My Deskmate Kept a Jar of Teeth and the Boss Loved Him

Every open-plan office has a smell, a hum, a guy. Ours had Warren, and Warren had a jar of teeth.

I noticed it my second week, when I still thought I was seeing things. It was a jam jar, the kind with the little fruit still printed on the lid, and it sat next to his keyboard between a family photo and a stress ball shaped like the earth. Inside were teeth. Human teeth. Maybe thirty of them, some with fillings, one with a tiny gold cap that caught the light in a way I came to dread.

I told myself they were fake. Novelty teeth. Some kind of dental sample. For about a month I built an entire comfortable fiction around that jar, because the alternative was that I sat two feet from a man who collected teeth and nobody had ever said anything.

Then Warren, who was otherwise a completely normal-seeming person with a lanyard full of conference badges, saw me looking and said, cheerfully, "Those are mine. And a few of my kids'. And my dad's, God rest him." And he went back to his spreadsheet like he had told me the weather.

I want to be fair to Warren. He was pleasant. He remembered birthdays. He brought in homemade banana bread that was, frustratingly, excellent. He never once did anything threatening. He just had, on his desk, in a shared professional environment, a jar of the teeth of three generations of his own family, and he liked to give it a little shake sometimes while he was on the phone, a soft dry rattle that I can still hear if I let myself.

I lasted eleven months. What broke me was a client visit. Someone important was touring the floor and I watched, in slow motion, as they leaned in to admire Warren's "cute little jar" and Warren said the words "those are teeth" and the client laughed the laugh of a person who has not yet understood. I decided that day I would say something to management, because surely, surely, this was not fine.

The meeting did not go how I expected. My manager, a man named Craig who genuinely believed the phrase "we are a family here" was a management philosophy, listened to my whole careful speech about hygiene and professionalism and clients. Then he leaned back and said, "Warren is one of our most reliable people. Have you tried getting to know him?" I said I knew him. I knew about the teeth. That was the problem. Craig said, and I have thought about this sentence for two years, "I think the real issue here might be flexibility."

So I got coached. Me. On flexibility. Warren kept his teeth. Craig, I later learned, had known about the jar for years and found it "characterful." There was even, apparently, a running joke at the manager level about it, which meant every person above me had decided the teeth were fine and the problem was anyone who could not relax about the teeth.

I moved desks eventually, to the far corner by the printer, which everyone assumed was a demotion and which I experienced as a rescue. Warren waved at me every morning. He retired last spring. At his little send-off, Craig gave a speech and, as a bit, presented him with a novelty gift box. Warren opened it slowly. I could not see inside from where I stood. But I saw his face, and I saw him laugh, and I heard, from across the room, that soft dry rattle.