Endless Inspiration 7

by Matt Herron

Write about something on the verge of collapse:  building, bridge, marriage, contest, institution, alliance, certainty

The phones are busy, the screens are red, and that’s nothing unusual. There is always work to be done in tech support because there are always customers with problems, real or self-caused, to be dealt with. But today, no one is answering the phones.

We were taught how to evacuate the building in training, and reminded every few months. During the exercises we shuffle single file out the nearest exit and down the staircase, following the waving motions of the chosen point-guards in hard hats. We joke around and laugh during the exercises, we take our time and enjoy the fifteen minute reprieve from work.

But during the real deal it is different. The sirens are deafening, the flashing lights disconcerting. Is this a drill? we ask each other. Is this for real? Our lines are not neat. We do not shuffle in single file. We run over each other to get down the stairs, we push through the narrow doorways. People try to go back for their bags or their coats or that precious family photo they keep on their desk, but once they are on the stairs, going back up is like swimming against the current. They are dragged backwards, or sideways, or forced to turn around. The current is inexorable. Some of the point-guards forgot their hats. One or two abandoned their posts in favor of survival, and who could blame them? At this point, the floor is shuddering. Plaster is falling on our heads from the ceiling.

When we get outside, we are ushered across the street by those point-guards still in possession of their faculties. I help hurry people out of the building, but I am getting in the way and so I go to join my friends across the street and watch as the brick building dismembers itself. What happened? Is there a fire? An earthquake? Can you imagine? Here, of all places? We never thought it would happen to us.

But it is happening. Certainly, as pieces of the red brick facade fall to the sidewalk, as a part of the ventilation equipment throws itself off the roof and lands not ten feet from where we are standing, it is happening.

The fire truck arrives. They move us back further. We walk up the street and partway across the bridge, standing at the apex of the bridge and watching our workplace destroy itself from within. By now a crowd has formed and the firemen have blocked the traffic so that no one passes the building. We keep our distance as we would from a leper.

Without warning, the building collapses in on itself, like in one of those demolition videos you see on the news. Except this one is not neat. It sprawls across the street where we stood previously. Debris gets tossed into the residential areas. The walkway under the road is plugged up with fallen building pieces. When the dust clears, I can see telephones and computer monitors sticking out, busted, tangled in the brick and plaster in the rubble.

After a three week inspection, we are told that one of the main supports had been eaten away by termites in the sub-basement level, the pressure causing a chain reaction that undermined the rest of the foundation’s integrity. Basically, the building’s knees buckled.

Our office is relocated, we are offered our jobs back if we wish to commute an hour, but most of us turn it down. The money the company loses in the building’s collapse is a pittance compared to their profits, but after they discovered the source of the disaster, some of the people in our workplace sue the company, sue the union. We all get reparations checks, big ones. A year later, a local journalist is doing research and discovers that the company ignored the termite problem in an attempt to cut costs. As a result of this recent scandal, they lost half their customers. In six months, the company is forced to sell, to split the century-old monopoly and hand the pieces to the highest bidder.

Thanks to the reparations checks, and the good fortune to be freed from that job and it’s poorly kept building in one piece, one of my friends decides to finally pursue her career as a federal police officer. Another becomes a body builder while finishing school. A third starts his own business and appoints himself CEO. In three years he is worth ten million dollars and competing with the former pieces of the company he was working for.

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