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First:
With the new year comes certain changes at GDI for Your Humble Narrator. Strangely, I find myself doing the same approximate level of work, (sometimes less) for the same amount of time a day, only for more pay. There are no real new responsibilities other than the usual regime of attention to detail, quality control, periodic second-guessing, ad hoc training, and information resourcing; in fact, the whole of the reduced team appears to have been brought down (or raised up) to common levels of authority, in the sense that no one has authority over another except in the realm of professional knowledge. This is to say that while I still have an elevated manager to answer to, I am no more or less accountable for my actions as I was before, which was minimal to begin with. It's almost like being my own boss at times; I do my own thing, I have the luxury of zoning out and focusing on singular projects for days at a time, and I'm rarely asked to perform outside of my own sphere. On the other hand, five fingers: I'm now invited to meetings I was once barred from, communication between associates is smoother and more direct, and a smaller team means that when I excel at something it's that much more noticeable.
At the same time, I'm still a faceless drone, I still do grunt work in the trenches, I'm still laboring for the glory of the Party.
Am I okay with this? As long as I'm getting paid, what difference does it make the level of work I do? Or should I aspire to be more, to do more, to increase the sum of the parts in my brain?
I have a friend, a holdover from previous corporate jobs, who made the decision not to climb the ladders any more after so many years in it. She's ambitious and aggressive, forward-thinking and forthright, intelligent, sharp-witted, and shrewd. She could do anything she put her mind to, and even as she grew older, she still had myriad opportunities in front of her that she could just grab at because she had a skill-set that was in such demand in corporations. But she also realized that The Climb is effectively endless, and that the higher you actually go, the more danger you put yourself in, both internally from maintaining personal standards and externally from performance standards. So, one day (probably over a course of several days, actually) she made a conscious decision to get off the ladder, got married, bought a house, and started to be her own boss, both personally and professionally.
To be fair, climbing the ladder at GDI is incredibly difficult even with superior skills and a university-grade education, and it's a minor modern miracle that someone like Your Humble Narrator with only a modicum of skills and a truncated education was able to squeak by on the merits of my absurd sense of humor, thousand-yard stare, and rugged good looks. So it would figure that why would someone like me even try to put my weight on the rungs? There's a one in a hundred thousand chance that GDI would hire me on permanently, even if I performed above and beyond expectations and abilities, and that's on top of the one in a million chance that GDI tapped me to come onto the project in the first place; so again, as long as the money on the tree continues to grow back for the forseeable future and there's sufficient wiggle room between now and the eventual termination of the contract, (two years at a time at GDI) after which the possibility that I may ultimately end up in either one of two familiar scenarios, (unemployed and happy or gainfully employed and unhappy) what's the harm in throttling back?
Isn't this the very definition of "you are not your job?"
Briefly now, a short primer on the three significant signs of corporate bother, according to what I've been able to observe:
- Cutbacks: Not necessarily a barometer for trouble, in fact, most companies will dress cutbacks up as efforts to reduce waste and streamline operations. Targets for cutbacks can include, but aren't limited to, employee benefits, corporate amenities, vendors, contractors, paid time off, etc.
- Hiring freezes: When a company stops making money, or starts to lose money, one of the first overt signs is a hiring freeze, because while salaries may not be the biggest drains on capital, they are one of the more controllable factors.
- Downsizing: Downsizing and layoffs are more or less the same thing, except one sounds innocuous while the other sounds like a death knell. Outside economics can trigger downsizing, but downsizing can also be isolated, as when local offices reduce staff to consolidate locations, or when labor is outsourced. The bad sort of downsizing is done when a company fails to stop foundering even after cutbacks and hiring freezes, and then proceeds to borrow against itself, so to speak.
In any case, keeping calm and carrying on is the hard and fast rule if you find yourself in a bothersome situation, which is not to say you shouldn't keep your CV updated. ⎋
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A job, I still has it.
There was some confusion, then confirmation, followed by additional confusion, then clarification, and again confusion.
It took a verbal laud from a resident captain of industry to sweep aside all misconceptions.
I'm sure it didn't hurt that the wheels were also appropriately greased with a cupcake.
No one else on the shift returned; it feels like I'm the sole survivor of a fallout holocaust or an equal opportunity virus or an undead revolution.
So now, not only is it a new year, but it feels like the first day of work all over again.
It was never a labor of love, but now it's more of a labor for love.
⎋
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I judge the quality of employment on three criteria:
The people, the place, and the actual work.
Most of the time the positive or negative traits of two are enuf to overshadow the third and homogenize the experience as a whole.
Sometimes a single aspect is sufficiently joyous or offensive to blot out the other two and color every work week after.
And every now and then, an assignment scores a hat trick, for better or for worse.
Oddly, pay rate is almost never a factor in evaluating the pros and cons of a job, probably because it's been years since I broke out of the paradigm of living hand to mouth.
So far, so good.
⎋
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Not going to India after all, at least this year. Never fucking mind.
Here's a distilled version of the past two weeks:
GDI: Hey, want to go to India?
me: Sure, why not.
GDI: Well, you can't.
me: Okee.
Whatever. Remove the rationale that I was only going to go along with it in order to secure my job (read: for the money) and not for the corporate recognition, thrill of world travel, or opportunity for exotic cigarette collecting, and I really didn't want to go in the first place.
Why? Because I'm not the biggest fan of dysentery.
Still, "disappointed" is an insufficient descriptor. "Embarrassed" comes closer, if only because I've already told a bunch of people within e-mail range of this possibility, and now both GDI and I look like douchebags, a trait that is par for the course when it comes to the GDI experience so far, but a jarring quasi-humiliation for Your Humble Narrator. Still, I don't know why I'm disappointed at this stage of my work on GDI's project, seeing as every singular aspect of GDI's approach to business, human resources, and internal information dissemination has been half-assed, insular, inefficient, self-serving, and borderline totalitarian. It's as if everything the company does is in perpetual beta.
But never mind GDI; they're the least of my problems, even tho they're serving, if inadvertently, as a trigger for this season's rash of depression, low self-esteem, and the kind of philosophy anti-panic attacks that make one once again question the validity of labor and the end-result of decades of unrewarding work. Is it any coincidence that these feelings coalesced during a screening of the psychotic feature There Will Be Blood (an odd retitling for a film, seeing as there isn't a whole lot of violence, let alone blood in its 158 minutes; one theory is that the producers decided to change the name from Upton Sinclair's title Oil! out of fear that potential moviegoers would see the capital "O" and the exclamation point and assume it was a musical) whose protagonist, Daniel Plainview, is only an oilman so he can make enuf money to get away from the general populace he claims to despise.
I'm not nearly as upset about this whole clusterfuck as I was last nite, which is doubly upsetting because distress is often a rich source of inspiration and creativity.
Still, there are only a handful of things in the world that I do not hate right now.
...
Seriously, tho; what was up with all that "I drink your milkshake" shit? They didn't even have milkshakes in 1927.
⎋
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Monday, GDI asked me to go to India for 90 days, starting in December.
Tuesday, I started to think it wasn't such a hot idea.
Yesterday, I determined that in order to retain my job at GDI, I have to go to India.
The logistics, such as they are, are bewildering so far, at least to my reclusive eyes; passport, house-sitter, remote bill-paying, etc. It's also a long way away, like Australia-far away. Part of my apprehension stems from the possibility that I'll get there and it'll suck; culture clash, homesickness, "Delhi belly," etc. Other parts are finding trustworthy people to look over Monkworks and tend to the moggies, the very real possibility of compromising my dietary lifestyle, and the fact that I've never been out of the county before.
But I have to do it. Something tells me that my going or not going is a dealbreaker when it comes to retention. That, and the timing is terribly convenient; my stay would overlap the end of the fiscal quarter, when contractors are weeded out.
Plus, another sabbatical may be in order, like the one I took in the summer of 2005. For a while I've been struggling to unravel a piece of folksy arcana that's been lodged in the folds of my brain ever since I decided to up and abandon the Middle West for the Left Coast; I keep thinking it goes something like "people change but places stay the same," which lends itself to the idea that part of the reason so many people find themselves in nowhere places with nothing jobs and nobody relationships is that they unconsciously ensconce themselves in their hometowns, eventually equating consistency with comfort, and that false comfort with satisfaction.
Turns out the phrase is actually, "Times don't change, people do."
Anyway, the last time I did something like this was totally not work-related, even tho the semi-happy result was my first tour at New World. I house-sat for my Mom partially as a favor to her, but also as an exercise in removing myself from the paradigm of location that, at the time, was "people change but places stay the same." I wanted to see, firstly, if a person's problems followed them even if they quit their job, left their friends and family, and moved to a remote location; and secondly, if that removal could be used to manifest change in an individual, once extricated from the confines of routine, rigmarole, and structure.
Very briefly, I didn't find what I was looking for that summer. And yet, oddly, strangely, creepily, I find myself in a parallel situation in this year's autumn; dissatisfaction at work, disillusionment in life. seemingly caught in a feedback loop of ennui, black blood, cyclical depression, seclusion, and semi-sedentariness; plus the extra incentive of holding onto employment in a suddenly and increasingly volatile marketplace.
So, you see, I have to go. Whether I find something I didn''t know I was looking for or not, whether I break a paradigm or not, whether it's fun or not.
I have to go.
⎋
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Like any smart American company, GDI outsources a lot of their "grunt" work to India; where, apparently, they do better quality work, they do it more efficiently, and they find value, worth, and reward in it. Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, we show up late and bail early, we bitch and moan over the relatively luxurious amenities, we multitask not because we can, but because there's no one else to do everything else.
Here, we equate how much a company "likes" us to retention, so we kiss ass, we kowtow, we play the sycophant. There, they just work.
Here, we're spoiled by what we have and covet what we want but don't need. There, they take what they can get and work with what they have.
Here, it's a grind, it's drudgery, it's a job. There, a job is a gift, a portal, an honor.
Do we just not like to work? Does that make us lazy, shiftless, "goldbricking?" (whatever that means) Or do we disagree with the idea of work, of singing for our sustenance, of dancing for our dog food, of sacrificing time for wampum?
If we were farmers, we might not have this problem. Farmers farming before the Industrial Revolution, that is. If we grew our own food, we might not have this problem. If we lived on tracts of land that we more than marginally larger than the square footage of our homes, that is. If we had the means within our extremities to sustain ourselves, to live off the myriad grids that nibble our pay advice to the quick, to be truly independent in more than the dictionary rhetoric of the word.
If, if, if.
⎋
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So you found a craft, and it set you back on your heels? Goody, goody.
You gave it your heart, you gave it your mind, you gave it dedication and unrecoverable time and strength you know you didn't know you had; and it broke it all into a hundred thousand individual grains of so much powdered glass. Now, how do you do?
What was the exchange rate? What was the return on your investment? What was your compensation? On-site amenities? Flexible personal time? Rapid advancement? Continued lenience? Foot massages?
Or were you just thrown various pieces of cake, in an attempt to prevent you from running away?
So now, you lie awake, hemming and hawing and humming the blues all nite, dreading the mornings when you must return.
You think that labor is a barrel of C₆H₂(NO₂)₃CH₃?
Work is still work, and pit bosses will always whip the ditchdiggers. But there are a lot more of us than there are of them.
⎋
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Briefly, or as briefly as possible, as this sort of talk is tiresome and self-indulgent and oh-so tl;dr, no matter how expurgated it is:
The days at Global Domination Industries are full of work, and that work is stupid and boring and sucks, but I don't hate it; not yet, at any rate, even tho I have every reason in the world to. While Your Humble Narrator is fond of spouting the adage "work is work" ad nauseum, the structure of the surroundings at GDI is hauntingly familiar to the bullpen-style, open-office, sweatshop-esque environment of the call centers that eventually broke my spirit and drove me into the quasi-schizophrenic state I enjoy to-day. One might take comfort in the fact that it's a call center in everything but name, and that's where my overarching concerns get all wibbly and wobbly and touchy and hot-buttony and stuff.
Again, briefly: the managers watch over the supervisors, the supervisors watch over the leads, the leads watch over the grunts, and the grunts do the lion's share of the work. I'm one of the grunts, and here's the dichotomy that's keeping me up the nites Cranky and Spanky don't. On the one hand, work is work; whatever you do doesn't matter as long as it serves to maintain the lifestyle to which you have become accustomed to. You are not your job, what you do for a living shouldn't define you as a person, it's just a job, etc., and to a certain point, this is what I want. I want anonymity at work, I want to be invisible, I want to be unknown; I want to do my work and go home, I want to do my work and forget about it, I want to do my work and get paid for it. I just work here.
And to a certain extent, GDI recognizes this want and appears to harvest grunts with the same attitude; people like me, who while not expressing it overtly, are desperate for work and have low(or lowered) standards. The result is an office full of good-hearted riff-raff, but riff-raff nonetheless, which also leads GDI to implement some borderline prejudicial rules and restrictions to keep us all in line and on task.
Can I still play with the riff-raff? Can I lower my standards without my bloated pride getting in the way? Can I work side-by-side with the salt of the earth and not get a rash?
On the other hand, five fingers: despite the stupidity of the work, I still find myself falling into the old patterns of excelling, of overachieving, of eyes forward and head down; yes sir, no sir, have a nice day. Even tho I am destined to hate this work, even tho this work is a waste of my time and talents, even tho I am continuing to redistribute an updated version of my CV to potential employers in the hopes of a permanent position, I still worry about making a good impression with the leads at GDI, I still push my skills to their natural limits, I still fly straight and true.
How far should we let the job into our hearts? Work is work, but no one hires a robot, no matter how good their CV is. As inhuman as some companies and corporations behave, they are all run by people. People who may only have let the job a little too far into their hearts, is all. It's been said before, but it bears repeating: we in the workforce deserve work that is both financially rewarding and professionally enriching. The next question is, however, are there enuf of those jobs to go around?
Break's over. Everybody back on your heads.
⎋
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I don't want to talk about it.
But you do.
You can't make a hundred-plus phone calls a day. You can't talk to a hundred strangers a day, every day. You can't read the same script a hundred times to a hundred different answering machines a day, every day, forever. You go home and there's nothing left of you inside. You're like a shell, a snakeskin, a cheap hollow chocolate bunny. This is exactly what made you do schizo the last time, and it can't happen again, not again, not this time. Because you're a fragile soul, because your soul vibrates on a particularly sensitive band of the dial, because your soul gets disrupted when it spends too much time in the presence of other souls.
Not lesser souls, not equal souls, not greater souls. Just souls running on different frequencies, not all of which are conducive to harmonious integration. It's the few that soothe your frazzled transmitters that you need to keep a good hold on, maintain good relations with, take to your grave with you. Your stony grave, your ashy grave, your floating grave. The grave next door.
Why don't you do something about it? Talk to someone, air your grievances, express your frustrations. Find an out, find a loophole, do more in a smarter way?
Because the general assumption is that the standard response will be, at best, something along the lines of "STFU/GBTW," and at worst, an exercise of the "at-will" clause of the assignment agreement you signed in your own blood on day one. Because you're replaceable, because you're a warm body, because you're a butt in a seat, because you're unskilled, temporary, disposable labor.
No one want to talk to you when you have a speech impediment. No one wants to hire you when you have no self-confidence. No one wants to love you when you have an obvious mental defect.
And no one cares about your problems. Deal with them yourself, or go to Hell in your own way. Stop whinging.
Grow up.
Take this piece of advice and join the human race. We're not all pretty, we're not all articulate, we're not all flush. You, however, seem to have taken it upon yourself not only to project the root cause of your petty, insignificant, micro-problems onto the world at large(as if the butterfly effect of emergency rule can be credited with delaying your supplemental funds, clogging traffic like a riverbed of bezoars, misappropriating your appetite, sparking a bowl of irrational anger, and hacking away at your impetus with a farm implement), but to revel in the flurry of mixed feelings, fruit peels, coffee grounds, old newspapers, chicken bones, and outer lettuce leaves that your Current Situation inexplicably generates, as if you're trying to root out a bottomless pit to hurl yourself down.
As before, going to Hell in your own way.
It's up to you.
⎋
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Doing instead of trying, instead of talking about doing, instead of thinking about doing.
Still, job hunting sucks. Worst job ever, to sell yourself. But, if you have the confidence enuf to exude the confidence that you're confident in your confidence, who's to turn you down for trying? The trick is locating that aquifer of confidence in the first place and tapping it so you can access it at any given time: during interviews, in conference calls, on downhill inclines when your car inexplicably bursts into blue eldritch flame, etc.
But even more than that, even deeper than that, even more overarching and amorphous than that, is the awful ancient question: "What do you want to be when you grow up?" Said query is never been more irrelevant than when one begins their search for a workforce position out of necessity instead of want. Almost no one wants to work, but almost everyone has to, and almost never the twain shall want and need meet in the same commonality. Just because you want to be an astronaut doesn't mean you can, just because you want to work for NetGoogBayFlix doesn't mean they'll have you, just because you don't want to go back to your local version of Alma Mater doesn't mean you don't have to.
I recently applied for a writing gig, which asked, among other things, why I was interested in fact-checking the metadata of a film database. For twelve shekels an Earth hour, I figured I had less than that to lose:
As a Virgo, I'm a natural perfectionist, a bit anal retentive, and I lean towards the more intellectual side of media. Movies and television should be understood as well as entertaining, and I like to deconstruct the films I watch and see in order to reveal the underlying themes and subtleties that can get lost on the casual audience member. In addition, we're in an age of information aggregation, and more information on more things is available than ever before. This is reason enough for the information available to be as accurate and correct as possible. On another level, with the rise of "burst culture" it now is more appealing than before to be able to condense large amounts of information, such as cast lists, plot synopses, etc., into browseable headlines that can be scanned and digested instantly. Then they asked if I would be able to "instantly tell the degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon?" From my experience working in media retail outlets such as Tower Records, I quickly learned the importance of pigeonholing genres and drawing lines between the examples that blur the difference between action and sci-fi and fantasy. Working with other media geeks, some of whom are even more anal and obsessive when it comes to minutiae, tempered with dealing with a fickle buying public who sometimes know what they like but don't know what they want, helped me to take all viewpoints, genres, and styles into account, even if they ran counter to my own tastes. As far as efficiency, most of my media and movie consumption takes place at home, because it's easier and I can watch at my own pace, at my own speed, on my own time. I can also back up and skip stuff, which just enables me to take apart a piece of media that much more expertly. This position is similar to a writing gig at Netflix I applied for a while ago when I was looking for some work-from-home set-ups. Now, as reluctant as I am to break the fourth "meta-wall" that separates Your Humble Narrator from you, the Gentle Readers, sometimes it becomes necessary to maintain the integrity of the day's writing to speak of myself. The problem is that I don't nominally consider myself a proper subject for content, despite the fact that I am FASCINATING(in the same sense that spontaneous cell division or fire ant slavery or demonstrated synesthesia is FASCINATING), which is and of itself a problem. If I lack the confidence to talk myself up on my own time, where's that confidence going to come from when I have to sell myself to a recruiter who'd just as soon hire a spasmodic, cybernetically-modified, purple porpoise for half the pay? You have to have a bloated ego, you have to think much of yourself, you have to be conceited and self-centered and megalomaniacal to survive and live and progress and grow. Otherwise, you're just existing. Good advice. If only we could synthesize it and take it intravenously. Or tip it over ice cream! But since I break the fourth meta-wall more often than I like to admit, perhaps we should partition the term. Every time I refer to myself as "we" or "Your Humble Narrator," that breaks the fourth meta-wall. But if the self-references are strictly of the "I" variety, that breaks the fifth meta-wall. Why the fifth? That doesn't make any sense, we're mixing media metaphors here, but the legacy is still valid. While the 'fourth wall" was always the screen of your Mike Teevee-brand radiation droolbox, an accessory also conveniently included with every personal computer purchase, the dimensions of the iNtArWeBz are simultaneously undefined and infinitely compartmentalized. There is not a box behind this new fourth wall, but a mad labyrinth, a dimensionally-transcendental minigolf course, a Gordian Knot of Jovian proportions. So it makes as much sense as it can to begin labeling the meta-walls we break contextually, since we can't pin them down geographically. Anyway, my point is, when we advance the narrative from simple first-person declarations to bald-faced ego-stroking, there should be some indication, like an idiot light on your dashboard: "EGO OVERHEAT; SERVICE RECOMMENDED." That said, and with all the praise you Gentle Readers have heaped upon Your Humble Narrator's past offerings, it would be truly and end-all acceptable to get paid to write. Why then, have all of to-day's job search results either come from companies who won't have me, or for unobtainable gearhead positions? I know why, actually. It can only mean one or two of two things; I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up, and I'm looking in the wrong places for whatever that may be. =]'
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I'm a highly decorated veteran of customer support. If there was an equivalent of a Purple Heart for customer support, I'd have a drawer full of them. I'd be tossing them into bags on Hallowe'en, throwing them from the Grand Marshal's float, and adding them to this year's King Cake instead of a plastic baby. I like to call myself a customer support advocate, which is just a fancy way of saying that I burned myself out doing CS (just like everyone in CS does, later or sooner) and now offer my experience only in the capacity of a consultant.
It started, as almost everything else in my life did, at Alma Mater. If there is any room left in the special chamber I keep reserved to store my excess of regrets, I would add to the pile not getting a face-to-face CS job in retail or whatever before I turned twenty-one. As it stands now, I appear to be going thru a weird kind of renaissance when it comes to employment; hopping from one assignment to another as a contractor, never staying at one place for more than six months at a time. This kind of puddlejumping is usually only relegated to the bored high-schooler looking to put some jingle in their jeans for one reason or another; embryonic economic independence, a household that needs another income, summer ennui, etc. The teenaged 'jumper at least has the possible luxury of being picky when it comes to their choice of chores. If the hats don't fit over at Hot Dog On A Stick, you can always try on a velour vest down at the GigaPlex.
I no longer have the fallback of being able to crash on Mom's cowch between gigs. My life is more akin to a struggling musician's, (minus the naked nubiles and suitcases full of cash) who have their own credo to accepting offers to perform: "You don't ask 'with who?' or 'how much?' You just say 'where and when?' and show up."
It wasn't until New World hired me back the second time (it was at their call center that I had the bright idea to up and quit CS) that I realized there were different dimensions to customer support other than simply answering one question after another, answering one phone call after another, bellowing "Next in line, pleeze!" over and over. At every other CS gig I had held in the past, the support was always one-way, from the CSR to the customer, directly, at least. (It was also our job to filter thru the customers' myriad complaints for suggestions, because Dog knows they almost never took the time to tell us nicely, let alone plainly.) At New World, I was given the open-ended task of contacting the growing lists of candidates for open positions at the company, and pin them down for interviews at the corporate HQ. The first thing I noticed about the people I was calling was that they were pleased to be hearing from me, after all, I was setting them on the path for a possible job offer, and a sweet one at that. The next thing I noticed was that I wasn't doing anything different than I would at any other CS job, i.e., there was courtesy, efficiency, and professionalism to spare. The only difference now was that the person on the other end of the line was actually appreciative.
This is what the archetypal bad customer needs to understand about customer support; it needs to flow both ways. It can't always be "I ask you questions, and you give me answers." Even tho that model looks like a two-way flow on paper, it doesn't always work out that way in practice. Why do you think most of the operators you talk to at call centers sound exhausted, unenthusiastic, browbeaten, disenchanted, and indifferent to your problems? It's because we are, and it's all your fault. We genuinely don't want to talk to you. After all, what's in it for us, other than our eventual paychecks? You can't buy groceries with the satisfaction of a job well done. You can't pay rent knowing that you've maintained 100% production for the nth day in a row. How well do you think we sleep at nite after having to upbraid another customer out of canceling their account?
With everything else in the world, you only get out what you put into it. Except, for some reason, for customer support. The ratio has always been disparate, always in the customer's favor, and for obvious reasons, but not necessarily good or smart ones. The obvious reason is that the customer creates business for the company. Keep the customer happy, and the company will be happy. Even a bad customer that keeps coming back is still a customer. But the customer is not always right. In fact, they're almost always stupid and ignorant. As an old (now dead) manager of mine famously said when justifying my continued existence at Alma Mater, "Customers don't read signs!" This is why every company has and needs customer support. And holding onto a bad customer for the simplistic belief that their needs are tantamount can be just as damaging as losing a good customer.
Real customer support is created by the customer. You only get good support if you put some good into getting it.
=]'
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I've encountered something at Wormhole that I've never seen before in my corporate career, and I've wandered thru a lot of cube farms:
Horizontal prairie-dogging.
It's exactly what it sounds like.
...
Well, maybe not exactly.
=]'
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If my paranoia over being terminated from my present place(s) of employment were half as justified as I believe them to be, Your Humble Narrator wouldn't be enjoying the benefits of such a steady income and the lifestyle to which I have become accustomed to that eventually comes along with it. As it stands, here I am, still. Slaving away, picking at the salt mines, doing the things most other Americans would rather not do. Admittedly, I don't pick lettuce or empty grease traps or clean up crime scenes, but the work I do, the work I've chosen to do is perhaps only a notch or two above standard caveman-quality labor, plus or minus a degree removed in execution.
And yet, I can't help but feel as if I'm on the grinding edge, that I'm making my way across a minefield of eggshells, that I'm only one incident ofinsignifica away from a hot-pink slip. Every morning, a miasma of virgin dread presses me back into my pillow-top, and shaking it off takes every dram of my sleep-strained reserves. Sometimes the press is too great, as it was last week, and I spend a handful of fleeting days playing hooky. Everynite , an invisible waldo reviews the events of the day for me, picking out spots where I should have done something slightly different, said something slightly louder, worded something slightly more forcefully, expressed myself in person instead of e-mail, piped up when I shut up, pointed out instead of ignoring, stayed late instead of bouncing early.
But, as soon as I get into the office, everything is fine, like a chest pain that suddenly goes away and you forget you ever were afraid you were dying on the spot.
It's been a bit since I made the shift from pure Customer Support to what I do now(which is a little bit of everything else that doesn't involve a Customer), a bit since I decided to forgo permanency with benefits for a stepping-stone model,puddlejumping from one gig to the next(sometimes with no clue as to whether I'll land upright or on a blank pixel of air), a bit since I abdicated a desire for a position of encroaching responsibility and accountability(if not respect and power). Because I thot that knowing what I didn't want to do was just as good as knowing what I did want to do. Because I was under the impression, as a number of youngish, suburban, quasi-professionals like me are, that for the most part, we work to live, not the other way around. It goes without saying that no one likes their job,altho if it goes without saying, then how can it be a universal truth? Perhaps the more truthful version would be that while not everyone dislikes their job, and not everyone is afraid of work, almost everyone would rather not labor, if given a choice.
But when was the last time you had a choice? When has it ever been anything but "work, or die?"
=]'
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Day Twenty. Friday is D-Day for Alma Mater. With any luck, and barring a sudden aneurysm, nervous breakdown, or other type of fit, we'll send the old bitch off by slacking off in the backroom and reminiscing ourselves into a self-destructive stupor. While I think that I've long since come to terms with the demise of the holding company that provided me with my first job when I arrived, starry-eyed, skinny, and bubbling over with Midwest naïveté, here at the other, less significant edge of the continent, for any number of reasons. First of all, I already have another job. Plus I've paid my dues, multiple times over. Like everyone else, I went thru the thrills and bellyaches, the political B.S. and authoritative jockeying, the power shifts and megalomaniacal managers, the easy days and the impossible days, and all manner of customer; good, bad, ugly; clean and filthy; black, white, yellow, and brown; straight-laced and straight-edge, hardcore and poseur, broke and rich; sophist, bacchanalian, and philistine. But getting over Alma Mater is sometimes more than just quitting and exiting the building, and getting pulled back in is sometimes more than just absolute necessity, as evidenced in my second tour. Sometimes you find yourself in an environment that, while scummy on the outside, provides a greater support group than any corporate-sponsored counseling program. They say the less confident you are about something, the more serious you have to act. Watching the crew at Alma Mater at work is proof positive of the countersign to that; the more confident you are, the less serious you have to be. Everyone at Alma Mater acts like a goof to a certain degree(even more so in recent days), and while it may not come across as professional in the strictest sense, especially when said goofiness is directed towards some of our more tight-assed clientele, we can technically get away with it; partly because the environment where we work is already so lax with the rules, but mostly because we know what we're doing. It's akin to letting your best programmer show up in pajamas and bunny slippers and letting him work odd hours; when you have experts of genius-level skill, a little forgoing of tradition and civility is the least one could both allow and expect. Some of the crew aren't so lucky to have a clearly delineated path out. Some are interviewing for Igor's when they supposedly install themselves on the Alma Mater footprint. Some already have other jobs, retail and otherwise. Others are just going to bum around on unemployment while they make up their minds. And this is what the majority of the customers that have been darkening our doors and moods have utterly failed to realize; that while the customers are losing one of their favorite stores, we're losing our jobs. And while there is a contingent of the public that still cannot fathom labor such as retail orfoodservice or the custodial arts as "real" jobs, our work is as valid as any other job. It may be dirty, it may not be glamorous , and it may not pay the bills, but we know exactly what we're doing from the ground running. That's why some of the crew are simply getting different retail jobs, because it's what they know, and they do it well. As mentioned previously in this forum, leaving the pain of scraping your life along as a wage slave behind for the salaried grape-eating of shiny corporate does not always equate into happiness. I can't even remember what I did in my years at Seek and Fishbowl that drew upon what I did at Alma Mater. That's what makes me envious of the "kids" leaving Alma Mater at the end of the week; they still have ten or twenty good years ahead of them, they have a fresh set of skills they can plug into virtually any job out there, and they haven't yet built up a wall of pride and principles that would bar them from other work that they might not deem "real." They still have everything out in front of them, all they have to to is reach out and grab something. It's too late for me. =]'
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I just used the term "fast track" as a verb.
I'm so ashamed.
This is akin to the first time I told someone I'd "e-mail them."
=]'
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As the twilight of Alma Mater begins to darken, one wonders not how it will end(which will no doubt be with a casserole of tears, drunken oaths, and both genuine and jocular fuckoffs), nor how it started(because when you enter into an agreement with an established establishment, the only thing that matters is your time there, your associates during the period, your experience for the duration, not the overencompassing history of The Company), but rather what could have been, now that you know what happened in the middle, with you and him and her and them.
While I never overtly entertained any notions that my Alma Mater would stand on its site forever and ever(amen, salaam, mazel tov), the idea crept into my already unhealthy repertoire of notions as a footnote, a reference, an allusion to other places, names, brands, landmarks, people, etc., that had also proved resilient against the rigors of normal temporal travel. HP, IBM, AT&T. Barrymore, Redgrave, Bush. Big Boy, the Panama Canal, route 66. Alma Mater stood at its post since before I came on the scene, before I railed and failed against the concept of gainful work, before the exchange of information became more powerful than the exchange of seashells. To remove it from the equation of the nation, of the economy, of the landscape is jarring, but I can recover from it, I think.
It's not the list of nevers that bothers me, because most of them aren't true and based upon the fears of the more ignorant patrons that grace our aisles. Where will we go now? What are we supposed to do? Why did this happen?
The answers, in short order, are; That's up to you, That's your problem now, and It just happened. It's up to you because it always has been; you've always had choices in life, this or that place, and you chose to come to us, over and over again. It's your problem now because, again, it always has been; if you can't find what you want or need at one place, you have to go someplace else. And it just happened because nothing lasts forever; we had a good run, thanks for shopping.
But it was nice while it lasted; slack times, mentally unbalanced company(tipped over on the good side), and all the records you could eat. A sweet location in the corner of a concrete prairie, a semi-hip, semi-annoying coffeeshop next door, a meditative view of the giant pine tree in the parking lot where the noon birds would confabulate. Regular customers, geeky brethren and authoritative jerk-offs, selfish rich bitches, bored trophy spouses of both sexes, clueless homecoming elite, and the occasional sympathizer. Rock stars and no-names, radio faces and midnight patrol officers, mom and dad.
And just the right place outside to take your smoke break, with a panoramic view of a slice of sky, opposing midday traffic, gulls and thrushes fighting for perching space on the edge of the neon sign, and traveling weather systems.
Forty-six years is not a long time in the epoch of business, but my collective seven seem to keep going on and on, even after I swear off over and over again. Like a cruel summer, a string of sweetness and pain.
=]'
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I now have three operant name tags. Keycard functionality is selective on two of them, the other is merely decorative.
Starting sometime last week, and extending until the Winter Solstice, I will effectively have no days off.
Weekdays at NetFab and Wormhole, weekends at Alma Mater(for as long as they last).
The last time I pulled something like this was about three years ago at AFF, when I worked for fifteen days straight. By the end I felt like a time bomb with a busted timer.
We'll see how mad I am this time next week.
It's just a good thing I'm not an air traffic controller.
=]'
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As the days at Alma Mater begin to wind down, we're starting to see a surgency of clueless newbies who are only now learning of our bankruptcies and cascading shutdowns. Some of them, as is true to form to Alma Mater's economic environs, exhibit rather deplorable passive-aggressive, master-and-servant behavior. Example:
In an effort to boost the bottom line, retailers like Alma Mater often sell ancillary products not necessarily directly related to their primary sellers(we call them "sidelines"). In the case of Alma Mater, the sidelines included everything from action figures to chewing gum to guitar strings. One holiday season, we even sold Duraflame logs. How ghetto is that?
This incident involves toiletries, specifically those produced by Burt's Bees. Last nite's customer of regard wanders in and, spying the Burt's Bees display, inquires hurriedly of the current discount before making a, erm, beeline for it.
Open displays of prettifying goop like Burt's Bees and Blue Q and Calvin Klein(Alma Mater was Ground Zero for the ck one and ck be launches, they even sent a rep in to school us on how perfumes and colognes are layered in "notes") are always a liability to your stock on hand, as every nosy consumer who passes by it has to compulsively fondle, squeeze, spindle, and otherwise mutilate the various bottles, boxes, and tins precariously placed on the display(faced out, of course). Of the detritus of Burt's Bees crap, only a lowly tin of Beeswax Lip Balm remained, and even that was decorated with a mysterious green goo. Being a helluva guy, I dutifully scampered into the backroom to wipe the offending gunk from the product, presented it again to the customer while announcing the discounted price(40% off of $5.00 = $3.00; not bad), only to be told:
"Well, that isn't really worth it. I think it's been opened, and it's not a very sanitary presentation anyway."
At this point, I turned tail and walked away from the customer without another word, before I allowed myself to say one of three things in response:
- "What was the point of you asking me to clean off the green spooge if you're not going to buy it?"
- "Why are you buying cosmetics at a place like this anyway? We sell records and porn mags and overpriced mp3 players."
- "If you're so goddamned concerned that your stupid hippie organic lip balm is sanitary, fucking buy it online."
There is no shortage of these horror stories. =]'
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Last Friday was this year's so-called "Black Friday," a retail industry term that's starting to eek its way out into the mainstream lexicon. We call it Black Friday for one(or both) of two reasons: - Being the traditional first day of shopping for the holiday season, retailers often look to the sales of this day to push them from being in the red(that is, losing money) to the black(meaning profits)
- The black moods that hordes of selfish, rude, cheap, spoiled, loud, smelly customers with too much spare time and even more too much disposable income can create upon your average sales clerk.
I shy towards the latter. Those of you who are aware of Alma Mater's secret identity are also probably aware of the lax dress code the company has established with its employees. You can more or less wear your street clothes to work, with a few caveats; no excessively shredded clothing, no profanity or pornographic images, no open-toed shoes, name tag clearly worn, etc. This freedom, more than anything else, is what probably jaded me the worst when it came time to leave the fold of retail and find a "real job," that is, one in an office with no windows. Altho the back room of Alma Mater was pretty cave-like, too. This Black Friday was different, in that we all received new mufti, long-sleeved t-shirts with the Alma Mater logo blazed on the back. And, of course, they were black. Get it? (No one else did, either.) So, for one day, Alma Mater was likened to any other retail joint with a slightly more stringent dress code, except we all looked like Noh theatre actors. The point is, on any other day, your average Alma Mater floor jockey gets accosted dozens of times an hour by clueless bobbysoxers and richbitches, who then pepper you with their silly questions. Even with our name tags hung by our belt loops, people still roll towards us like water up the Mystery Spot. Only about half of them whinge, "Do you work here?" which is a form of a backhanded compliment; if you can spot the people in this store who dress the most like street rats, they're the ones who most likely work here. But on Black Friday, with everyone in their supersnug Black Friday kit, touring the floor like a company of cat burglars, as obvious as ever that we were the toughs who ran the joint, not question one. Were they afraid? Confused? Or just too busy shopping? =]'
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