Sunday passed without incident. I woke, showered, dressed, killed some time, went grocery shopping, killed some more time, made dinner, did the dishes; real thrilling adult-type stuff. That in itself was a little strange, returning to the rhythms of daily life after a literally transformative experience, going through all the usual motions but feeling the hem of my skirt swish 'round my legs, my bust shift in the confines of my bra, my ears and tail twitch and emote: a real reminder that, yes, this was really me now, but being me wouldn't be quite the same, going forward…
(I'd also discovered the quiet relief of taking your bra off at the end of the day, when you're winding down – a bit like kicking off your shoes after a day on your feet. I hadn't anticipated that, but it made sense; still, it felt slightly ridiculous. Well, you take your simple pleasures where you can find them, I guess.)
I was eating better, at least, now that I didn't have to plan around holing up in the apartment for as long as I could manage before going back out.° I've never been a particularly elaborate cook, but I realized, when I was first living on my own, on shit wages, that you actually save money and eat better cooking for yourself – and it's amazing how much of a difference fresh-ish, non-frozen veggies and meats make.
° (My natural tendency to do so notwithstanding.)
Then came Monday. I could've put in for a longer leave, but I'd have to do this eventually…unless, I didn't know, I quit my job, changed my name, moved to Cleveland, and went into waitressing in hopes of avoiding ever having to admit to people who knew me previously that I was Suddenly Different…
…
…The idea, I thought, did have a certain appeal – but I definitely didn't have the temperament for food service; I could just about manage to cope with customers when they were on the other end of a phone line.
Anyway, it wasn't like my coworkers didn't know; even assuming Bryce hadn't blurted something out on Teams when Nicole called me in, I'd been AWOL for over a week in the middle of the pandemic, and even Curtis could put that particular two and two together. And, I recalled with intense embarrassment, there'd been the meeting that Thursday, when I was already half out of my gourd…
I stood there in front of the mirror, staring at the reflection I still wasn't used to and half-expecting her to start talking back like this was one of those bits in Bloom County. I'd washed my face, brushed my hair, dressed in clean clothes that fit my altered frame reasonably well…and still felt hideously unprepared.
(I also felt like I needed a shower after all – but it was too late now, and I didn't relish the idea of getting up earlier just for time to dry my fur before work. Maybe I could tie a garbage bag around my tail, as a makeshift "shower cap…")
Was a T-shirt really enough? I hadn't gotten any button-up shirts (blouses? What was the difference?) on Saturday; would those be that little bit more professional, sufficient to eke past the "slob" tier and achieve "unremarkable background entity" status in order to keep people off my case? Or did I need to go further° than that, now…?
° (Damn it.)
It's strange, the notion we have that clothes change something about you; like somehow, if you swish into the office cutting a suitably dashing figure, you'll be warded against criticism, charmed for Confidence and Success; like the outfit itself is a talisman, an enchanted suit of armor. In truth, I was still me, and even if my dress could fool everyone else, I'd know it. And while the me in the mirror wasn't exactly a stunning beauty, I wasn't gonna count as unremarkable anytime soon…
Giving my top one last nervous adjustment, I went to pour coffee, sat down at my desk, and popped my work laptop open; then, to my chagrin, I was greeted with the login screen for Christopher Robinson for the first time in ages.
I stared at it for a bit, surprised at how much it irked me; it'd always been a minor annoyance, nothing worth listening to Bryce fret over "best practices" for, but after everything I'd been through in the last week, being confronted by a system that refused to call me what even my own parents did was slightly maddening. With a sigh, I logged in, took a slug of coffee…
…and paused. I did have access to the domain admin account for our office,° since half the random things I managed day-to-day required it; I'd long since taken advantage of it to liberate myself from the "best practice" requiring us to change our goddamn passwords every ninety days.
° (The extent to which concessions to practicality rendered half our other practices empty security theater was also mildly galling, but that's all IT outside of fintech – and probably even there.)
Once I'd thought of it, it was just a matter of modifying the user in Active Directory, editing my Office 365 account° to make c.robinson@ an alias just so's I wouldn't miss any of the undoubtedly thrilling and essential e-mails coming my way, forcing a Group Policy update, rebooting for good measure, and – yes, there you had it, Kit goddamn Robinson, officially.°°
° (They weren't linked; Bryce'd been making noises about Azure AD, but after a brief survey I'd concluded that I'd sooner take a hacksaw to my own limbs.)
°° (Well, okay, still FULCRUM\crobinson on the back end; some things in Windows are even more of a bitch to change than others.)
Surprised by how much this little victory improved my mood, I settled in, reached for my headset, and realized that there was no chance of it fitting my remodeled head; even if I got the band situated so's to hold the earpiece in position, it'd leave the mic jutting into space somewhere above my nose. Laptop mic and speakers, then; I'd worry about better solutions later.
The meeting started, and – oh shit, I thought, I'm on camera; they can see…! It was silly to get hung up on that after everything I'd been through, but I still felt a little intimidated. But there was no going back now; even if I killed the camera, they'd already seen, and I'd be speaking in what was clearly a woman's voice. Nothing for it, then…
To my immense relief, I was not immediately greeted by a chorus of cringey commentary. Not that I really expected it; two-thirds of us were, if geeks of one flavor or another, at least minimally socially-functional, and while that was harder to say for Curtis, he kept his bloviations from straying into personal remarks.° If nothing else, we could all more or less manage professional courtesy, I hoped…
° (I attributed that to his being among the half of our staff who were married men, though I did wonder how that'd happened.)
…not that this made me any less intensely self-conscious or not a mildly nervous semi-wreck. I couldn't stop assessing myself in the mirror-view; the lag between this me and that me threw me off even more, and I kept getting the feeling I was watching someone else. I took a look over the array of webcam images; geez, it felt like years since I'd last seen these people.
"Ah, Miss..ter…? Robbins, you're back!" Bryce said, hanging for a moment like a glitching robot before continuing on with the usual blithely disconnected spiel. Nothing much had changed while I was out, though we were onboarding a new client – a decking contractor down by the river, in the port district. I had a sneaking suspicion that I knew which of us he'd be tapping for the on-site work.
While it was encouraging that things were business-as-usual, it did mean that, once again, the morning stand-up ran for well over forty minutes in contravention of all sense and decency. I spent most of it fidgeting, trying to work out the most comfortable posture for me, now; sitting up straight pressed the base of my tail into the seat cushion harder than I liked, but my usual slouch killed the support my bust got from my spine. As I was experimenting, the chat client pinged:
Michael:Good to see ya back, man. You doin' okay?
I just stared at that, for a minute, feeling…oddly comforted by it. I wasn't used to coworkers expressing any particular concern for my well-being, aside from the obligatory get-well-soons if I was down with stomach flu or whatever. He really was a decent kinda guy, I thought, a slight smile crossing my lips. Though it was plenty weird pondering whether I was doing "okay…"
Kit:Alright considering, I guess. Still all weird and confusing, but I'm getting by.
…That was a weird thing to see myself write, but…it didn't feel incorrect. It was about what I'd told Caitlin, wasn't it? I'd already had my big emotional breakdown the other day; for now, I was feeling less traumatized than just stuck in day-after mode, wondering what this even meant for me in the long run…
Michael:Glad to hear it. Tried to keep things from gettin' too hairy while you were out.
I glanced over the ticket queue; while the automated-monitoring spam I usually cleared out was piled up on that board, the main one didn't look too bad. I wasn't thrilled about slogging through the junk to sift out anything legit, but I smiled anyway.
Kit:Thanks.
Michael:No worries, man. Glad to have ya.
I almost left it at that; then, for no accountable reason, I felt the urge to engage in small talk.
Kit:Guess you haven't been camping while I was out. Could probably cover for you if you wanted.
Michael::D Might take ya up on that in a month or two.
Michael:Still pretty cold at night, 'specially up in the hills.
I remembered Monday night, but I hadn't thought about that; it'd been ages since I last slept outdoors. Way back when Caitlin and I were in our single digits, our dad took us to the Boundary Waters for a week; while beautiful and tranquil and whatnot, between primitive toilets in stands of brush hosting Creatures Unknown, a voracious mosquito population, and portaging packs that weighed as much as we did while he and his old roommate took the canoe, I'd come home feeling perfectly content to admire Nature from behind glass henceforth.°
° (Every so often I'd be stricken with wanderlust; I managed this affliction by holing up with something open-world and heading off in a random direction as soon as I was past the intro sequence.)
Thinking back on it now, I was more fixated on memories of perch, crappies/sunnies, and one very lovely rainbow trout that Dad and Uncle Carl had landed, and the nagging knowledge that walleye could be had there, but I'd never had walleye. I was so lost in reverie that I almost missed it when Bryce finally called the meeting to a close, and was just about to reply to Mike when the phone rang. Right, this was my job, wasn't it.
"Fulcrum Solutions, how can nya help you?" I said, taking a deep breath and tapping the "answer" button on the softphone. C'mon, me, you can do this…
"Oh Christ," said a voice, "are you the receptionist? You're the receptionist, aren't you."
For a moment, I was so taken aback that I wasn't quite sure how to respond. You learn to deal with angry, demanding, and/or distraught customers in tech support, but this was a new one…and then the pieces clicked into place. Really? Truly? Just because it was a woman's voice on my end of the line!?
"Actually, I'm—" I began, but she cut me off. I recognized the voice; while I'd said it in exasperation before, she was now and forever branded in my mind as the Stupid Cow.
"God," the Cow said, "that's just what I need right now. Listen, transfer me to one of the people that can actually help, okay!?"
I had, up 'til this point, intended to help her, but I found my inner troll chomping at the bit, and the Gremlin of Malicious Compliance rose up and seized hold of me. You wanna play that way!? I thought. Fine, heifer, I'll show you "receptionist…"°
° (Apologies in advance to the receptionists of the world. You're all probably fine people, and it's a consolation to me that you can likely empathize.)
"I understand, mya'am," I said, adopting the best infuriatingly-chipper tone I could muster. "But all of our techs are currently busy assisting customers," – and, counting myself, this was approximately true – "so I'll need to get you added to our call log. Can I start by getting the phone number of your business?"
She gave an aggravated sigh. "What, do you not have caller ID!?"
Of course we did, and I knew who she was, anyway, but she didn't know that. "I'm sorry, mya'am," I said cheerily, getting into the role, "but this number isn't coming up in mya database. Is there a chance that nyew might be calling from a personal cellular phone?"
"Christ! Yes!" she hissed, before giving me their number. I watched the call timer tick upwards with a growing sense of schadenfreude.
"Alrrright," I said, "and would you like me to put this nyamber on file for you…?"
"Of goddamn COURSE I would!" she bellowed; I responded with loud staccato typing, about triple the necessary number of keystrokes.
"Nyand can nyew tell me a little bit about what seems to be goin' nyan?" I prompted. I had a feeling I knew the answer, but in fairness, she might've regurgitated cud into her printer or something.
"Dammit, who is this!?" she fumed. "Your manager is gonna hear from me after this…!"
"This is Kat here at Fulcrum, mya'am," I chirped; like hell I was giving her my real name. "Niaow would you like to tell me what seems to be the prrroblem?"
"My goddamn E-MAIL keeps going white!" the Cow replied, seething.
"'Going white?' Could you be more specific?" I queried, knowing full well that she meant it was doing that (not responding) thing that newer versions of Windows indicate by draping a cheesecloth over the application window for some damn reason.
She growled audibly. "Why do I have to explain this to you, you bimbo!?" she snapped. "It circles, and then it goes white! Just get someone who actually knows what they're talking about to call me back! ASAP!"
"Of courrrse, mya'am," I said warmly. "I'll make a note of that, and we'll get you that callback. Niaow, is this the best number for us to rrreach you at…?"
She hung up in a flurry of profanity, which I decided counted as a "yes."
In truth, I was perfectly familiar with the issue: for reasons known only to some dread Elder God whose blasphemous name requires seventeen screaming mouths to pronounce, the product-development staff at Martha's All Fruitcake did all their planning and coordination by means of a single, massive spreadsheet, which they e-mailed to each other daily rather than use any remotely sane file-sync method.
On top of the obvious problem,° the Cow was department manager. While I'd seen no sign that she contributed meaningfully to the work, she insisted on being CCed with every change and refused to delete old copies, so her mailbox was astronomically proportioned, and Outlook would simply grind to a halt under the weight of it.
° (To wit: person A opens the sheet and makes changes, e-mails it to the group; meanwhile, person B has been making changes, also e-mails it to the group; now you have two different copies floating around. The version history after years of this was fractally complex.)
All of which we'd explained to her, and had proposed several non-insane solutions, which were rejected on the grounds that it'd break their workflow – but, inevitably, she still wanted it fixed, and called in regularly to demand that we wave our collective wand and make the problem vanish in a puff of pixie dust. In that regard, the call was nothing unusual – mildly infuriating, sure, but not a surprise.
What was novel was someone deciding right off the bat that I wasn't even competent to address the problem, solely on the basis of my (altered) demographics; I knew intellectually that this was A Thing,° but it was my first time experiencing it. It was, to put it mildly, absolutely maddening; I couldn't decide whether it made it worse that the Cow was on the same side of the fence as I was, now. But what could you do? I wasn't not gonna do my job…
° (Funny; people write about sexism in IT re: coworker or management interactions, and rightly so – but they mostly neglect the customers.)
…but, under the circumstances, I didn't feel an iota of guilt when I tagged the ticket as low-priority, took a deep breath, and pointedly turned my attention to clearing out several hundred monitoring alerts instead, tail flicking in quiet satisfaction.