I'll Handle It

It's 5:55 PM. The building is mostly empty. The notification arrives the way they always do — flat subject line, no warmth: Incident severity: P2. Assigned: you. He looks at his phone. He accepts it.

This is a song for the kid who code-switches so smoothly by now that some days he can't remember which version of himself is the original. He uses Jira correctly. He pastes the right StackOverflow links in Slack. He took the on-call rotation because he wanted to be the kind of person who takes the on-call rotation. And somewhere underneath all of that, twelve years back, his mother was vacuuming this same hallway at 6 PM, her cleaning schedule printed on a paper she folded and kept in her coat pocket. Hallway B, 18:00.

The song doesn't try to resolve that. It doesn't offer catharsis or a moral. The chorus does what he does — it just says I'll handle it, which is the only vocabulary he has for both the job and the grief and the pride that won't quite fit inside a single sentence. The bridge drops down to almost nothing, just Rhodes and his voice just above a murmur, reading the incident ticket like a liturgy. Assigned: you. Yeah. Assigned: me.

He held the elevator for the janitor on the way out. The man looked like his uncle. He didn't say anything. Neither did the janitor. That silence is somewhere in the bass line, if you're listening for it.

[Verse 1] Badge tap, elevator two, Cubicle C, the one with the broken view. They moved the whiteboards while I was out, Conference room B — do not disturb, no doubt.

I cc'd the right people, used the right words, Jira comment thorough, good instincts, they heard. Access elevated — Tier 2 now, Somebody's counting on me to figure it out.

[Pre-Chorus] And I walk past the closet where she kept the mop, Hallway B, eighteen hundred, she never stopped. I press the button, I wait for the floor, I don't know what I'm carrying anymore.

[Chorus] I'm on-call this week, I'll handle it, P2 incident, I'll manage it. She scrubbed these floors so I could sit above, I'll handle it — that's how I say I love.

[Verse 2] Lunch in the parking lot, engine off and low, Call my brother — no answer — let it go. Please update the ticket with your findings now, I type it back, don't know exactly how

To hold both things — the pride and the weight, The access badge, her schedule, running late. I held the elevator for the janitor's cart, He looked like my uncle — didn't say a word, just parted.

[Pre-Chorus] And I walk past the closet where she kept the mop, Hallway B, eighteen hundred, she never stopped. She handed me up like a prayer to this place, Now I carry her name on my corporate face.

[Chorus] I'm on-call this week, I'll handle it, P2 incident, I'll manage it. She scrubbed these floors so I could sit above, I'll handle it — that's how I say I love.

[Bridge] Five fifty-five and the rotation hits my name. The server hum, the smell of the clean hallway, same. I think of her pushing that cart down the dark hall, I think of her overtime — that's why I take the call.

Incident severity: P2. Assigned: you. ... yeah. Assigned: me.

[Outro] I'll handle it. I'll handle it. Mama, I'll handle it.