Well Water...Part Seven

Chris backed the rest of the way out of the driveway and onto the street of their subdivision. His eye caught the window screen of his son’s room. Weeks prior, Savannah had decided to throw a tantrum and cut nice little square shaped holes in each of the kid’s windows. It didn’t look that bad from inside the house. But from the outside you could see these blemishes from across the street. It had annoyed Shonda that he hadn’t had a chance to repair them yet. She would make comments like “we finally moved into a nice house in a decent neighborhood and now we have ghetto windows!” She was right though. A little more than a year earlier they had purchased what Shonda considered her dream home. It was a modest two story house, with green wooden siding and bright white windows. Shonda said it reminded her of a doll house. Chris didn’t have an opinion one way or the other about that observation, but he did admit that it was the nicest house that he or any member of his family had ever been lucky enough to live in. He made a mental note to fix the screens on the weekend and made his way through the neighborhood.

He meandered through the subdivision of middle class homes with well manicured lawns. The houses were of various shapes and sizes. There were two story homes, ranch style houses and a variety of brick and siding choices. It was a typical suburban neighborhood. When they first moved in what Chris noticed almost immediately was that the average age of the residents was well beyond their own age. These were mostly families with high school aged children, if not college age. They were well established in their various careers and most of the women were stay at home moms and a fair amount of them had some sort of “enhancement” procedures done to their bodies. They were forever scheduling neighborhood association meetings of some sort, or someone was trying to schedule as mass play-date or event at the community pool. There were mom's clubs and “girls’ night out” clubs. It was an entire subdivision of people who liked to do almost the exact same things. Chris privately joked with Shonda that they had moved into a “Stepford” neighborhood. To himself, he thought that they had somehow gotten ahead of the game and should still be living in their first home, which was a much more modest split level house with a mortgage that was half of what they were paying now.

He passed by a few of the neighborhood’s morning walkers: an assortment of elderly ladies ambling down the streets and sidewalks and a sole dog walker being briskly lead down the road. As he drove, he fumbled with the radio. He wasn’t really searching for any station in particular, and settled for the local country station that he had awakened to earlier. He made his way out of the neighborhood and onto a series of back roads that would eventually lead him to a main expressway.

Their subdivision was directly next to a vast non-residential area that was still part of the greater metropolitan area, but was located between two major parts of town. It was a very beautiful part of the city that consisted of some farmland, a county park and an assortment of driving ranges, soccer fields and baseball fields. When they had moved to the new house, it only took Chris a few weeks to find out that he could cut his commute to work in half by taking the back roads, and he was pleasantly surprised that the scenery wasn’t too bad either.

He pulled onto yet another road which passed the edge of a large park and lake. This was the kind of park that consisted of several different smaller sections. In addition to the lake, which was by far the biggest and most popular attraction, there were several other pavilions, smaller playgrounds, driving ranges and walking paths scattered over what he guessed to be about two square miles. And perhaps the feature of the entire area that enjoyed the highest amount of activity was the concrete walkway encompassing the entire park. As it was already a fine summer day, there were several dozen walkers, bikers and rollerbladers taking advantage of the cool morning air. Chris sighed and thought how much he too would like to take advantage of some early morning exercise, and he was always curious as to just how long the actual path was. But with three young kids at home, and a morning schedule that only got worse when school started, it wasn’t going to be a possibility until they were much older. Besides, he lied to himself, there’s always the Tony Little Gazelle sitting at home.

He continued on his route to the office, stopping only at a quickie mart to grab a cup of coffee. He stopped most mornings at this place because they had pretty good French vanilla cappuccino which he used to make the coffee at work somewhat drinkable. He was not a macho “I drink my coffee black” kind of guy, so he needed the sweet flavoring to mask the taste of the mass produced swill that passed for coffee at his work place. And, to make matters worse, the pots were the big metal kind so there was always a metal aftertaste to it which no amount of sugar and cream could completely mask.

A few more stop lights and he finally turned into the parking lot of his job. “Another day, another dollar,” Chris mumbled to himself. He got out of the vehicle and made his way up the side walk and into the wonderful world of corporate America. The building he entered housed the headquarters for the world leading maker of automotive service equipment. They were responsible for inventing some of the most sophisticated, and expensive diagnostic equipment around and enjoyed a market share of business. He knew this to be true, because not only did he see a small portion of the total business that this company did on a monthly basis, he also knew what the general consensus of the customer base thought about the equipment. Chris knew there would always be a group of shop owners that would never be satisfied, but for the most part people either owned this brand of equipment for years or had a dream of owning it one day. Sort of like how there are certain people who are so convinced about the quality of a particular brand of vehicle they would never even consider buying anything else.

Considering all this, Chris often wondered why, if his company did so well, the building was still stuck in the art-deco style of the sixties and seventies. The campus, while generally very beautiful, consisted of plain white buildings with little or no decorative effect. In fact, the only saving grace for the entire complex was that no expense was spared on the landscaping. Sandwiched between the parking lot and the main building was a field of plush green grass that was about the size of three football fields. The side walk, which dissected the vast field, was edged with a row of trees on either side. But once that side walk ended the drabness of the building began. He did have to give them credit though; while the outside aesthetic of the building had gone unchanged for decades, they were making very drastic renovations on the interior of the building.

The main lobby was just redone in a more modern style. There was a gigantic half-moon reception desk and directly behind it a fifty inch plasma screen monitor that flashed the company logo as well as welcome messages to the various visitors expected for the day. On either side of the reception desk was a glass walled meeting room decked out with oak topped conference style tables and various electronic display devices. The remainder of the lobby was filled with plush, overstuffed leather furniture, solid dark maple coffee tables, and on one wall there was even a drink station complete with sink, coffee maker and mini-fridge.

As he walked through the exterior lobby doors, he nodded and smiled at the receptionist and waved his ID badge at the electronic lock to the main building doors. He made a bee line for the break room and was glad to see that there wasn’t anyone else in there yet. Chris wasn’t a morning person at all, but he was never rude to anyone. He always returned a “good morning” with a smile or polite “morning” of his own. He wasn’t anti-social by any means; he just didn’t care to have in-depth conversations with anyone until he had gotten his first cup of morning coffee into his system.

He filled up a little white Styrofoam cup and made his way through the maze of cubicles to the one he called his very own. The cubicles in his office building weren’t the kind that you would think of in the classic sense of the word. Usually, offices with cubicles are tightly packed with a chest high maze of little gray squares. The cubicles in Chris’ office were half wall and half glass. They consisted of about a waist high section of taupe colored material and the remainder was made of glass that ended about a foot from the ceiling. Chris had always thought it strange that this was the design of the cubicles. Depending on the configuration of the desks inside these cubicles, many people in the office had to stare at each other on a daily basis. And while it did promote office chatter throughout the day, which generally made for quicker days, he always thought it was rather annoying.

Unfortunately, this phenomenon affected Chris, but being a mid-level manager did have its perks. For years, he had been in control of whoever was placed in the office directly across from his. If a new person came in, or someone transferred into the department, he would simply reassign them to another cubicle. Currently, there was a single mom in her forties that occupied the office across from his. She was polite and friendly and had teenage daughters. So Chris constantly had conversations with her about the troubles that came up with raising not only teenagers, but teenage girls specifically. He had noticed that his own daughter, who was only seven years old, already had a sassy attitude and was completely enthralled with clothes, make-up and jewelry. He would comment about how he hoped this was a phase, probably naively so. To his dismay, he was informed that it would be much worse before it got better.

With coffee in hand from the break room, he walked into his office and sat down at his desk. He surveyed his space to make sure that everything was as it should be. His office was cluttered with paper. Part of his job was to process surveys to make sure that the equipment that his company sold would fit in various customer locations. Over the years, this mound of paper had a tendency to start to pile up. On that day, nothing seemed out of sorts with his various stacks of parchment so he turned his attention elsewhere.

He glanced at his phone to see if the voice mail light was on. It was not and he breathed an inward sigh of relief. An early morning message usually meant that an employee would be in late or not at all, and he wasn’t in the mood to have to answer incoming phone calls. He moved the mouse so that his PC screen saver would stop running and then logged in. The first thing he saw when he hit the enter button was and image of all three of his children.

Weeks earlier, Shonda had taken photos of all the children in the back yard and had them developed and blown up for an art project. Chris had sent them to his email so that he could use them as his desktop background. Nicholas, who they rarely got to actually pose for a picture, was lying in the grass with his head cocked to one side and a cute little smile on his face. Noah was standing with his back against a tree, looking off to one side with a giant toothy grin. And Savannah, who was the complete opposite of Nicholas when it came to photographs, was sitting on the ground in a pose reminiscent of a high fashion magazine: one shoulder thrust forward, her long blonde hair cascading about her shoulders, and a picture perfect Hollywood smile. He logged into all of his various programs and settled in for another day’s work.