The Coworker Who Only Ever Existed on Fridays

The unsettling thing about Dale is that for a long time he was not unsettling at all. He was the best part of Fridays.

Dale sat at the end of our pod on Fridays. He had a laptop, a lanyard, a coffee, the full costume of a colleague. He was funny in the low-key way that makes a long week survivable, he knew everyone's names, he asked about your weekend plans and remembered them the next Friday. He was, by unanimous unspoken agreement, one of us. If you had asked me a year in whether Dale worked here, I would have laughed at the question.

Then Priya, back from a stretch of Fridays off, said a strange thing at lunch. She said, "Where does Dale actually sit the rest of the week?" And there was a pause. A real one. Because none of us knew. I had never seen Dale on a Monday. Or a Tuesday. I tried to picture Dale at his Wednesday desk and got nothing, a blank, the way you cannot picture a word you know perfectly well how to say.

We compared notes, half laughing. Nobody had ever seen Dale except on Fridays. Nobody knew his last name. Nobody knew his team, his manager, or what exactly he worked on, which was strange, because Dale talked constantly and warmly about work in general and had somehow, across a year of Fridays, never once said a concrete thing about his own.

I checked the directory. There were two Dales, both in offices in other cities, neither matching our Dale, who was very much in our building, in our chairs, drinking our coffee, every single Friday. I checked the seating chart for our floor. The end seat of our pod, where Dale sat, was marked "flex/unassigned." I asked Facilities who had it Fridays. They said nobody. It was flex. Anyone could take it. But only Dale ever did, and only on Fridays.

Now, I want to be careful, because Dale never did a single frightening thing. He was kind. When my father was sick, Dale asked about him gently, every Friday, and I told him things I did not tell people I had known for years, because Dale had that quality, the quality of someone who was only ever there for the good part and never the rest. Maybe that is why we told him everything. He felt like a Friday.

We decided, gently, to figure it out. Not to trap him, just to know. The next Friday I asked him, straight out, friendly, "Dale, what team are you on again? I want to loop you into something." And he smiled, the warm familiar smile, and said, "Oh, you do not want me on that, I would only slow it down." Which is not a team. And I noticed, saying it, that I still did not know, and that he had done that gracefully a hundred times before and I had let him, every time, because it was Friday and I was tired and Dale was easy.

The Friday after that, he was not there. The flex seat sat empty. We told ourselves he was off. He did not come the Friday after either, or the one after that. No goodbye email, because there was no email, because as far as any system showed there was no Dale. The seat stayed empty on Fridays for a while, and then a new hire took it, on a Monday, and sat there all week like a normal person, and somehow that was what made it real. Dale had never done that. Dale had never once been a Monday.

I still think about him on Fridays, mostly. Almost only on Fridays, honestly. Which is, I have come to feel, exactly how he would have wanted it.