Workers’ Paradise
WORKERS’ PARADISE – February 23, 2026 – Albany, New York, USA
Kevin Delaney enjoyed the mile-and-a-half walk from his condo to the downtown district surrounding the State Capitol. He liked the cool morning air and how it cleared his head. Along his way, he stopped at a library and swapped out the book he had just finished with a new spy thriller. He placed it in his satchel, which contained his lunch and some bubble wrap to make it appear fuller. A block away from the government office building where he worked, he pulled folders from the satchel and held them in his gloved hands. His face turned grim and almost angry – a sign that he was hopelessly overburdened. He kept his eyes on the ground and picked up his pace, as if he was already late for a meeting.
Kevin’s workspace was in an older building with an airy interior atrium. He climbed a set of stairs, careful not to make eye contact with anyone, and ducked into his small office. He closed the door behind him and opened the blinds covering his south facing window. Maps and charts covered his walls and they were littered with pushpins and post-it notes. Post-it notes also lined the edges of his computer screens. Stacks of folders and printed reports filled his desk and the single guest chair in front of it. The place looked perfectly hectic.
After logging into his computer, Kevin raised the temperature on the room’s thermostat by a few degrees. Then he settled into the reclining chair behind his desk and pulled the new library book from his bag. For the next three hours, his body barely moved except to turn pages. His face remained serene, as if he was at a spa instead of in a cramped, untidy office.
When he finally needed a bathroom break, Kevin picked up some folders from his desk, put on an angry face, and marched down a corridor. He spoke to no one before returning to his office where he quietly ate his lunch alone while reading.
While he was officially employed by the New York Department of Education, somehow Kevin did not appear on any of the organizational charts. Over the past ten years, he had survived multiple shakeups and restructures and somehow fallen through a crack. Most recently, he reported to someone in charge of statewide curriculum, but his supervisor oversaw lots of people and could not really say what Kevin was supposed to be doing. All the supervisor knew for sure was that Kevin always looked busy and overworked. Like everyone else who saw Kevin in the building, his supervisor assumed he was doing something important.
In reality, Kevin worked hardest at being left alone. His angry, overworked demeanor and accompanying file folders were an act. He kept his office looking chaotic in case anyone visited, but he never ate or socialized with others in the building in hopes he would be forgotten. When he received a meeting invitation, he always claimed to have a schedule conflict.
So far, his system worked. He looked so busy and frazzled, everyone assumed he was indispensable and handling a necessary but terrible job. Why question him or think about moving him to another department? He was pitied from afar, but behind the closed door of his office, Kevin was living in his own little paradise. He spent most of his day stress free. His facial expressions reflected the mood of the book he was reading at the time. He got through a new one almost every day. And his paychecks kept arriving.
On an afternoon in late February, Kevin heard a knock on his door. It was the familiar “shave-and-a-haircut” cadence used by Dane, his current supervisor. Dane was a model bureaucrat, bland and even-tempered. Kevin figured he would need to spend the next few minutes spouting Department of Education buzzwords and dropping references to projects he was trying to finish. He hid his library book and tapped a key on his computer that automatically caused his phone to ring. He picked it up and then called toward the door, “Come in!”
When the door swung open, Kevin was holding his phone up to his ear and pretending to listen. As expected, Dane stood in the hallway wearing a suit and holding an electronic tablet. A young woman stood next to him. She looked no older than a college student or maybe a high school student. She wore a skirt and jacket that looked like grown-up clothes she had raided from her mom’s closet. She smiled with happy, white teeth.
Kevin took a long look at Dane and the girl while pretending to listen to the phone. Then he held up a finger as if to say, “I’ll be right with you.” He turned his attention back to the phone and said, “I know this is important but I’m going to need to call you right back. Give me a few minutes, okay?”
Kevin put down the phone and looked at Dane with a look that combined frustration and obedience.
“Sorry for interrupting,” Dane said. “Let me introduce Gina Popovich.”
The girl standing next to Dane exchanged greetings with Kevin.
“Gina started two weeks ago but she’s already proved to be a go-getter,” Dane continued. “I’m afraid I can’t articulate all your job responsibilities, but I know you’re overwhelmed and can’t finish all the projects you have planned. So to help out, I’m assigning Gina to work with you 50% of her time.”
Kevin looked at Gina in surprise and she smiled back at him.
Dane acted pleased with himself and added, “I want her to work side by side with you until she’s up to speed.”
A thousand fatal thoughts raced through Kevin’s head. He could not imagine a single scenario in which having Gina around did not ruin his peace and quiet.
“I really appreciate you thinking of me, but I think I can handle it,” Kevin stammered. “I don’t want her starting her career with the boring stuff I’m doing. I’m sure she’d be more effective somewhere else.”
“I know what you’re doing is important and I want to be supportive,” Dane replied. “No one here should feel overwhelmed by their job. It isn’t healthy.”
“I’ll be fine. Really.”
“No, I insist. Training someone new might seem like even more work, and maybe that will be true at first, but I promise you Gina’s going to change your whole outlook.”
“I’m excited to be working with you,” Gina interjected enthusiastically.
All Kevin could say was a drawn out, “Okay.”
Dane grinned with satisfaction and said, “I’ll let you two get acquainted and you can start sharing your project ideas.”
After Dane disappeared, Kevin cleared the stacks of papers and folders off his office’s guest chair and told Gina she could sit down. “Maybe you can tell me more about yourself.”
Gina was happy to share. “I just graduated from U-Albany. I interviewed lots of places and had to choose from all these job offers. I picked this one because it seemed like a place where I can make a big difference.”
Gina talked more about her hopes and dreams and Kevin grew more worried that she would be a problem. His first instinct was to try and collude with her and convince her that if she played along, she could enjoy free time for half her day. But as she described her family and her volunteer work, Kevin knew she had the wrong personality for corruption or even bribery. He would need to hide the truth about his situation.
“Tell me what you’ve learned so far about the Department of Education,” Kevin said after Gina finished talking about herself. “I’d like to get your perspective on what goes on here.”
As Gina described who she had met and their job functions, Kevin was surprised to hear how much had changed since the last time he had bothered to pay attention. As Gina spoke, he suddenly came up with a plan to keep her occupied until he could devise a permanent solution. He would set her up with a big project she could do on her own.
“Here’s what I’d like you to do to get your feet wet. I need to know all the expenditures for every school in the state, broken out by county. And I need to know how much they’re spending on textbooks as a percentage of their budget. You’ll probably need to talk to accounting. Maybe the State Auditor. Take your time and come back to me when you’re done.”
Gina wrote notes on her tablet and appeared eager to start. “Any words of advice?”
“It’s best you figure it out on your own.”
“Okay, I won’t let you down. Do you want electronic reports or should I print them out?”
“Both.”
Gina hurried off to find the information and Kevin smirked to himself. Under his breath he said, “That ought to take at least a month. It’ll give me some time to breathe and think this through.”
The next afternoon, as Kevin was enjoying a new library book, someone knocked on his door. He made his computer dial his phone and then called, “Come in!”
Gina hurried into the office wearing a bright smile. “I finished!”
“Finished what?”
“The report you asked for.” She placed a stack of papers on his desk. “This is the printed version. And I’ve got the electronic version right here,” she said, holding up her tablet.
“You’re done? With every school in the state?”
“I found someone really helpful in accounting. And once I had the data, I used AI to help with the spreadsheets. I stayed up pretty late, but I figured you needed it right away.”
Wearing a stunned look, Kevin thumbed through the graphs and tables on the printed pages in front of him.
“Now what?” Gina asked.
“What do you mean?”
“What should I do next?”
“Hmmm. Why don’t you concentrate on the other half of your job and give me time to absorb this? Maybe come back in a week.”
Gina giggled like Kevin must be joking. “Okay. You look at it and I’ll be back tomorrow.”
When she was gone, Kevin dropped his head helplessly on his desk. She had infinite, relentless energy and it was not going away. Keeping her busy on made-up jobs would be full time work for him and she would eventually catch on that it was all meaningless. She would tell Dane, and before he knew it, Kevin’s work paradise would be gone. His only alternative was to make her quit. If she hated working with him, maybe she would request a transfer and go on to torment someone else. She was still early in her job assignment. Some adjusting and rearranging was natural for a new employee. He would use his acting skills to scare her away.
When Gina appeared the next day, Kevin was on the phone. He yelled into the receiver about failing schools and then slammed it down. He turned to Gina with a flushed and furious face.
“Well, turns out your report is useless. It’s all wrong.”
Gina’s lip quivered in surprise. “I tried to do what you wanted.”
“Well, you didn’t. I’ve been showing your graphs to some district superintendents and they laughed at me. It was humiliating.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You didn’t dive deep enough. This isn’t college. This is the real world and you can’t speed through something just to get it done.”
“I thought it was right.”
“If you’re going to work with me, I expect something more professional. Now get out of here. I’m too upset to think straight right now.”
Gina slunk out of the office with scared eyes. Kevin slumped into his chair guiltily. He hated belittling her for a selfish reason, but it was better than eventually losing his job. Hopefully, she would take his irrational behavior as a warning sign and ask to be transferred away from him. Then everything could get back to normal and he could return to being forgotten.
The dream of never seeing Gina again was shattered the next morning. Shortly after he arrived in his office, Kevin was greeted with a knock and then Gina holding a plastic tub filled with cupcakes.
“I know you had a bad day yesterday and a lot of it was my fault. So, I made you these cupcakes as a way to say sorry and that I’ll try harder.”
Kevin’s eyes flicked between the cupcakes and Gina’s sincere face. He remained silent while his brain churned. The pink-topped cupcakes were like little tormenting demons arrived for his personal reckoning. How could he upset and abuse the sweet girl standing in front of him? She only saw good in people, even when they had the worst intentions. The longer she stayed attached to him, the worse it would be for her career and life. Yet he could not shake her.
“Do you like them?” Gina asked. “I’m afraid some people don’t like cupcakes.”
“Yes, I like them. Thank you.” Kevin stood up. “I’m sorry, but I have to go to a meeting.”
“Should I come with you?”
“No, stay here.”
Kevin walked out of his office and out of the building. He did not bother looking angry or overworked. His face remained blank and distant as he thought regretfully about Gina. Of course, he had nowhere to go, so he followed the route he usually took home. He ended up at the library and wandered aimlessly in the book stacks.
And then, at the end of a row, he noticed a sheet of paper advertising a job opening at the library. He read the notice as hungrily as a lost hiker deciphering a map. That night, he did the first unselfish thing he had done in ten years. He applied for the library job.
Two weeks later, Kevin’s life reset when he started work at the library. He still got to read a lot, but now he talked a lot about books too.
There was a new scramble in the Department of Education. Gina was reassigned and given Kevin’s old office. It immediately went from being very quiet to very noisy. For the first time in a very long time, it was a happy place for a different reason.
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