Line four rang at 2:10 a.m. It had rung at 2:10 every Tuesday for three years, and I had answered it every time.
"clips.com support, this is Ruth."
"Ruth. It's Walter Brisby. I'm sorry to bother you."
"You're not bothering me, Walter. It's my job to be bothered."
"I think the button has moved."
"The button has not moved, Walter."
"Are you sure? I'm looking right at it."
"So am I," I said. I wasn't. I didn't need to.
My name is Ruth Aldana. I was fifty-two that autumn, and I worked the night shift for clips.com out of a converted mattress showroom in Marlow, Ohio. The old sign was still on the roof. It said SLUMBER in blue neon, and most nights it was the only honest thing on the block.
If you have never used clips.com, here is the whole idea. You post one clip a day, fifteen seconds at most. There are no likes, no comments and no filters. You get a calendar of your life, one square per day, and each square holds fifteen seconds of it.
Forty million people use clips.com. Most of them film their coffee.
The day shift had twelve agents and a chatbot named Tilda. Tilda could reset a password in four seconds and had never once asked anybody how their tomatoes were doing. The night shift had me, line four, and Bao.
Bao Tran was twenty-nine and the only engineer who worked nights. He wore the same gray hoodie with the drawstrings cut off, because he chewed them when servers misbehaved. Above his desk hung a whiteboard that read DAYS SINCE THE SERVERS CAUGHT FIRE. The number that Tuesday was 1,412.
"They have never caught fire," I told him once.
"That's what makes the number so impressive," he said.
Line four was the last phone line at clips.com. The founder had promised, back when the company was six people above a bakery, that a human would answer at any hour.
The bakery was gone. The six people were rich. The promise was me, in a headset, at 2:10 a.m.
Walter was eighty-one. He was a retired railroad signalman from Corby Hill, two hours south of Marlow. He spoke slowly and exactly, like a man reading a timetable aloud. He had been a widower for three years and two weeks.
His wife's name was Iris. She had planted the garden behind their house on Linden Street. The week after her funeral, Walter joined clips.com and posted his first clip. It showed eleven seconds of a bean row in the rain.
He had posted a clip every day since. Always the garden. Always at 6:12 in the morning. Always exactly eleven seconds.
"Why eleven?" I asked him, the first year. "You get fifteen."
"I know what I get," Walter said. Then he told me about the squash, and I let it go.
Every clip had the same kind of caption, one sentence, no punctuation at the end. The tomatoes are thinking about it. The beans have opinions. The rain came back for something it forgot.
The first time he called, three years ago, he genuinely could not find the button. It was under his thumb. I talked him through it for twenty minutes, and at the end he said, "Iris would have found that funny." Then he called again the next Tuesday, at the same time, about the same button.
I had worked nights for eight years by then. I took the job after my divorce, when my son Theo joined the Navy and the house got too quiet in the evenings.
Nights suited me. Nobody at 2 a.m. expects you to be cheerful. They just want you to be there.
He had nine followers. One of them was me. Three of them were accounts selling sunglasses, which clips.com was supposed to delete and never did.
"The sunglasses people follow me," Walter said once, with some pride. "I must be doing something right."
The calls always went the same way. First the button. Then the garden. Then whatever else was on his mind, which at two in the morning could be anything.
That Tuesday it was the tomatoes.
"They're thinking about it," he said. "It's October. They should have decided by now."
"Maybe they're shy."
"Iris used to talk to them. I've tried. They don't respect me the same way."
He paused. "I've been reading to them. The railroad rulebook, 1974 edition."
"How's that going?"
"They're very well informed about signal clearances. Still green, though."
I laughed. He laughed too, a short dry sound like a drawer closing.
Then we were quiet for a while. That happened on Tuesdays. Neither of us minded.
At 2:48, he said he had kept me long enough. He always said it, and it was always a lie.
"Same time next week, Ruth."
"The button will be right where you left it."
"I'll believe it when I see it," he said, and hung up.
At clips.com, every call ends with a ticket. Every ticket gets a resolution code. I logged Walter as Code 14, User Education, every single week. Then I wrote the notes in full sentences, because that is how I was raised.
"You're the only person in the history of customer support who uses semicolons," Bao said, reading over my shoulder.
"Somebody has to."
"Nobody has to. That's the point of semicolons."
The person who read my notes least was Colby Fenn. Colby was thirty-four and managed Support Operations on the day shift.
I had met him in person exactly twice. We communicated mostly through emails that he sent at 7:01 a.m. Every subject line began with the words Quick Win!
The Wednesday email arrived on schedule.
Subject: Quick Win! Tuesday handle times
Hi Ruth! Our average handle time target is six minutes. Tuesday's line four call ran thirty-eight. Can we get Tuesdays under ten? Small changes, big impact!
Colby
I wrote back that we could get Tuesdays under ten if Walter's tomatoes got faster.
He replied with a thumbs-up. I don't think he read it. I don't think Colby read anything that wasn't a chart.
On the wall of my cubicle, between the escalation chart and a photo of my son in his Navy whites, I kept a card.
Walter had mailed it to the clips.com office after our first year of Tuesdays. It was addressed to Ruth of Line Four. It had made it through three mailrooms and a security desk, which told me something about Walter's handwriting.
Inside was a packet of marigold seeds, taped down at the corners. Under it he had written: For whoever answers when nobody should have to. W. Brisby, 14 Linden Street, Corby Hill.
I had never planted the seeds. I don't have a garden. I have a balcony, a folding chair and a philodendron that is mostly a theory.
But I kept the card. I looked at it most nights around four, when the building got quiet. The quiet in a mattress showroom is a specific kind of quiet. It sounds like it's waiting for you to lie down.
Every morning at 6:15, I took my break. I bought a vending-machine coffee that tasted like the machine. Then I sat in the old showroom window, under the dead SLUMBER sign, and opened Walter's calendar on clips.com.
Wednesday's clip was there at 6:12. Eleven seconds of tomatoes, still green, with the rulebook visible on an upturned bucket. The tomatoes are considering their options.
Thursday's clip was there at 6:12. Beans, mostly. A bird I didn't recognize.
Friday, at 6:15, the square was gray.
I refreshed the page. Still gray. I told myself he'd overslept, or his phone had died, or the tomatoes had finally said something worth thinking about.
Saturday, the square was gray.
Sunday, gray. Monday, gray.
Bao noticed me refreshing the page on Monday night. He watched for a minute without saying anything. Then he rolled his chair over.
"His account's fine," he said quietly. "I checked. No errors on our side."
"I didn't ask you to check."
"You didn't have to."
On Tuesday I came in early. I made my coffee at one-thirty, which I never did. At two I put my headset on and faced line four. I sat with my hands flat on the desk, like a girl waiting to be called on in school.
At 2:09 the light was dark.
At 2:10 the light was dark.
At 2:15 Bao came over and stood next to me. He didn't say anything. He just stood there, chewing the space where his drawstring used to be.
For the first time in three years, line four didn't ring.
Up next: Three Percent
Continue to Part 2 →