Part two of my screenplay story
*
"Please, sir. Would you just bear with me for another ten minutes?"
"Ten minutes?! Listen, I don't have ten minutes. I think I told you enough."
"Is there some time I could call you back at?"
"No. I'm real busy. I said enough. You just fill in the rest."
"I can't do that, sir." Now a note of pleading has entered Anders's voice. "I'll get through the rest of this really fast. If we don't finish it, then I'll have to throw the whole thing out."
"Am I gettin' paid for this?"
"Pardon?"
"Are you sendin' me money? I give you a lot of my time, I expect something in return."
"Sorry, sir, the company I work for hardly pays me anything, I don't think they'd be generous enough to start mailing cheques to all the people we interview."
This attempt to establish a sense of camaraderie falls flat. "I'm serious, mister. I gotta go," the man says.
The line is cut.
Anders lets out a deep sigh and swivels around in his chair. He first looks at the supervisors' station, then the clock. It's twenty to ten. An incredible exhaustion, mitigated by the proximity of quitting time, washes through him. He rubs his eyes and stands up.
Laura, one of the supervisors, casts him a condemning glance. Feeling guilty, then, an instant later, feeling with defensive pride that he does his fair share of work and deserves the occasional break, he walks over to the station.
"Cheques in?" he says. The question is virtually rhetorical.
Laura looks at him with her glassy, neutral eyes. "No," she says.
"They were supposed to be here at five," Anders says.
"Don't blame me. There was some screw-up with the payroll system."
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