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Ticket to Paradise

Michael Preston

    Monday morning at 8 a.m. sharp Angela Garcia appeared at the Child Services building on San Juan Street, wearing a modest blue flowered dress and her only pair of flat leather shoes. She had brushed her short black hair as best she could, but it still stuck out in places, giving her a somewhat disheveled look. Mrs. Peacock, dressed more fashionably in a white blouse with black slacks today, took her around and introduced her to her fellow caseworkers. She spent little time with formalities, as she was the District Supervisor, and had things to do of a strategic nature that were far more important than wasting time socializing with the worker bees. Her fellow caseworkers seemed happy to meet Angela, but this was tempered with the realization that it would be six months before she would be fully trained. They hoped Angela would still be around by then. Many new hires, once they learned what they were getting themselves into, simply quit.
    Mrs. Peacock took Angela to a small cubicle. “Well Angela,” said Mrs. Peacock, “this is your office, where you will be while in training.” At that moment a man appeared at the door. Mrs. Peacock looked at her watch, frowned, and cleared her throat. “Ed, you are just in time”, she said, to remind the little worm that he was being paid by the hour and he was three minutes late. “Angela, this is Ed Farmer. He will be your training officer.”
    Ed and Angela shook hands. Mrs. Peacock explained that Ed had retired from Child Services a year ago after an uneventful thirty year career. He was back on a contract to help train the new hires, as the existing caseworkers, who were overwhelmed with work, could not spare any time to train anyone. With that, Mrs. Peacock retreated to her office where she could keep an eye on all the other worker bees, which she trusted about as much as a mad mongoose. Angela was left alone with Ed.
    “Well”, sighed Ed, “I guess we’d better get started. There’s really no training manual. Everybody learns by doing around here.”
    “What’s the best part of the job?” asked Angela.
    “Quitting time,” replied Ed without a smile.
    In addition to Angela, Ed was responsible for teaching two other recent college hires, Sara Hughes and Eduardo Gomez. It soon became apparent to all three of them that Child Services was one of the most dysfunctional places they had ever seen. Used to the logic and structure of the college classroom, they soon realized that everything they had learned was useless here.
    The first thing that Angela was taught by Ed was that every child had a paper casebook which was created when they became wards of Child Services. The casebooks were supposed to have been replaced by a computerized system, but since the software had been created by a company that had never done this before but had of course been the lowest bidder for the job, it was still unreliable, and no one wanted to risk their job by using it. So the casebooks were carried around from place to place, constantly being updated as a child’s fate would be determined through interviews, court appearances, and expert witnesses.
    A caseworker would be assigned to each child as they entered the great government bureaucracy of Child Services. This caseworker would theoretically be responsible for the child’s welfare throughout the process until it was determined by the court or child services what would happen to the child. In practice, this rarely happened. Because they were so short staffed, the assigned caseworker might not be available on the day, for instance, that a child was scheduled for a court appearance, so some other caseworker who was available would step in. The casebook would be passed on to that caseworker, who would assume responsibility for the child until they had a scheduling conflict and the casebook would be passed off to yet another caseworker, and so on. It was similar to a football team desperately trying to score a touchdown on the last play of the game by lateraling the ball back and forth among the players while trying not to get tackled.
    Sometimes the office would be notified of an upcoming court date for a child, only to discover that the casebook had disappeared. This would trigger a panicked search of the office for it, with every caseworker who had touched it swearing that they had given it to Joe, or Frank, or Sue or maybe Ralph the security guard. If the casebook was not immediately found, the office clerk, Debbie Peterson, would leap into action.
    She was the lowest ranking employee in the office, and had to take crap from almost everyone. Therefore, revenge was constantly on her mind, and taken at every opportunity. She had one significant power over the caseworkers, whom she despised. It was what she lived for, marching into Mrs. Peacock’s office to inform her that poor Susie Smith’s paperwork was missing and there was a court date for her day after tomorrow, and she was completely frustrated that despite her heroic efforts to find it, there was nothing more she could do. She would leave Mrs. Peacock’s office after delivering the awful news, shaking her head mournfully that such a catastrophe could happen. Then she would retreat to her lair outside Mrs. Peacock’s office to enjoy the fun.
    Mrs. Peacock, understandably, hated getting these news flashes from Debbie, as it just reminded her how tenuous her position really was at Child Services. She could just see the newspaper headlines: Child Services loses records of children in care. District Supervisor forced to resign. Board of Supervisors calls for criminal investigation. So when Debbie would knock on her office door and enter her domain with a frown on her face, Mrs. Peacock would immediately start to hyperventilate.
    Debbie was universally disliked by the caseworkers, who called her The Rat behind her back. Word would flash around the office that The Rat told the boss Susie Smith’s file is missing. All the caseworkers would go to Red Alert, suddenly remembering an interview they had scheduled out of the office, or a dentist appointment, or maybe their dog needed a flea bath. The office could empty out in a matter of minutes.
    Angela had been witness to this during her second month of training. She had been half listening to Ed drone on about how to act in court without embarrassing yourself or falling into traps laid by slimy defense lawyers. Suddenly she noticed a lot of whispering going on among the other caseworkers. Books were slammed shut, purses snatched off desks, pockets patted frantically for car keys, and a silent but efficient evacuation of the office began. Angela thought maybe it was a fire drill, like the ones she had endured every year in the dorms at college, but wouldn’t an alarm have gone off? She spoke to Ed. “Why is everyone leaving the office Ed? Is it a fire drill?” Ed, who had been about to start on another of his glorious war stories to his captive audience of one, instead shut his mouth and looked around at the backs of people scurrying out of the office.
    “Oh shit,” he moaned. “It’s a missing casebook! It’s going to get ugly. Don’t say anything, don’t look at anybody but me, and let’s get you some training on that computer.” With that Ed crab walked around to her side of the desk where he would have his back to Mrs. Peacock’s office, and began an earnest lesson in how to finesse the crappy software program to get it to do what you wanted it to do... maybe.
    Mrs. Peacock had now had fifteen minutes since the fuse had been lit by the awful news given to her by The Rat. Her blood pressure had begun to skyrocket, a headache was pounding her brain, and she was outraged...absolutely outraged, that the idiots she had working for her had indeed lost another casebook. She had told the idiots to always keep a log on each casebook so it could be easily found at all times. But there was no log to be found for poor Susie Smith, so she, the District Supervisor, who had far more strategic things to do, would now have to lower herself to serve as the babysitter, for this office of incompetent children, who probably couldn’t find their own asses without a road map.
    Mrs. Peacock might not know where Susie’s casebook was, but she knew who to blame. She had a list of every case opened in her office on her computer. This list included the name of the caseworker originally assigned to each case. The computer was password protected and the password was known only to her. She considered her computer to be like Fort Knox; impregnable and full of gold. Thus it was a simple operation for Mrs. Peacock to load the magic file into her Excel software program and do a search for Susie Smith. Within seconds (thank God for computers) the information on Susie Smith was displayed on her screen. There it was! The incompetent insect who was assigned to this case was...Ed Farmer. The shit was really going to hit the fan now, thought Mrs. Peacock, I’m going to make him wish he never applied for a job here... but wait. Ed Farmer? He was retired! How could this possibly be his case? Mrs. Peacock pounded her keyboard. A quick review of the court records showed that this case had actually been started in 2000, just a week before Ed retired. It had been one of those cases from Hell which had been continued month after month as Susie’s parents had been in and out of rehab, given chance after chance to get their lives together, been given temporary custody of poor Susie, and then failed miserably at being responsible parents, leading to a foster home for Susie and the upcoming court date where it was expected a final disposition of the case would be made. Final disposition! Oh no, thought Mrs. Peacock. That would mean the court would be expecting a recommendation from Child Services. A recommendation that would carry a lot of weight with the court....except she didn’t have the casebook to make a recommendation. This was it, the final turn of the screw to tighten the lid on the pressure cooker that was now Mrs. Peacock. The explosion was imminent! There was no reasoning with her now! She had to have that casebook.
    Ed and Angela were hunched over her desk, trying to make themselves look small while staring at a computer screen which neither of them had any interest in when the door to Mrs. Peacock’s office banged open. Ed flinched involuntarily at the noise as he had heard this sound many times before, and it had never been a good thing. Mrs. Peacock, her blood pressure reaching impossible heights, and shaking with anger, scanned the mostly empty office. Where is that little weasel...not in the conference room...cubicles mostly empty...where the Hell is everyone...did somebody schedule a fire drill?...no, I would have gotten a memo...wait...there he is! Mrs. Peacock had spotted Ed’s back hunched down in Angela’s office. She steamrolled out of her office, and headed down the row of cubicles to Angela’s office. Ed was pretending to be busy explaining something to Angela, all the while watching wearily out of the corner of his eye as Mrs. Peacock drew closer. He could tell from past experience that she was really enraged about this one! God help the poor sucker who caught it this time! Thank God he was retired! Wait, why was she slowing down in front of Angela’s office? Angela couldn’t have screwed up, she hadn’t done anything yet!
    Mrs. Peacock stopped at the door to Angela’s office and stared in angrily at them. “Ed,” she said, almost shouting into the cubicle, “I need to see you in my office, NOW!” With that Mrs. Peacock turned on her heels and rumbled back to her office, where she sat in her Deluxe Executive Office Chair, which was only fitting for a District Supervisor, and waited for the condemned to enter.
    Ed, who had thought himself immune from blame for anything, was stunned. How could this be happening? He was retired! Had somebody ratted him out about a long ago transgression that had been buried and forgotten? He racked his brain trying to think back in time, but came up with nothing that he thought could be blamed on him. Angela looked at Ed like a dead man as his face became red with embarrassment. He couldn’t look her in the eye, racked with guilt over whatever it was he had done. “Be right back,” he mumbled as he rose from his chair and slowly made the Bataan death march to Mrs. Peacock’s office.
    Angela observed Ed enter Mrs. Peacock’s office and slowly close the door. Ed sat down in the Standard Office Chair, which was inferior in Mrs. Peacock’s mind, lacking the lumbar support that the Deluxe Executive Office Chair had. He gazed nervously across the desk where Mrs. Peacock sat glaring at him malevolently, like a spider contemplating a fly which had just gotten stuck in her spider web.
    “Ed, we have a problem,” she said frostily, getting right to the point. Make the weasel squirm...the punishment must be severe...an example must be made!
    “Uh ok,” said Ed, playing his cards close to his chest, unwilling to volunteer anything until he knew what this was about. The slightest misspoken word could be pounced upon by Mrs. Peacock.
    “There is a court appearance scheduled for Susie Smith day after tomorrow and the casebook is MISSING!” Mrs. Peacock emphasized the word missing to make sure the idiot understood she knew who was responsible for this. She stared across her desk at Ed, clearly expecting an immediate confession of guilt from him and a plea for mercy. Ed was flustered. Susie Smith...what does she have to do with me? Once again his memory failed him. He was a drowning man, grasping at anything to save himself from going under, because obviously Mrs. Peacock had something that made this all his fault.
    “Susie Smith?” Ed asked in a meek voice, “I’ve been retired,” he emphasized the word retired to remind Mrs. Peacock that this should give him ironclad immunity, “for over a year. Don’t remember her.” If this had been a tennis match he was playing he had just lobbed the ball back to Mrs. Peacock.
    “You don’t remember her?” Mrs. Peacock got an incredulous look on her face like she couldn’t believe Ed had the audacity to say these words to her. She had him now...there would be no escaping...she had the proof in front of her! “My personal log, which I maintain myself, and which no one else has access to, says otherwise. You were assigned to the case in May of 2000!” Mrs. Peacock triumphantly flipped Ed a piece of paper across her desk and sat back in her Deluxe Executive Office Chair with smug satisfaction. Reason had triumphed...the weasel could not deny the proof there in black and white...he was guilty as sin...release the hounds! Mrs. Peacock had returned Ed’s lob with a smashing forehand shot; game, set, and match.
    In Mrs. Peacock’s world, everything went by The Book. Something was black or it was white, but it could not be gray, because that was not the way it was in The Book. The Book was the set of sacred rules, set down decades ago and never revised, which governed how things were supposed to work in Child Services. The Book said that a child coming into Child Services would be assigned a caseworker, who would be responsible for that child until their case had been completed. Mrs. Peacock knew this rule by heart, she could tell you on what page of The Book it could be found, and she needed to believe in it because otherwise it was to admit that the whole process had devolved into insanity over the years, was hanging by a thread, and could collapse completely if word of just one screw-up reached the wrong ears.
    Mrs. Peacock knew that her caseworkers swapped casebooks around like playing cards to keep up the mirage that the rules were still actually working even though she was understaffed by forty percent. She had encouraged her employees to work smarter, and this had been one of the ways they had done that. But she was careful never to have actually put anything in writing that told her employees to do this, so if things blew up there was, as the saying went, plausible denial that she knew anything about it. Because there was no permission to do this in The Book, it wasn’t officially happening. To admit otherwise would bring immediate wrath down upon her head from Roger (the Dodger) Duncan, head of Child Services, who did not want to know about these things, and who inhabited his own fantasy world at a much higher level than Mrs. Peacock. The ultimate, unspoken, but totally understood goal, was to do whatever was necessary to fool the public into thinking that all was well in Child Services, to keep up the veneer of a well-run department, and to avoid having your name mentioned in the newspaper, until you could retire with a fat pension and move to Florida.
    Ed had run afoul of The Book many times during his thirty year career. He also knew by heart the rule that Mrs. Peacock had used to nail him to the cross. Son of a bitch, he thought. I only had this for one week...one week...before I got out. It’s a flagrant disregard of my constitutional rights...a miscarriage of justice...I never even met Susie Smith! But he knew this excuse would fall on deaf ears with Mrs. Peacock. He had been assigned the case, so by God, he’d better find out what happened to it or he could kiss his lucrative training contract goodbye. Ed cleared his throat so he could speak without any indication of the anger which was building up inside him. “Well, I guess I had it initially,” he said grudgingly. “For a week.” He threw that in just for spite.
    “Yes you did,” replied Mrs. Peacock, “and according to the rules you were supposed to have created a log of who you passed the case to when you retired. Where is the log?” She was starting to get angry again...the satisfaction of nailing the weasel was beginning to wear off...she absolutely needed that file!
    Ed knew nothing about a log rule. Mrs. Peacock had created this rule when another casebook had gone missing... after Ed retired. This she had apparently forgotten, but no matter, Ed was guilty beyond the shadow of a doubt. Ed was smart enough to know that claiming no knowledge of the log rule would bring down another tirade by Mrs. Peacock and extend the abuse heaped upon his poor stressed out body, so he wisely decided to fall on his sword. “I don’t know,” he said lamely.
    Mrs. Peacock sat back again in her Deluxe Executive Office Chair and pretended to be deep in thought. “You don’t know” she repeated finally, looking at Ed with a glare that would have frightened Adolf Hitler. “Well here’s what’s going to happen. You are going to find that casebook TODAY. You are going to look in every nook and cranny in this office. You are going to talk to every one of your co-workers, and you will not stop looking until you FIND it. Do you understand me?”
    “Yes ma’am,” Ed said wearily. At this point he felt like a suspect who had been interrogated by the police for twenty four hours straight, who would agree to anything just to make it end. He desperately wanted out of her office.

    Angela was watching the drama play out in Mrs. Peacock’s office. She could not hear what was being said, but she could see the expressions on Mrs. Peacock’s face and the wild hand gestures of both parties through the glass window next to the door of her office. Angela also noticed The Rat, whose desk was located right outside Mrs. Peacock’s office, seemed to be able to overhear the conversation. She had a wide smile on her face and appeared to chuckle to herself occasionally as though she had just overheard a good one from Mrs. Peacock. Then the door to the office opened, The Rat pretended to be busy typing on her computer, and Ed came trudging back to Angela.
     “OK,” he said grimly when he reached Angela’s door, “we’ve got to find a casebook that’s missing.” Angela could surmise just by the look on Ed’s face that he was being blamed for its’ disappearance. “I think we should start looking in the stacks”, he said. The stacks were a large room in the basement of the building which contained all the old casebooks which were no longer active. They were supposed to have been scanned and digitized so you could sit at your computer and see them, but the funding to do this never seemed to appear in the budget. So the old casebooks were filed alphabetically on row after row of steel shelving, gradually decomposing in the humidity of the basement.
    Ed’s logic was that the caseworkers had already searched their office for this casebook when the first alert went out. If any of them had it, it would have been found by now. So the odds were that someone had mistakenly thought the case was closed and had it filed away in the basement. The only problem with this theory was that the stacks would already have been searched as a last resort when the casebook could not be found upstairs. So it was probably misfiled, which meant it could be anywhere in the basement. Or someone had lost it, in which case Ed was totally screwed, and would probably be unemployed tomorrow.
    Ed led the way down to the basement, flipping on the overhead florescent lights. It smelled of dampness, earth, and dust. Each row of shelves had a legend on the end which stated the starting and ending letters of the alphabet which corresponded to the names which were contained on the casebooks in that row.
    “Ok,” said Angela, “where do you want me to start?”
    “Well, there’s no way of telling where it could be,” he replied. “But I’ve had some luck before when I searched under the first name instead of the last.” So they walked over a few rows to where the files that began with Sa were and began to search. An hour later, Angela heard a “yes!” hissed from the other end of the row where Ed was working. “Found it!” he shouted, waving the casebook in the air.
    The two of them trooped upstairs with their prize. “Stay here, I’ve got to go give this to the boss,” Ed told Angela, giddy with relief. It was almost four thirty and the office would be closing at five, so they had found the file in the nick of time. Mrs. Peacock had been anxiously watching the clock draw closer to five too. She had been through this before but this was a case awaiting final judgment, which was about as important as it could get. So when she spotted Ed heading toward her office with what looked like a casebook under his arm and a smile on his face, she knew he had found it. Good old Ed...knew I could count on him...none of the other idiots could find it...somebody will pay for that...she thought to herself. The Book still ruled, order had been maintained.
    Ed passed by The Rat’s desk and gave her a little grin. He was Master of the Universe, the go to man when the chips were down, and The Rat should be kissing his ring right now. Instead she gave him a dirty look as he marched on by into Mrs. Peacock’s office. “Found it,” Ed said as he slammed the casebook down on the top of her desk, raising a large cloud of dust. Mrs. Peacock gave him one of her best smiles, usually reserved only for her boss when he would make his yearly visit to her office for the Christmas party.
    “Knew you could do it,” she exclaimed. She opened the cover to make sure it was the right file...and discovered the log....which wasn’t supposed to be with the casebook, because obviously if the casebook was lost then so would the log...the caseworker should have it...I’m going to have to chew somebody out for that tomorrow... Mrs. Peacock sighed. She decided to let it go for now. There were no caseworkers left in the office to scream at.
    “Uh, ok if Angela and I take off now? It was real dusty down there in the stacks and we both need a shower,” Ed asked. “Sure, go ahead,” replied Mrs. Peacock, magnanimously allowing them to leave five minutes early. Ed turned to leave but then stopped as if something had just occurred to him. He turned back to Mrs. Peacock. “You know, I almost forgot to tell you. I found this filed under Sally instead of Smith. Somebody misfiled it.” He could see Mrs. Peacock beginning to turn this over in her mind... a new search for the guilty... so having planted the seed, he quickly left her office, winking at The Rat on the way past her desk. The Rat, disappointed that there would not be a public flogging, ignored him.
    “Come on, let’s get out of here,” Ed told Angela when he reached her cubicle. “We’ve done our good deed for the day.” On the way out, Angela heard Mrs. Peacock’s door bang open. She didn’t have far to walk. “Debbie, I need to talk to you in my office, NOW.”

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