows what's going on outside. Chat Hi channel
Speaker 1: will only be used for appropriate business related business. Maybe
Speaker 1: you should get out. Chat hi channel will only be
Speaker 1: used for appropriate business related business. I've been there for
Speaker 1: sixteen hours and I couldn't remember the last time I
Speaker 1: slept a full night at home when I hadn't been
Speaker 1: buzzed on cold pills in exhaustion and the sound of
Speaker 1: call of duty from the living room that week when
Speaker 1: I did sleep, I kept saying, this is Mark from Magnicore,
Speaker 1: or this is Mark from wherever I am right now,
Speaker 1: and heard explosions and the way voices carry over the
Speaker 1: river from Detroit, the screams and the crowds and the gunshots.
Speaker 1: Or maybe I was never actually asleep, Maybe I was
Speaker 1: just off my head. I shouldn't have washed the pills
Speaker 1: down with beer. But there's that thing that happens when
Speaker 1: you stop in for a beer after work, and the
Speaker 1: inertia of the whole thing, the job, the shitty beer,
Speaker 1: and the fact that a person brings you food even
Speaker 1: if you can't afford it. It sticks you to your seat.
Speaker 1: It was bad last summer when we couldn't afford to
Speaker 1: run the a C. But the bar on the way
Speaker 1: home could, and it was full of familiar guys, broke
Speaker 1: and lonely and trying to avoid looking at what was
Speaker 1: left of the Detroit skyline, or the gray green clouds
Speaker 1: boiling to the north, and the hail and the lightning
Speaker 1: storms every afternoon like clockwork. The summers are definitely hotter,
Speaker 1: and the mosquitoes are definitely worse. And the last summer
Speaker 1: I noticed that the birds don't sing anymore, all their
Speaker 1: whistles and like video game lasers. I stepped outside for
Speaker 1: another cigarette and realized the door had been locked. And
Speaker 1: I don't have a fall because I don't rate a fob.
Speaker 1: Jordy was there too, setting up his stupid Western Morgan
Speaker 1: idle piles a bright pink and green and blue post it.
Speaker 1: Now it's all over his desk. I need to go out.
Speaker 1: The doors are locked for the night. I need to
Speaker 1: go out. We lost another girl from online. You'll have
Speaker 1: to take over social media if we lose anyone else.
Speaker 1: Take your break here. I just kind of stared at him,
Speaker 1: and my skin prickled, like all the suit of a
Speaker 1: phedron I had taken had rushed to the surface and
Speaker 1: was blasting every single nerve ending in my body. I
Speaker 1: need to go outside. You can't, like you physically can't.
Speaker 1: I kind of stood there, and I'm ashamed to say
Speaker 1: I wanted to cry, like a little kid who isn't
Speaker 1: allowed to use the bathroom, who just wants to sit
Speaker 1: with his dad but keeps getting dragged away by unfamiliar relatives.
Speaker 1: The kind of crying you see on the bus at
Speaker 1: rush hour when some little kid coming back from the
Speaker 1: mall loses it and lies in the aisle wailing, cramming
Speaker 1: road salt in his mouth, and you just think you
Speaker 1: and me both. I didn't actually cry. I hate myself
Speaker 1: because I just said, begging, can I please have my
Speaker 1: phone back? Please? Jordy looked at me like I was
Speaker 1: an idiot him in the middle of all the post
Speaker 1: it notes that read congratulations, and You're a winner and
Speaker 1: Western Morgan idol. I didn't say anything. I left at first.
Speaker 1: I just sat in the lunch room, shivering and nauseated,
Speaker 1: staring at the plastic solo cup left over from the
Speaker 1: barbecues they used to give before the ash. There will
Speaker 1: be worse moments in my life, no doubt, more pain,
Speaker 1: more sadness, but I can't imagine anything so wide ranging
Speaker 1: in its desolation as that moment. The only thing I
Speaker 1: could focus on was telling Missy to get her phone
Speaker 1: back and watch the horizon and be ready to escape.
Speaker 1: A girl from online staggered through, sweaty and pale, and
Speaker 1: I knew that Jordy would be there in a minute
Speaker 1: to ask for another eight hours overnight answering stranger's questions
Speaker 1: so perfectly that they treat me like a shitty customer
Speaker 1: service AI built to serve. There aren't a lot of
Speaker 1: choices in life, are there. You can choose to have
Speaker 1: kids or not, to leave your hometown or not, or
Speaker 1: to stay in a terrible job you are, for some reason,
Speaker 1: very good at. But other than that, what is there?
Speaker 1: Just a lot of compliance and non compliance. This moment
Speaker 1: didn't feel like a choice. I said to the girl,
Speaker 1: we need to get out of here, and she nodded.
Speaker 1: Then we headed down to the lobby. The doors were
Speaker 1: locked and no one caring a key was in the building,
Speaker 1: and the girl just looked bad. But when I went
Speaker 1: to the fire escape, she still said, no, no, we're
Speaker 1: not supposed to. We need to get out. They'll fire us.
Speaker 1: And I could hear the fear in her voice, and
Speaker 1: I wondered how badly she needed this job, that she
Speaker 1: was here in the middle of the night. It's so
Speaker 1: sick she could hardly stand. Tell them I did it,
Speaker 1: I said, and hit the bar, only it didn't move
Speaker 1: because the fire escape was locked too. The next thing
Speaker 1: I did was stupid, but I don't know what else
Speaker 1: I could have done. I walked back to the lobby
Speaker 1: and picked up a garbage can and began slamming it
Speaker 1: into the glass door behind me. She was coughing and
Speaker 1: coughing and said maybe stop, stop, but so faintly I
Speaker 1: could ignore it. Then we were out, and she was
Speaker 1: staggering towards the emergency room on wilette and I was
Speaker 1: alone in the rain water the same temperature as my blood.
Speaker 1: Then I went looking for a pay phone, because the
Speaker 1: only way to sort this out was to call in.
Speaker 1: But I couldn't remember which of Western Morgan's departments Misty
Speaker 1: was assigned to. So when I finally found the city's
Speaker 1: last pay phone in the bus depot, I called them all,
Speaker 1: all the sad voices of men and women here and
Speaker 1: on the other side of the world. Welcome to Kyphus
Speaker 1: Business Systems, Jane speaking, Can I help you? Welcome to
Speaker 1: Tesla Mobility. Can I help you? Welcome to ross Am
Speaker 1: Account Services. Welcome the Lighthouse Mobility. I'm looking for Misty,
Speaker 1: she helped me before. I'm sure I can help you.
Speaker 1: What's your user number? Misty? Misty knows, I said, my voice,
Speaker 1: queer less and elderly. Put on Misty. I could hear
Speaker 1: the exhaustion in his silence. Than the compliance one moment,
Speaker 1: I'll transfer you. Hey, Misty, I said, Misty, Misty, you
Speaker 1: need to get to high ground. What who is this?
Speaker 1: Just promise, Kay, there's no tsunami warning. It's on its way.
Speaker 1: It's passing Japan and Hawaii. It hit the Allusians California.
Speaker 1: I hope she didn't mistake me for what I felt
Speaker 1: like right then, a crazy old man mad with loneliness,
Speaker 1: longing to hear a voice in the void, even if
Speaker 1: it was only to harangue them for the weakness of
Speaker 1: their service and the terrible nature of their product. Mark,
Speaker 1: another six hours to landfall. I know you'll still be
Speaker 1: on shift, promise. I waited for her to disconnect, which
Speaker 1: was okay because at least I told her then. I
Speaker 1: think maybe she said thank you, Mark, or maybe it
Speaker 1: was just the noise in my head. I held the
Speaker 1: line another moment that hung up. I felt okay because
Speaker 1: I got through, because I wasn't in a cubicle anymore,
Speaker 1: because I could walk home and enjoy the silence before
Speaker 1: call of duty marathons in the living room, enjoy the
Speaker 1: ashy rain falling across my slowly cooking skin. I walked home.
Speaker 1: Misty I walked home hoping. Misty said, thank you Mark.
Speaker 1: It felt like I was slipping through a gap in
Speaker 1: the world between noises, a kind of silent passage, the
Speaker 1: way kids slip along the abandoned rail easements in town
Speaker 1: below grade, the corridors of grass and rats and squirrels
Speaker 1: and birds, between the noise of the phones and call
Speaker 1: of duty, between heart beats, between crusting waves, the silence
Speaker 1: you hang on to for just a moment when someone
Speaker 1: hangs up, before you go on to the next call,
Speaker 1: because there is temporarily a respite from the tyranny of
Speaker 1: the queue, The silence after a bullet connects or a
Speaker 1: wave hits on the other side of the world. I
Speaker 1: just hope harder and harder and harder that Misty would
Speaker 1: insist they unlock the doors and break the windows, and
Speaker 1: they would escape before the wave arrived to wash the
Speaker 1: rest of us away. I don't know how to add
Speaker 1: a clapping sound effect without it just sounding horrible in
Speaker 1: the audio. Airhorns, you know what, Daniel um already straight
Speaker 1: seconds of air horns or or or not? Um? I
Speaker 1: think the air horns are good. I was beautiful. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was wonderful. It's really incredible, Thank you so much,
Speaker 1: and particularly relevant now Yeah yeah, unfortunately, Yeah yeah, it's
Speaker 1: with what's happened. Yeah yeah, that is extra extras thinking
Speaker 1: about the whole town, what happened in the past week. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that is a it sucks. HM. If people want to
Speaker 1: find more of your work, or if there's anything you'd
Speaker 1: like to plug, now is the time, okay. UM. I
Speaker 1: have a website. It's called where is here dot c
Speaker 1: a UM and I have jeez links to a bunch
Speaker 1: of my different short stories there. I have a novella
Speaker 1: coming out next year. A few years ago I postulationed
Speaker 1: a novel UM. But if you're interested in the climate
Speaker 1: change stuff, there's probably one I'd recommend called UM an
Speaker 1: Important Failure that was in Clark's World. It's available to
Speaker 1: read online. It's been translated into Polish. It's in a
Speaker 1: couple of different collections. UM. And if I'm allowed to brag,
Speaker 1: which it won this the the Sturgeon Award last year,
Speaker 1: which is a science fiction award handed out by UM,
Speaker 1: an academic organization in the US SO and it's about
Speaker 1: it's about climate change. It's all set on Vancouver Island
Speaker 1: in Vancouver. I've heard you. I've heard you also have
Speaker 1: stories about ghosts. Yes, I have a genre I'm trying
Speaker 1: to establish that I call obstetrical horror that I started
Speaker 1: writing when I was pregnant. Yeah, giving birth is just
Speaker 1: such body horror. So ghosts, childbirth, all that stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I read a lot about ghosts as well. You can find,
Speaker 1: like I say, a lot of that stuff on my
Speaker 1: website and links to anything that's available for free online.
Speaker 1: So yeah, where is here? Dot c A and I'm
Speaker 1: on Twitter a um at Canadianist, but I don't really
Speaker 1: use it that much. So I am excited for the
Speaker 1: combination of climate change fiction with horror fiction. Um, And
Speaker 1: by excited, it's like half half actually excited, half dreading
Speaker 1: because a lot of it's gonna probably be horrible in
Speaker 1: terms of people being like, you know, what's scary climate
Speaker 1: change and you're like, okay, but yeah, but oh sorry,
Speaker 1: go on. I don't know, but I think there definitely
Speaker 1: is a good way to combine the the exsential elements
Speaker 1: of both of those things to something that actually is
Speaker 1: really impactful that plays on human fears and emotions and
Speaker 1: how we can get over those fears and move towards
Speaker 1: something useful. Yeah. And it's also that horror going back
Speaker 1: for well however long you want to we've been telling
Speaker 1: stories has given us a series of structures to kind
Speaker 1: of process that. UM. And I think that's really valuable,
Speaker 1: that their patterns we can use to work through. And
Speaker 1: I mean writing climate change fiction for me, I just
Speaker 1: finished another novella UM that's specifically about like near future
Speaker 1: stuff and about the wildfires a lot um. But you know,
Speaker 1: having a story to tell about it as a way
Speaker 1: of process sing all the research I was doing UM
Speaker 1: was really valued. It's super useful. Yeah, and just um,
Speaker 1: I mean, you can call it therapeutic if you want,
Speaker 1: But I don't think it's that. I think it's organizing
Speaker 1: information in your head that is just simply too large
Speaker 1: for you to actually grasp. I mean I can't actually
Speaker 1: grasp this stuff. But no you can't. It's it's too bad. Yeah,
Speaker 1: exactly exactly trying to me. Yeah, horror does that probably
Speaker 1: better than almost any other genre. Yeah, I mean, look
Speaker 1: what it horror does with adolescent anxieties or um, you know,
Speaker 1: all sorts of different the fear of dying, the fear
Speaker 1: of aging, the film if your illness and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I think we have structures in place with
Speaker 1: horror fiction, um and with sort of science fiction horror
Speaker 1: that kind of are gonna let us start to process
Speaker 1: things that are otherwise just too intellectual or not intellectual.
Speaker 1: But to abstract that's too it's too Yeah, abstractors, I
Speaker 1: think is the right term, because I mean, like, guess
Speaker 1: my fear of that is that, like climate change fiction
Speaker 1: is just gonna resort to like the disaster story and
Speaker 1: it has very like glamorized, weird versions of like apocalypses
Speaker 1: and disasters and like collapse and very like big ways
Speaker 1: that impact everything around you. When in actuality, the effects
Speaker 1: that they have are very localized and small and are
Speaker 1: still horrifying, but the way that they're framed is always frustrating.
Speaker 1: In films, and you look at like, you know, a
Speaker 1: typical like you know, like apocalypse themed movie, I think
Speaker 1: is I'm afraid that the bigger you know, if you
Speaker 1: turn turn talking about like big movies, how it's going
Speaker 1: to frame in that way instead of these more kind
Speaker 1: of personal stories of like the horror of being trapped
Speaker 1: inside a warehouse as a tornado comes and you're not
Speaker 1: allowed to leave, which is a way more horrifying than Oh, look,
Speaker 1: all of New York City is crumbling because of this pseudami,
Speaker 1: which is so big and like possible, I guess, but
Speaker 1: like that's so big you can't feel that. And what's
Speaker 1: more like gonna happen is people getting trapped in buildings
Speaker 1: and not being allowed to leave. And that's that's that's like,
Speaker 1: that's actual horner. Yeah, and it's intimate too, write like
Speaker 1: it's not it's not in distant idea. It's intimate. It's
Speaker 1: the particular consequence of something for a community, for an individual,
Speaker 1: for relationships. And if I can go on on this um,
Speaker 1: there's an entire genre of apocalyptic fiction that kind of
Speaker 1: comes out of the early Cold War, and they're always
Speaker 1: these weirdly cozy apocalypse is where one white guy survives
Speaker 1: and in the new world he builds this kind of
Speaker 1: feudal fantasy. So I've actually this one filled the Last Babylon,
Speaker 1: where a character says, of these two spinster ladies that
Speaker 1: were miserable before the nuclear war, after the nuclear war,
Speaker 1: they're really happy because their lives have meaning now, And
Speaker 1: it's this it's those are the apocalyptic stories that we've
Speaker 1: had we need a new kind of story, a new
Speaker 1: kind of horror that I think, um that does exactly
Speaker 1: what you're talking about, that doesn't default to that weird
Speaker 1: heroism and one guy surviving kind of thing. There's a
Speaker 1: wonderful Corey doctor short story that that I think pivots
Speaker 1: off that idea nicely. Um In his his book What
Speaker 1: is Unauthorized Toast, I think Bread an authorized Bread is
Speaker 1: one of the stories in it, But the book is
Speaker 1: has a different it's a collection of his short stories.
Speaker 1: But there's um a post apocalyptic story that kind of
Speaker 1: follows a bunch of tech bros trying to do the
Speaker 1: traditional like survive the the apocalypse makes everything you know
Speaker 1: better for me, I get to be a cool warlord thing.
Speaker 1: It's it's good. It doesn't end well for them. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: I I think the I think the thing that is
Speaker 1: important to do is like focus on the horror of
Speaker 1: the little things, like the little things on like a
Speaker 1: global scale, Like like the thing that is so frightening
Speaker 1: about climate change is that all of these the terrible
Speaker 1: things it's bringing are going to hit the same way
Speaker 1: mass shootings do, where it is a calamity for a
Speaker 1: community and people fifty miles away, try to pretend it
Speaker 1: didn't happen and get to doing like their their daily stuff.
Speaker 1: Like that's what's that's what's so scary about it. It's
Speaker 1: not like you said, it's not the buildings in New
Speaker 1: York collapsing from a tidal wave. It's the birds stop
Speaker 1: singing and you still have to go to work. I'm
Speaker 1: I'm I'm writing a script right now for probably the
Speaker 1: show about how climate change is hard to think about
Speaker 1: because because how how big it is and one of
Speaker 1: like the models that I'm trying to draw a comparison
Speaker 1: from this, Like it's almost like climate changes is like
Speaker 1: a type is like a type of Cathulhu in terms
Speaker 1: of the way it affects you, but you'll probably get
Speaker 1: by it's it can affect your neighbors, and you can
Speaker 1: watch it and you can watch it have other people,
Speaker 1: but like it doesn't mean that your life is going
Speaker 1: to end this way because it's so it's so ma
Speaker 1: can uncaring, it can attack so many places at once,
Speaker 1: but you don't know how like how big this effects
Speaker 1: are and how and what what what what the scale
Speaker 1: of them will be on your local area. So it's
Speaker 1: like this it's this thing that is way more existential
Speaker 1: than anything else because it it does not, it does
Speaker 1: not care, it has it has no morality. It's it's
Speaker 1: not it's not out to get you specifically. It's this weird,
Speaker 1: this weird thing that's just getting imposed upon us now.
Speaker 1: And that type of horror in fiction, I think is
Speaker 1: something that at least I want to explore in my
Speaker 1: next few years of writing. And I'm excited to read
Speaker 1: other people's work who kind of covered that similar side
Speaker 1: of horror and combining with like climate change and the
Speaker 1: small ways it's going to start affecting us in places
Speaker 1: around the world. I think, um, that what you said
Speaker 1: and isn't isn't there so many talks about the Catholic scene.
Speaker 1: I don't know. That's Donna Harroway, Donna Harroway, that's it. Yeah, Um,
Speaker 1: But but also just how weak some of our previous
Speaker 1: narratives like you can't you can't bring in you new
Speaker 1: Judeo Christian apocalypse is to this kind of thing because
Speaker 1: we can't. There's not you can't. We can't have that
Speaker 1: kind of moralizing in it, um that we need. And
Speaker 1: that's honestly, Cathulo is really handy for that cosmic horror
Speaker 1: because it forces you to, as you say, face something
Speaker 1: on an existential level. Um that how you feel and
Speaker 1: who you are and your individual experience does not matter.
Speaker 1: So it's like a lot of people, like you know us,
Speaker 1: we're watching what's happening in Kansas right now, and like
Speaker 1: I'm not in Kansas. I don't know anyone in Kansas.
Speaker 1: I'm looking at this calamity and it's so distant from me,
Speaker 1: but yeah, it's also very close. And that's a weird
Speaker 1: feeling to deal with. UM. And I can see oh yeah,
Speaker 1: corporations are contributing to this specifically, like climate change as
Speaker 1: in general, but like like Amazon trapping people inside inside
Speaker 1: these warehouses. It's like, I can there's ways to fight
Speaker 1: extensions of this, but you can't fight it. You can
Speaker 1: only fight its extensions. And that's and yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's a super it's a super interesting thing that I'm
Speaker 1: gonna I think, Yeah, we are going to see you know, this,
Speaker 1: this idea get dealt with more and more as these
Speaker 1: things start happening more and more. Um and yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean climate change, cosmic corps maybe maybe the way to go. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that's I think that's a good line to
Speaker 1: end on, or at least a good thought to end on. Well,
Speaker 1: thank you so much, Rebecca for coming on and sharing
Speaker 1: your story. Would you mind plugging your website one last
Speaker 1: time since we extra like fifteen minutes. No, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: that's that's people may not have noted it last time
Speaker 1: before the conversation. We should give them another chance. Okay,
Speaker 1: So the website it is, where is here? Dot c
Speaker 1: A so w h E r I s h E
Speaker 1: r E dot c A excellent all right, Well, thank
Speaker 1: you very much, Rebecca. Um, until next time, everybody lose
Speaker 1: your mind with the cosmic horror something something anything, any
Speaker 1: kind of cosmic car that causes you to to your
Speaker 1: your mind to scramble and you to begin worshiping in
Speaker 1: the dark corners of the world. Any anything that does
Speaker 1: that is good. So well, thank you so much for
Speaker 1: having me. It's an absolute pleasure, very very happy to
Speaker 1: have you with you. It could happen. Here is a
Speaker 1: production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts on cool
Speaker 1: Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com,
Speaker 1: or check us out on the I Heart Radio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts you can
Speaker 1: find sources for It could happen here. Updated monthly at
Speaker 1: cool Zone media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.