01.15.2004 - 5:49 p.m.

At just before four today, I am balling up the cord to my laptop charger, then tucking it into the inside pocket of my case. I usually work until five, but I'm taking the hour to get my oil changed, and run a bank errand by foot while I wait for the new, clean oil to be added. Then I can drive to the Eastern Shore tomorrow without popping a cylinder, or whatever other magical car parts get grumpy when they're dirty.

Except that just before four is when the phone rings.

"Hello, Writing Center," I answer.

It's the boss. He wants to talk about the proposal due today, which he just sent to me for a final edit. I pull up my email on the destop computer. No new mail. What this means is that my boss plans to send it, but is still writing.

"Well, call me back as soon as it gets there. I guess it could take a while to get past the firewall, since I'm at home."

We hang up. While I am waiting for the proposal I balance my checkbook and fold a credit card reciept into a little square. (I once learned from an Encyclopedia Brown mystery that it's humanly impossible to fold paper more than seven times by hand. It isn't, but it takes a lot more than eight square inches to do it.)

The phone rings again, I answer again, it is the boss again. "Do you have it in front of you now?" he asks.

"No," I say. I was going to call when it came, remember?

"Well, I've to get going in just a few minutes, so let me tell you what I'd like to do with it...You weren't trying to leave early or anything today, were you?"

My stomach rumbles a curse which I echo in the silence of my mind. "Nooo," I say, telling the truth, because now it is too late. I listen to the stream of edits and rewrites and niggling format adjustments. So much more than a "final edit." His wife is calling him in the background, and I make it my goal to drown her out with the progressively frustrated taptapTapTapTAP of my keyboard.

I slam down the phone when he hangs up, too, but it doesn't help much. Especially because then, the stupid email does show up, and the 2-4 page, double spaced draft I'd sent to him is still four pages, but no longer double spaced. The call for papers said 2-4, and also double-spaced. So I was going to have to fix that too, but then it occured to me that I don't yet have an academic reputation, and that this awful mess of a proposal does not belong to me.

That's why his name is on the top, and mine is second billing.

-stonebridge

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