Here’s the thing I want to write about, but I’m a-scared of writing about. Not scared of writing, or words, although I’ve often thought it fun to have a psychosis that would make me absolutely phobic about words. Nope. Just worried about the closeness to the one taboo in the weblogging bullshit world I seem to have broken in the past life on the East. Common sense would say steer clear of anything in the old-9-to-5, paying the bills, hive of drones and income, aka work.

It ain’t really about work, though. It’s about what happened to me, and work is a geographical location. Maybe a catalyst. Definitely a reason I was in the situation but a bit player.

In a highly fucked up moment of aural voyeurism (is that even possible, since voyeur implies viewing?), I got to listen to a car accident. It wasn’t like a fun campaign-ending fender bender, it was a full-on smash up. (By the way, if you search Massachusetts and political stuff and car accidents, the number one answer with a bullet is “Chappaquidick.”)

My boss often calls from a Blackberry (using a handsfree headset, I might add) in the morning, as she races from appointments and figures out her day’s game plan. The other morning was no different than many others, and so I was on the phone with her as she gave me her estimated time of arrival and we ran down making a few changes to the day. The first meeting was an all-hands training for everyone in my group. She had made it mandatory and, so’s not to get fragged, had to show up herself. Our telephone conversation was mundane, banal, unexciting, verbal checking of a boring to-do list.

Then, I heard a scream. My boss screamed. But, there was a Doppler effect of the sound getting distant, she hadn’t screamed right into the microphone.

Fucking shit, um what? Shit. Pretty much those were my exact thoughts.

I waited. I called her name a few times. I could hear some cell-phone background rustling, like when a pocket calls the last number by mistake and the recipient gets a voicemail message of ambient sounds. I called her name again. I waited.

No doubt, these sounds and the absence of responses all happened real time in under a minute. Of course, my brain calculated otherwise.

She got back on the phone. The voice had an audible tremor and a chunk of the back of the throat, clenched kind of squeak we all control under extreme stress. That voice that lets you know the person speaking isn’t what you would call “all set.” She said the obvious, she’d just been in an accident.

Before the cell-phone haters tsk, she was rear-ended. So, talking, singing to the radio, brushing her teeth wouldn’t have changed anything. A truck ran up her ass in a hurry to make it through the green light and maybe didn’t see the car in front of it just starting up again from standing at the red.

All I knew at the time was “accident,” “bad,” “windows smashed.” But, she was talking. I hung up and left approximately 312 messages on her husband’s cell phone. I tried calling her back. I got nothing.

Finally, again, probably minutes, but mentally hours, she called me back. She had called 911, the cops were just arriving, no one would let her get out of the car, because the ambulance hadn’t arrived. My mental bargain was, “Hey, must be OK if she was able to call 911.” But, the pessimist in me knew why no one would let her out of the car, shit can break inside.

It was my job to make an announcement to the team meeting and to find senior management and let them know. I was basically tasked with letting people know “bad thing,” and that was all the information I had. I didn’t yet know if she were truly OK, I didn’t know “truck,” I didn’t know exactly where, I didn’t know how, I didn’t know why. To say I was shaken would be an understatement.

Here’s where the reality of how much I don’t care for the human race started to kick in. I got heckled making the announcement. One dickhead made a joke about the meeting being mandatory. Another person opined on cell phones being dangerous.

My inside my head voice thought, “FUCK YOU. Listen to yourselves.” Seriously, there should be a business, professional phrase one could evoke that clearly expresses “Shut the fuck up, what is wrong with you, have you no sense of appropriateness.” Alas, our language is so lacking.

I gave the hecklers a sense of time and a place for lighthearted banter, and this time not being it, and I left the room. I wasn’t in the mood to sit through the training. And, I still didn’t know if her husband had gotten in touch with her.

The one person who was 15 minutes late for the training and therefore missed my announcement, who one might characterize a bit more than a tad self-involved and self-important, if only for showing up 15 minutes late, required my repeating all that I knew which wasn’t much. She proceeded to grill me for information, providing her commentary, making assumptions and, I feel, generally giving me the impression I had completely failed to sate her need for gossipy detail. Bring back the hecklers, I thought, they were easier.

A couple of hours later, I heard from her husband, who this time had that faint tremor that telegraphed worry and general not-goodness. The car was totaled, I found out, and they were keeping her on a back board in the ER for X-rays.

Throughout the day, there was a clear professional split. Half of the people checking in at my desk expressed concern, caring. The other half wanted answers on how their work, their schedules would be affected. They remembered at the tail end to ask about the person. Like, “oh yeah, by the way, any word?”

In the end, she’s overall fine. Nothing broken anyway. But, what a colossally sucky day for her. And, what a mildly sucky day for me as emissary. And what a wonderful reminder that only about 50% of us give a rat’s ass about other people.