The Timecards I Laid Down

What I did not do

Here is the part I want to say plain, because I have gone over it a hundred times since.

I did not walk back into that breakroom and take the certificate off the wall. I did not find Deb on the floor and ask her what she thought she was doing. I did not even let my face change.

I wanted to. My hands wanted to.

But I have worked in that plant long enough to know how it goes when two women have it out on the line. It becomes a thing about the two women. It becomes he-said and she-said and both of you in the office looking like you cannot get along, and the real question, the one about the paper, gets lost under all the noise.

I did not have the whole thing yet. I had a certificate with the wrong name. I did not have the why or the how. And a woman who comes in with half a thing and a loud voice gets sent home to cool off. A woman who comes in with the whole thing, quiet, gets heard.

So I decided I would get the whole thing first. All of it. Then I would carry it to one desk and one man and set it down and let it speak.

That meant I had to find out how my eleven years ended up under Deb’s name.

Deb

I have known Deb Hollis nine of those eleven years. She came on when her kids were small, and she worked the line next to me for a long time before the office pulled her inside to run the timeclock software.

That was the thing about Deb. She was good with the computer. When the plant switched from the old punch clock to the badge system, the one where you tap your card against the reader and it logs you, Deb was the one who learned it. She trained the rest of us. She fixed it when it hiccupped. If your punch did not take and the screen said you were not there, you went to Deb, and Deb went into the back of the system and put you where you belonged.

I never thought about that before. How much a person could do, back there, where the rest of us only saw the green light and heard the little beep.

My badge number is 2207. I have had it since the day I started. Deb’s is 4015. Those numbers are how the system knows whose hours are whose. You tap, it reads the number off the card, it writes down that number showed up at 9:58 and left at 6:04.

The bonus is figured off those numbers. Perfect attendance is not a person deciding you were good. It is the system counting: did badge 2207 punch in for every scheduled overnight shift this year, no misses. If yes, the check cuts.

So if my shifts, the ones I actually stood there and worked, got written down under 4015 instead of 2207, then on paper, on the screen, Deb had the perfect record and I had the gaps.

I did not know yet that was what happened. But I knew where to look.