I was in the breakroom at work, failing to remove the cellophane top from a Jell-o cup, when I realized I was missing my right index finger.
I was skeptical.
Holding the cup with my left hand, I tried again with my right—placing my thumb beneath the cellophane tab and attempting to pinch it with my absentee finger.
Useless. There was no finger. The Jell-o cup tab sat, unbothered, like a little mask on the pad of my thumb.
“Jell-o,” said Harold, “nice!” He had approached me from behind. He placed a fast-food sack on my table and took the chair across from me. At the sight of my consternation, he gave me a quizzical look. I held up my hand, and he paled. “You are a valuable member of the team,” he said. “I recognize your contribution as equal to or greater than my own.”
This, I remembered, was a line pulled directly from our company’s recent, mandatory sensitivity training video.
Frightened to have stumbled into a situation hairy enough to warrant video training, Harold hid his own hands in his lap, staring longingly at his food sack.
I left him there to eat in peace.
Of course, there was nothing wrong with missing a finger. It was only that I’d had mine even earlier that morning. I had composed emails. I had entered data. Two tasks, it now occurred to me, that would now be hindered, at least until I learned to overcome. My short-term productivity would suffer. I resolved to visit Zani, our HR professional.
While I waited outside Zani’s office door, several of my coworkers arrived. Phyllis was first. She was our receptionist and had the sweetest phone voice—direct, but with just a touch of southern charm. When I greeted her, she simply shook her head and pointed to her throat. “You’re missing your voice?” I asked her. She nodded and began to silently weep. Sam, the security guard whose post was a folding chair by the entrance to floor, was the next to arrive. He wouldn’t sit down and kept his hands clasped behind him. I didn’t ask what he was missing.
Zani’s door opened and she greeted me with my company number. In her office, I explained. She wore a face of professional concern. When I was through, she asked, “Does it hurt?”
I told her it didn’t.
“Is this the result of workplace injury?”
Again, I said no.
“I don’t see this as a problem,” she told me.
I showed her my hand to demonstrate otherwise.
“You are a valuable member of the team,” she told me. “I recognize your contribution as equal to or greater than my own.”
I shifted in my chair.
“Let me ask you this: do you enjoy working with us?”
I said I did.
“When we hired you, did you not assure us that you considered your job to be your home away from home? That, indeed, your work was your life?”
I said I had.
“But now you’ve had a change of heart and believe you’ve given to much of yourself?” She frowned and waited.
“Not at all,” I assured her. “It’s just that I need that finger to send emails and so forth. Think of my diminished productivity.”
Her expression suggested that she now understood and that it was in her power to clear up this misunderstanding. “Your productivity will be fine. If anything, it will improve. It looks to me like you’ve been sending emails all through lunch—or your finger has, I suppose. Look, I just got one that you sent to the team featuring a kitty sullied in a mud puddle above a work-related motivational phrase.” She turned her laptop to show me.
Still skeptical, I said. “It isn’t just me. Phyllis is missing her voice. How will she answer phones?” I pointed to the back of her poor mute head framed outside Zani’s window.
“Her voice is taking calls as we speak.” She showed me the rapidly changing pattern of lights on her phone directory. “Look at it go!” she marveled.
I sat with this until she cooed my company number, placing a soft question mark behind it.
“So, I just work alongside the finger? Type and enter alongside it?”
Her eyes looked up and travelled as if she had just had a genius idea. “We could get you a second keyboard,” she mused. “One for you. One for…it. Would you like that? Think of the expanded productivity!”
Mostly, I wanted my finger. I settled on the second keyboard.
I left her office, passing Phyllis and Sam and now several others.
It was a long walk back to my desk. I stood for ages just outside my cubicle wall, fearing to look within.