Frank was one of those guys who couldn’t leave a building without lighting a cigarette; they were the same action, the same event.  He could not be seen exiting the high-rise where he worked without a coffin nail in hand, and by the time he emerged from the revolving door onto Park Avenue, the cigarette would have already come alive, glowing dully, offering up a thin, aromatic trail.  Frank’s building was smoke-free, which was pretty much the price you paid for working plumbing these days.  Thirty weeks out of the year Frank would have said that working plumbing was worth every penny, but October’s Indian summer had come and gone, and the season’s first chill made him want to reconsider the deal.  

Just this once Frank had managed to leave the building with an unlit cigarette.  It was an accident; a sudden breeze had snuck into the usually-windproof confines of the revolving door, snuffing out the match and queering Frank’s tried and true routine.  To set things right he found a sheltered spot along the building wall and lit up.  Frank liked to savor the ceremonial first drag, and this one brought him back to his favorite daydream. As he exhaled, his mind’s nostalgic eye watched the cloves of his youth transform into the cannabis of his college days, and finally into the Camels of his thirties.  It felt good; that first drag was always worth the long elevator ride.  Tobacco didn’t fill the void, and Frank knew that, but it made the void bearable and that’s what mattered right now. 

He was thinking about the joke he had made in the elevator:  Holding up his forearm, he had glanced at his bare wrist and announced that it was “half past a cigarette.”  No one had laughed.  Frank didn’t really need a watch anymore; his old Timex was at home in a shoebox next to a broken camera and a souvenir pen set from Wisconsin Dells.  Nowadays he marked off the passage of time in nicotine cravings.  Was it ten, twenty, or thirty a day?  To Frank, the question was nothing more than spurious gedanken arithmetic, like moments in an hour or angels on the head of a pin.

Signs point to yes, he said to himself.  His thoughts had shifted to the magic 8-ball on his desk.  On a lark, he had picked it up on his way out the door and asked it to confirm his suspicions, which it had.  Frank wasn’t a superstitious guy; he didn’t believe in astrology or the Tarot or any of that bunk.  But he had observed, somewhat uneasily, that the predictions that came to him in fortune cookies were quite frequently dead-on, and that the magic 8-ball on his desk—on the rare occasions that he consulted it and got back an answer that was not better not tell you now or reply hazy, try again later—was uncannily reliable.  Cognitive dissonance, he thought, you remember the times that it’s right, you forget the times that it’s wrong, and when you look back it seems like it’s right more often than it really is.  He decided that he would get to the bottom of it: he would start a log on his palm pilot of fortune cookie and 8-ball predictions that he got, and over time he would prove to himself that this was all in his head.  But when he reached for the inside pocket of his gray overcoat, the palm pilot wasn’t there.  He had left it on his desk, probably.  The log would have to wait until after his cigarette break.

Frank worked as a customer service rep for a company that made just about anything, so long as it ran on electricity.  Smoke had worn out his larynx in a way that made his voice seem much older than thirty-eight, and on the telephone he sounded wizened and avuncular.  This particular phenomenon, combined with a genuine knack for helping people, made Frank an excellent customer service rep.  In his thirteen years working the phones—which was unheard of—he had been nominated for Service Rep of the Month each and every month he was eligible.  He had never actually won the award, but only for lack of trying.  Frank wasn’t an ambitious career-type, and he suspected that his lack of ambition was the very thing that allowed him to excel.

Within the customer service department Frank had become something of a legend.  He had been at the company longer than the department manager, and even though he wasn’t a Suit himself, Frank had a private office, which was also unheard of.  The cubicles buzzed with rumors about what other sorts of special Suit privileges Frank might have.  If every story was to be believed, then Frank not only had a stock option plan, an expense account and a key to the executive washroom; he also had access to a company limo, a helicopter, a skybox at Yankee Stadium, a Caribbean beach house, and a personal trainer who doubled as a masseuse.  None of these were true, but when asked, Frank would neither confirm the rumors nor deny them.  He enjoyed the mystery, but more than that he took a kind of masochistic pleasure in keeping secrets; holding them in even when it felt like he would burst if he didn’t let them out. 

There were other rumors about Frank that he himself had never heard, rumors of a dark and conspiratorial flavor.  There were theories to the effect that Frank was a member of a secret company steering committee, or that he worked for an unpublicized “internal affairs” department, or that he was an honest-to-god undercover agent for one government body or another.  Other stories supposed that he was a high ranking member of some Secret Brotherhood, and the Suits were actually his subordinates.  Sometimes this organization was the Masons, other times it was a fraternal order so secret that no one knew its name.  It was true that Frank was on a short list of rank-and-file folks who got called whenever the Suits wanted a “random sample” of employee opinions, but that was as far as the conspiracy went.

There was also a rumor that every year the company sent Frank to Walt Disney World to study their renowned customer service practices.  This was partially true.  Disney runs a special behind-the-scenes tour designed as a training session for customer service people.  Frank’s company sent him once, and used to send a different rep every year until they killed the program to cut costs.  Whenever money is tight, Frank would say, customer service always gets the shit end of the stick.  The Suits would always come down and talk a mean game about how it was easier to keep an old customer than to acquire a new one (or to win a lost one back), but they never really seemed to believe it themselves.  They treated Frank’s department like it was a profitless money sink, and left no corner uncut.

The shit end of the stick, Frank thought as he took another drag.  He was playing his favorite cigarette-break game, where he watched the bustling pedestrians on Park Avenue and imagined what each one would be calling customer service about:  Here’s a guy who’s been using his clothes dryer for almost a year without realizing that it has a lint filter that needs to be cleaned, and now he’s calling to complain that his shirts smell like smoke.  There’s a woman who needs a basic lesson in the difference between the “quick defrost” and “total defrost” settings of her microwave.  Over there is a guy who’s got so many wires coming out the back of his TV that he can’t figure out where they all go anymore.  Frank often wondered how accurate his guesses were, but there was really no way of knowing.

If the magic 8-ball was to be believed, then the shit end of the stick was what was in store for the customer service department: Frank suspected that within the next year the company was going to move the whole department off of Manhattan, to cheaper pastures in Hoboken, or to one of New York’s four other boroughs.  There hadn’t been an announcement or even a rumor of an announcement, but the building was feeling more and more crowded, and the Suits would need to make some space before too long. Signs point to yes.   Frank had seen it happen before, and if it had to happen again, he hoped they would move nearer to where he lived in Brooklyn.  But both Frank and the Suits knew that no matter which way they went, one half of the department or another would quit, and Frank would be expected not only to train the replacements but to take up the slack at the same time.  But that didn’t bother him nearly as much as the idea of having to play the cigarette-break game anywhere else in the world besides midtown Manhattan. 

As he went along dreaming up customer service calls for each passerby, Frank couldn’t help but remember the time a few years back when some consumer group had given the company a big award for customer service.  The Suits in public relations wanted to make a big thing out of it, a whole ad campaign about how great Frank’s department was.  They wanted to put his picture in the ads, to put a real human face on the department and all that.  But Frank was daunted by the idea of seeing himself on buses and taxicabs and subway cars all over town.  He had stalled and made up excuses, and for whatever reason the ad campaign had never got off the ground.  Now he couldn’t help but think that if he had complied then, the Suits wouldn’t be so quick with the hatchet whenever profits were down.