To clear my head, I took a walk. I was feeling weakened and overwhelmed at work. It all seemed to come to a head this week.
My feet chose the path. I paid no attention. In a few minutes, I was walking along the river, as usual.
The air was cool and humid. The broad waters flowed smoothly, faster than me and in the same direction, with tiny swirls along the edges where the river was hemmed in by city stonework. Filled to the brim, never changing, always there, yet never the same. Endlessly fascinating, and calming.
Several riverside vendors displayed trinkets and books. The woman behind the trinkets table thrust a white porcelain dog in my face and made a mournful face as if begging me to hold the sad little dog. Strangely, I didn’t even bother to speak to her. I might have even rolled my eyes like a teenager. Not like me.
I stepped over to the book table without looking back. I didn’t want to see the woman’s face. All those books. If only I had time to grab one and read. Wait, that was my usual excuse. Today, I had the day off. A mental health day. Still, too many books that I should have already read. Picking one up seemed like a meaningless drop in the bucket. All I could do was to stare at the titles.
I should have recognized my agency problem right then. How many times had I heard the same excuses from clients?
The hopeful face of the book vendor hardened when I ignored her, scoffed at the books, and strode off, muttering some lie about not having any money. I could have been polite, but something welled up in me. Was I that desperate to have control over a single moment?
Across the street from the river path was my office, the sign in gold letters on black: The Agency Agency. This shouldn’t have startled me. Without any clear intention (or should I say, without any agency of my own?), I had walked to work like every other weekday morning. Except I had taken the day off.
Trudy greeted me from the reception desk. I called out my daily cheery hello. From the lobby, I scanned the clients in the waiting room fidgeting or slouching or buried in a magazine or clutching paperwork, waiting to be called.
George stepped out of his office, spotted me and nodded hello before calling “Number thirteen!” A scraggly man in a stocking cap stood and approached George, walking with effort, as though his joints needed a squirt of oil. George ushered him into his office, their congenial greeting receding into a blur of mumbles, and then silence after the door thunked shut.
I was standing in front of the numbers machine, so I took one. Number seventeen. It felt amusing to take a seat in the waiting area, the little slip of paper in my hand. If George called my number, we would have a brief laugh about all this, I’d let him get on with his next client, and would continue wandering through my day.
But it was Shelly who called my number. Since I didn’t know her very well, I decided to play client and see how she handled people.
“Hello, Shelly,” I said, smiling.
“Hello, how are you doing today?” she said as we shook hands. Turning to the waiting room, she again called “Number seventeen!”
“That’s me, Shelly,” I said, holding out my slip of paper.
Her eyebrows lifted. She took a breath to say something but didn’t. She took another breath. “Aren’t you… working today, Gordon?”
“It’s Jordan. No, I took the day off.” I slipped past her into her office.
“Um, are you here to talk to me?”
“Yes, let’s talk,” I said, “I guess I’m number 17.”
We settled ourselves in the chairs.
“Okay then… so, tell me your situation.”
“Well, Shelly, maybe you can help me. I am at a total loss.”
“Not total,” she said. “You came here. That’s a bit of agency of your own right there.”
“Yes it is, isn’t it. I tell clients that myself, and it’s true. Except I didn’t actually decide to come here.”
“So why are you here? Why now? What’s going on?” She leaned on the arm of her chair, resting her chin on the palm of her hand, looking at me with a hint of a squint, trying to figure me out. Maybe that was her look of concentration, her way of focusing on a client.
I was now a client.
“This week’s clients really got to me. Not the followups, just the four new ones. Each was more impossible than the last, until yesterday, I felt totally out of control.”
“Without agency, Gor—Jordan?” she said.
I laughed. “Isn’t it odd? An agency agent without agency?”
“How did it happen?”
“Well, the first one was not uncommon. His boss was constantly peppering their conversations with one-upmanship. No matter what he said, his boss replied with a retort or a boast that shot him down.”
“So you counselled him to change the subject, or take the boss at face value — man or woman boss?” Shelly said.
“Woman. And yes, I counselled those things, and sprinkled in a few good techniques for one-upping her back, just so he could retain some self-esteem.”
“Right. So. That didn’t work?”
“Not really. And that’s when my problem started. I realized that this client was not the one who should have come in to see us,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s the boss that should have come in. Why is she intent on shooting him down all the time? Maybe it’s because nobody in management listens to her. Maybe they’ve taken her agency away, so she feels the need to take away his to feel more in control.”
Shelly took in an audible breath and let out a sigh. “We’ve all seen that, yes. But the one that comes in is the one we help.”
“But so often it’s the wrong person. I gave the client the best advice I could for himself, but then talked about his boss, and how she probably felt she had very little agency, at least at her own level in the company. I thought maybe if he found a way to sympathize with her on that score, it might go farther to solve the problem than the bandaids I could offer. Except, of course, suggesting that he look for another department or another job, but that’s a longer term issue, well beyond his time here.”
“Jordan, this all sounds like you are on top of the whole thing. Good for you.”
“Maybe, but the next client made me question myself even more. It was an abuse case. Her stepfather was getting drunk and violent. Ever since he’d lost some of his hours at work, and then lost his job altogether.”
“We all deal with clients like this,” she said.
I rubbed my face and continued. “So far, nothing terribly new, I admit it. I spoke with the young woman about finding work for herself, about doing anything she could feel good about, about confiding in people, gave her a proverbial pat on the back for coming to see us, suggested ways she could leave the house, move somewhere. Her step-dad made it all impossible.”
“Give it time. Is she still coming to see you?”
“Her friend paid for her first two visits, and I let her do two more on credit.”
“Credit?”
“Well, free,” I said, studying the sad white porcelain dog on her desk.
“I see,” Shelly said, frowning. “So what are you beating yourself up about?”
“Here’s the thing,” I said, straightening up in my chair. “That young woman Charlotte, she wasn’t the problem. So she couldn’t be the solution,” I said. I closed my eyes and shook my head to stop thinking about the implications for a moment.
“She’s our client, she’s the only one you can talk with,” Shelly said. She squinted at me again. I wondered if she saw permanent burnout written on my face.
“But it’s her step-dad that needs the agency, not her. He’s the one who has tried to take her agency away from her. His job gave him his agency and he lost it. Look, I only know what she told me, but sometimes I think drinking can only validate not having any choices, not following any plan. Grabbing someone else’s agency might be the easiest way to feel like he had some. He has zero right to treat her the way he did. I just wish he could get help.”
“Good luck talking to a violent alcoholic who hasn’t asked for your interference.”
“Exactly. Any real solution is out of my hands.”
Shelly smiled. “Look, Jordan. Anyone who is in a service job — counselling, teaching, consulting — we just try to help people help themselves. Even doctors and lawyers are in the same position most of the time. We aren’t the solution, we just try to clear the way so someone can solve their own problem.”
“Wait till you hear about my next two new clients.”
“Okay, shoot.”
“The next one came in with the age-old story of the abused wife. Everything fit the pattern — the imbalance of power, special gifts, the sugar daddy tending to every need, the removal of independence, increasing interference with friends and allies, isolation, draining of common resources, persuading her that she was not capable of living on her own, promising great things, removing all independent choices, removing all her agency.”
“Yikes. It’s horrible. But so terribly common, and sometimes very difficult to read accurately from the outside.”
“But it wasn’t an abused wife.”
“No? What do you mean? You just said it was.”
“No, it was the same story as an abused spouse, but she wasn’t even married. Guess who the client actually was?”
“I have no idea,” Shelly said. “Everything you said cried out abused wife, or abused partner of some kind.”
“Yes, an abused partner. She used to be a minister in the government of Scotland. She was talking about England. About trying to regain agency in the world. What am I to do with that?”
I had her there. She had nothing to say. She reached for her cup of cold coffee and sipped the last drop.
“Well,” said Shelly, “That’s about diplomacy. A step up from what we do.”
“Is it really? Isn’t agency all about diplomacy, at some level? I mean, we deal with a lot of the same problems. I wonder if the real solution is what we call diplomacy. Finding the source, the one that is stealing agency from others. We need to go straight to handling them or treating them, not all the symptoms they cause.”
“How did you handle this woman from Scotland, then?”
“In the end, I said the usual, that her secrets were safe with us but that I’d have to confer with my colleagues and propose an action plan for her, once she checked out and provided us with evidence of being able to pay our fee. She’s expecting to hear from me.”
I tapped my foot impatiently, thinking of how to bring up my final new client of the week.
Shelly’s smile grew thin and wan. She seemed pale.
“I really do have other clients out there, and a few followups to do, Jordan. I’m not sure what you want me to say.”
“Shelly, it feels good to tell you all this, but I still have no resolution, no routes to choose from. How could I ever possibly get to a real solution for these people?”
“Well, maybe that’s not really our job description, don’t you think? We just do what we can to help them solve their own problems.”
My knee was bouncing with impatience. “Just let me tell you about the last client. The one that pushed me over the edge.”
“Whatever. Go for it.” Shelly glanced at her watch.
“This one came in just like everyone else. Took a number. A wiry, confident man, well-dressed, a foreign accent that I couldn’t place. Every movement of his was efficient. He sat down with me and immediately began lecturing about World War I.”
“About what?”
“World War I. He starts in with dates and doings from more than a century ago, right? He tells me quietly but in no uncertain terms that he knows all about the agency problem. For a moment, I thought he might actually be talking about The Agency, the CIA. But I listened and said nothing to interrupt. In the end, he pointed out that after the victors deprived Germany of all its agency as punishment for putting everyone through such a vicious war, it only led to World War II, where Germany thought it could regain all its agency and then some.”
“Another diplomat?”
“You got it, but this time he segued into talking about Russia. How Russia saw itself as losing agency on all sides, and struck out in every way it could think of. He said Putin thought he could regain his own agency by strolling into Ukraine and taking over.”
“So who was this guy, Zelensky?”
“No, he was at a higher level than him.”
“God?”
I laughed. “This guy works for the Secretary General of the United Nations. Wants some serious psychological proposals on how Russia can regain agency without being rewarded for starting a cruel war.”
“Oh, is that all? Sounds easy.”
“I take my job seriously,” I said.
“A little too seriously, I’d say, Jordan,” Shelly said. “I know we’re always supposed to say that we’ll consult with our colleagues and come back with an action plan, right? But this time, you better do it. Coming to me is a start. And before giving up your own agency, let’s find the right people to handle this if you’re not up to it. What do you think?”
My mind was a swirl of contradictions. “How different are these four cases, really? Aren’t they all the same thing, at some level?” I said. “Does our Agency Agency know what it’s doing? Are we really able to help people? What the hell are we here for?”
“Jordan, you need a day off,” Shelly said. “Here’s what I have to say about all you have been telling me: I will take into careful consideration all that you have told me, and will consult with my colleagues. Your secrets are safe with us. I’ll come back to you with an action plan, once you have checked out with proof that you can pay our fee. I’m sure that will be no problem, since our accounting department has access to your bank account.” Shelly stood up and reached out her hand to shake mine. “I want to thank you for seeing me today. We’ll talk soon.” Her smile was still thin but there was more color in her face.
I saw myself out. I did not check out.
* * *
As I sit by the river and write all of this in my journal, I’m wondering if I’ll call in sick tomorrow. Or if I might even quit.
Maybe Shelly’s right — I’m taking the work too seriously. But that’s the way I am. If I don’t take it seriously, do the minimum, and look the other way when things fall apart, I’ve given up on my own agency. They don’t want us flying off on our own, but then, they should not be promising what they know we can’t deliver. I hope Shelly doesn’t report me for seeing Charlotte a few times for free.
Since being trained to work at The Agency Agency, I see everything in terms of agency. Who has it, who doesn’t. Who gains some, who loses. Who steals it from someone else, or resigns to having no say. Some wash themselves of the whole vicious cycle and choose a new route.
Before I got this job, I was depressed. I was without a job for too long. I had so little agency that I could barely scrape together the energy to look for a job at all. If I quit this job, could I choose a new route?
But can I take a pay cut, a devaluation? Can I sell my agency to an employer and do whatever they want me to, in exchange for enough money to buy back some of my agency nights and weekends?
I have a job, I shouldn’t give it up. Right? Maybe I’m getting myself fired, the way I’m acting. Where does self sabotage fit into my agency scheme? Why would anyone take his own agency away?
Maybe I should work for myself, or with friends. Or go back to work and help at least some of my clients solve their own problems.
If only I had a guaranteed income, like some of those Native Americans with casinos in their tribe. I read that the money lets them relax a little and make better choices for their kids. It sure would take away the panic, and who can make good choices when they panic?
My friend Michael used to say if you hand people money without making them work, they just get lazy. At my interview, I told The Agency Agency agents about Michael, and they just laughed, and pointed out that nobody’s natural state is to live without agency.
In front of me, the light is dimming. The water still sparkles, always on the move, like me. The whole world seems to be on the move, without actually going anywhere. Every day the same. Every day different. It’s unsettling, and calming, and fascinating.
My client list is always full. But each person needs a different sort of help.
Tomorrow, I’ll finally take my own advice. Take another day off. Make some lists. What I can do, not what I can’t. Then I’ll know.
A work in progress. Or maybe it’s complete. What do you think Jordan will do tomorrow? Or what will happen to him?