Insignificant Others
Danforth J. Amherst was a wealthy and important man who wielded a good deal of influence in political circles, and like most wealthy and important men, he was extremely impatient and demanding of others. He had no time to stop and smell the roses as he walked his narrow path in life and had nothing but contempt for those who did.
In his quest for financial gain, he did not trouble himself with even the simple pleasantries one human being customarily extended to another. Indeed, he was usually abrupt to the point of rudeness. Thus, most people he met disliked him despite his money and avoided his company whenever possible.
This lack of human warmth bothered him not in the least, for Danforth J. Amherst, captain of industry and financial colossus, was a textbook misanthrope. The cantankerous billionaire had no close friends, never made the effort to learn the names of his employees, rarely dealt with people on a social level and considered no man or woman his equal. He lived alone in his immense house, maintained by a seldom-seen domestic staff that he barely tolerated. Despite his servants' hard work, loyalty and efficiency, he was extremely critical of everything they did. Things were never done fast enough or well enough to suit him. The only reason his long-suffering employees did not resign en masse was because he paid them well. Whatever might be said of him, Danforth J. Amherst was no tightwad.
The affluent curmudgeon began a typical day at 5:30 a.m. by complaining that his clean clothing had not been laundered or pressed to his satisfaction. Then he would go down to the dining room where he would grumble that his coffee was cold or that his food was not cooked to his taste. After breakfast, he would head for his office, finding fault with his chauffeur's driving along the way. Then, once he got to work, he would immediately start in on his office staff, beginning with the receptionist in the lobby and ending with his personal secretary.
"Clerical workers! A swarm of gadflies is what they are! I have no use for any of them," he would often whine to no one in particular as he stormed down the halls of the Amherst Towers high-rise. "Give me a computer or a machine over a human any day! I wish I could hire an army of robots to replace the nincompoops I have to deal with."
His male "secretary" (Danforth never deigned to call him an assistant), a graduate of Harvard, took his caustic grumbling with a grain of salt.
"People are only human, after all," the young man announced calmly, "and therefore subject to human failings."
"I don't give a damn about people," Danforth snapped. "Why, if you were to take an assessment of the human race, I bet you'd find that less than one percent of the world's population is of any value. The vast majority of people are insignificant and completely unnecessary."
"I think that's a gross exaggeration, sir."
"On the contrary, I think I'm underestimating the number of worthless people there are in the world. There's not one person I know of that I couldn't do just as well without, and that goes for you, too."
The secretary rolled his eyes and smiled. Sometimes he felt like Bob Cratchit working for the miserly old humbug, Ebenezer Scrooge. He further wished he could take a page out of Jacob Marley's book and set up an appointment for Danforth to meet with the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future. However, he doubted they would have such a miraculous effect on his boss.
For all his myriad complaints, Danforth led a well-ordered life with all of his needs taken care of by his able staff, but that was soon about to change. On the way home from his office one evening, his limousine came to a jarring halt. Danforth pressed the intercom button to speak to the driver.
"What's wrong? Why have we stopped?" he demanded to know.
"We seem to be having car trouble, sir. I'll pop the hood and take a look."
"Well, be quick about it."
A few minutes later, the chauffeur phoned a tow truck from the car phone.
"The local service station will send a flatbed truck out immediately, Mr. Amherst. I've also taken the liberty of calling a cab to take you home. It should be here in ten to fifteen minutes."
"Why can't you fix the car?" his employer growled. "It's part of your duties as chauffeur to maintain the cars."
"I don't have the necessary parts to repair it here, sir."
Danforth sat in the back seat, cursing his driver's ineptitude.
When the taxi finally dropped him off at his house, the disgruntled businessman had to sit down to a cold meal. He rang the dinner bell with unnecessary force, and a timid young maid poked her head around the kitchen door.
"Is there something you wanted, sir?" she asked in a barely audible voice.
"Tell the cook to reheat my dinner. Better yet, tell her to throw it out and make me something else. This is the worst meal I've ever tasted. Where did she learn her trade? At McDonald's?"
The servant, cowed by his harsh words, was momentarily taken aback.
"Well? What are you waiting for? Get this garbage out of my sight. And hurry up and get me something to eat. I'm starving."
"But, sir," the girl summoned the courage to stammer. "The cook isn't here. She's on vacation until next Monday."
"Vacation!" Danforth bellowed. "Am I to go hungry until then? Isn't there anyone in this place who knows how to cook? Are you all a bunch of worthless incompetents?"
The girl whimpered, collected his dishes and hurried back into the kitchen. A few minutes later she returned with a microwaved frozen dinner.
"What the hell is this, dog food? Call the employment agency and have them send a cook over first thing in the morning. I want one here before breakfast. Got that?"
Danforth had had—for him—a trying day and wanted only to end it, so he went upstairs to his rooms, undressed and stepped into the shower. The icy cold water pelting down on him made him swear profusely and scramble for a bath towel.
"Johnson," he screamed. "Get up here. NOW!"
The elderly butler headed up the stairs to the master suite—none too quickly because of his advanced years.
"You called, sir?"
"Did I? It's been so long; I nearly forgot," he said sarcastically. "There's no hot water."
"I'll have someone fix it first thing in the morning, sir."
"I want to take a shower now, not tomorrow. Take a look at it and see what you can do."
"I'm a butler, sir, not a plumber."
"You're a butler, not a plumber," Danforth repeated mockingly. "It figures! I've got a driver who's not a mechanic and a kitchen maid who's not a cook. I wonder if any of you can walk and chew gum at the same time."
The butler turned a deaf ear to his employer's verbal abuse.
"Will that be all, sir?"
"Yes, yes! Go on and get out of here. You're useless to me anyway—you and everybody else in this world."
* * *
The alarm went off at 5:30, and Danforth got out of bed, irritable as usual.
"Breakfast had better be ready, or there will be hell to pay."
He walked into his dressing room, but for the first time in his pampered life, there was no freshly pressed shirt and suit laid out for him.
"Don't tell me the laundress has gone on vacation, too."
He tied his robe tightly around his waist, stormed out of his room and ran down the main staircase.
"Where are my clean clothes?" he shouted, his voice echoing through the eerily quiet house.
"Johnson? Where are you?"
The butler did not come when he was called.
"Johnson! Where is everybody?"
The dining room was empty as was the kitchen. Breakfast had not been served nor had anyone started to cook it, for there was no cook, no maid, no laundress and no butler.
"So," the billionaire laughed, "you've all up and quit on me, have you? You'll regret it; I promise you. You'll have a hell of a time getting another job."
Danforth went downstairs to the laundry room in the basement and found the suit he had worn the previous day. Thankfully, it was still fairly clean. He put on the pants and shirt and took the jacket with him when he went back to the kitchen.
His attempts at making breakfast resulted in a disaster. The fried eggs stuck to the pan, the toast was burned and the coffee was far too strong.
"The hell with it! I'll just stop at a diner on the way to the office," he said and then donned his rumpled suit jacket, grabbed his briefcase and rang for his driver.
Pacing back and forth in the foyer, Danforth waited for more than ten minutes for the car to pull up to the front of the house. It never arrived.
"Didn't that oaf have the car fixed yet?"
He walked around the side of the house toward the garage. The limo was gone, but the Porsche his nephew used on his infrequent visits to Uncle Dan's house was parked in the second bay. Danforth opened the garage door and got the Porsche's keys from out of the chauffeur's locker. When he got behind the wheel, he saw to his despair that the car had a standard transmission. What little driving experience the billionaire had was limited to cars with automatic transmissions.
"It shouldn't be that difficult to drive a car with a stick shift," he foolishly assumed, "considering all the brainless nitwits on the roads that have them."
But after stalling the Porsche more than a dozen times when he tried to put it into reverse, Danforth gave up and walked back to the house. He picked up the receiver to call a cab, but there was no dial tone.
"Doesn't anything work around here?"
Becoming more annoyed with each passing moment, he opened his briefcase and took out his cell phone. He tried calling for a taxi, but no one answered. Then he made several futile attempts to contact his office.
"There's got to be someone there! Why isn't anyone picking up the phone?"
Finally, he dialed 911. Still, there was no reply.
"It must be the damned phone," he swore and threw the BlackBerry against the wall. "I don't suppose any buses stop near here."
He walked down the driveway and to the house next door. No one was there—not his neighbors nor any of their servants. Danforth walked for over a mile without seeing any other people.
"Where is everyone?" he shouted to a street void of human life.
It then occurred to him that perhaps his servants hadn't all walked out on him in anger. What if their disappearance was due to something more sinister? Fear raced through his veins and he walked back to his house.
Afraid that his entire neighborhood had fallen victim to a terrorist attack, Danforth turned on his television and tuned to CNN. There was nothing but the multicolored test pattern on the screen. His terror grew. He turned on the radio—nothing but static. On the verge of panic, he tried the phone again, but it was still dead.
The frightened billionaire walked out the front door to his professionally landscaped front yard and screamed at the top of his lungs, "Is anyone out there? Can anyone hear me?"
The silence was complete. There was no sound of an airplane flying overhead, no lawn mower, no dog barking, no bird chirping and, most disturbing of all, no traffic sounds.
Danforth J. Amherst fell to his knees and wept like a baby. Since birth, his every need had been seen to by hired servants and paid employees. Without them, he was lost. In the absence of the domestic and office staff he desperately relied upon, he became the pathetic, useless person he had so often accused others of being, for how could he survive in a world without people to wait on him?
* * *
Johnson hung up the phone and went out onto the lawn where the young kitchen maid was being comforted by the temporary cook the employment agency had sent over that morning.
"There, there, now," the older woman crooned. "Everything will be all right."
Johnson stood next to Mrs. Grasso, the laundress.
"I phoned 911," he announced. "They'll send an ambulance right over."
"Do you suppose we should try to get him back inside?" she asked. "He wouldn't want the neighbors to see him out here like that."
"I doubt it would matter much to him now," the butler replied.
"I never saw anything like it," the young kitchen maid told the other servants. "He looked right through me as if I wasn't there. He just walked past me, talking to himself."
"What did he say?" the chauffeur asked.
The maid shrugged.
"I couldn't understand a single word of it; it was like he was speaking another language. It was so creepy."
"I know what you mean, dear," the cook said. "He came into the kitchen, completely ignored the breakfast I had made for him, and started to fry himself some eggs. He wouldn't look at me when I tried to talk to him, either. But then I always heard he was a difficult man to work for, so I just naturally assumed ...."
"Difficult?" Johnson interrupted. "He was the rudest man I'd ever met, but this particular behavior is not like him at all. He was acting like a crazy man, going from the telephone to the television to the radio. He even threw his cell phone against the wall and broke it. No, it's not like him at all."
"You think that's odd," the chauffeur said with amusement. "You should have seen him try to pull the Porsche out of the garage!"
Danforth J. Amherst lay on his exquisitely landscaped front lawn, curled in a fetal position, whimpering like a small child. The chauffeur looked down at him with disgust.
"I think the old bugger has lost his mind!"
"No great loss if you ask me," the laundress laughed.
The young kitchen maid was aghast.
"This isn't funny. If they commit him, we'll all be out of a job."
"No for long," Johnson sagely declared with the worldly wisdom that comes with old age and a lifetime spent in domestic service. "There are plenty of rich, useless people like him that need people like us to take care of them."
As the cook said, there are plenty of useless people (and cats) that need someone to take care of them.
