The Contractors (Out of Line collection) by Lisa Ko

Author:Lisa Ko [Ko, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-08-31T23:00:00+00:00

After Sandra reads the article with Sandie’s interview, she feels bad. Sandie is making only 80 percent of what her male coworkers earn, and the Manila office has a higher target number, 98 instead of 96, and they have a quota, one thousand posts a day, labeling them for some AI program. One thousand? It’s impossible. No one can do that, Sandra thinks, and she is relieved that the New Jersey office doesn’t have a quota, only management monitoring them, and then she feels even worse, like she does whenever she hears about people in other countries who get paid nearly nothing to make the clothes she wears or the toys Cammy wants. But the guilt lasts only a moment because how is this her fault when she hardly has any money herself? It’s not like she is rich, not at all. It’s cheaper to live where Sandie lives, so they don’t need to make as much. It’s proportional. It’s fair, or at least as fair as it can be when nothing is fair.

The article describes “Terry” as wearing a business suit to work, and this makes Sandra think Sandie’s job can’t be so bad if it’s professional like that, if they have to dress up in suits. Sandra has never owned a suit. On Saturday night, after Cammy goes to sleep, she wears jeans, a pair of old Converse, and a hoodie with a skull on it, pulls her hair into a stubby ponytail, and logs in to a ride-share app. She heard that you can pick up some decent cash driving around Hoboken and Jersey City on a weekend night, where the bars are. She still hasn’t sent her mom any money, though Lee had surprised her and paid a few hundred dollars of Cammy’s hospital bill. He’d bet some money in a fantasy football pool and won.

Sandra drives an elderly Italian man to his daughter’s home in Bayonne and agrees with everything he says to her about baseball, which she knows nothing about. A drunk college-age woman wearing a bandage dress and heels falls asleep in the back seat, and Sandra has to park the car in a no-parking zone and wake her up, make sure she gets into her building safely. Around midnight, she takes a guy about her age, prematurely balding with big nerd glasses, to a bar on Newark Avenue. He mentions his car has been out of commission all week, and it is a pain in the ass to not have a car in Jersey, especially if you work in the suburbs, like he does, out in Iselin.

“Where do you work in Iselin?” Sandra asks.

He names the social media website.

“I work there too. When I’m not doing this.”

“I thought you looked familiar. You were at the holiday party, that cruise?”

“I work on the third floor.” The third-floor lobby is painted the same shade of blue as the rest of the floors, but beyond the lobby doors is the line for the metal detector, then a line for the locker room, where everyone has to stash their phones before their shifts.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.