|
I wasn't born with a closed mind. Admittedly, my upbringing was left, leaning red, but I was always as rebellious against that as I was against everything else. In a sense, corporate America saved me from the streets. So why do I hate it now? This is a long-ish story, but I think some folks, especially those who find my posts so offensive, might be interested.
In my youth I worked mostly as an art and music teacher, temporary gigs. Sometimes I filled in the slow times working childcare. The pay was lousy, the work difficult, but I thought it was okay. I figured I was doing some good and I would eventually get hired somewhere and get a relatively stable income. I had a college degree and I thought I was qualified. I had swung a hammer or two, but that seemed like a shutout. All the tradesmen I knew had learned from their fathers when they were just kids, and there's no way to compete with that if you start as an adult. The only things I'd been doing my whole life were drawing, painting, writing, and making music. Other than groceries--work I'd always been attracted to, but which would kill my mom if I got into it, for weird and irrelevant family reasons--teaching seemed like the gig. I still hoped to "make it" as an artist and thought of the paid work as a "day job" anyway. Needless to say my situation got worse and worse until I couldn't even afford to work because it was costing more to drive than they were paying me. I ended up homeless, sleeping illegally in a warehouse where my friend worked and manning a recycling station a couple of hours a day--man, talk about shitty jobs! I was ready to kill myself and maybe take a few people with me.
It was really my brother, not corporate America itself that snapped me out of this. We were drinking one night and I was moping about my problems when he said, hey man, why don't you just cut your hair and go to a temp agency? They'll hire you. They hire anyone.
I'd never considered office work before. I assumed it was very difficult and specialized because the people in it made so much money in comparison to what I made working really, really hard at jobs that made me stiff and sore for days. Or jobs where I was in a 110-degree metal shipping container used for storage, sorting wood. I figured that life was more or less fair and that the people who got paid five or ten of fifty times what I made at those gigs must be superhuman and their working conditions nearly intolerable.
The temp agency took about two days to get me a 40-hour-a-week open-ended assignment. My boss, who spoke broken English, vaguely pointed to some binders and gave me no idea what I was supposed to do. I was introduced around an unenthusiastic department. It seemed like no one wanted me to bother them, so I sat down at my computer and started playing solitaire. This was the international sales department of a three billion dollar company, and they were paying me ten bucks an hour to play cards with my computer.
It got even weirder. I poked around a little and found out the person I was replacing was depressed (surprise surprise) and no one knew when she would be well enough to come back to work. I played solitaire for about a week, discovered the internet, and spent a lot of time reading my friends' bemused comments that my first-ever e-mail address had a female name. I was starting to rack up the kind of money I used to make in a whole season teaching. At night, I worked on my novel. It seemed like the ideal situation, but I started getting paranoid that they would get rid of me when they found out I wasn't doing anything. More than that, I was just bored.
So I started asking people to give me work to do. Little by little I built up my own load of responsibilities and tried not only to achieve the superhuman task of actually filling a 40-hour week with work, but also to make myself more or less indispensable to the department. Eventually I could cover for any manager there except the very specialized financial people. Two years after I left I ran into the vice president of my division at the movies and he remembered my name--pretty impressive in an office with 3000 employees. I was very popular with the folks overseas as I was usually the one who actually answered their calls and e-mails. The management in Moscow thought I was the head of the department and requested a special meeting with me when they came to visit, much to the chagrin of my actual bosses.
I was into it, more or less. I mean, it wasn't my passion, but I enjoyed certain parts of the job, especially working with people from other countries and learning about the different business cultures. I did notice that the people I liked best were universally hated by the people in my office: the Australians in particular, for having a "cowboy" or overly individualistic corporate culture. Despite a lot of cognitive dissonances like this--I also enjoyed best the work that others hated the most, hated the foods they loved and loved the foods they hated, etc.--it seemed to me that the company needed my skills (especially at the discount rate they were paying) and that if I had a permanent job there I would be able to advance. The company was enormously strapped for personnel, being a non-high-tech firm at a time when only tech jobs were "sexy." And I even had a few advocates. My immediate boss, who interestingly enough had been a Red Chinese official before becoming an American corporate manager, was very impressed with me and tried to make it happen. She even negotiated a raise for me, unheard-of in the temp world, and kept me around when the person I was replacing came back.
After a few months of me applying to open positions in other departments, she took me out to lunch to tell me to look for another job. I wasn't fired; I could work there for as long as I wanted to or needed to, but they were never under any circumstances going to give me a real position.
She couldn't fully explain why; I had known her long enough to be able to tell that the reasons were too impolite for her to feel comfortable talking to about them. It had nothing to do with my performance. So what was it? I guess I just didn't "fit in."
I realized the bland, boring people I worked with were just quiet, grown-up versions of the conformist kids in school who called me "loser" or "weirdo." They probably still did behind my back. I didn't break any rules, but somehow the very intrinsic nature of my being was considered unfit for service to the company. My interests in art, music, and literature were extremely suspect, as were my lack of interest in sports or prime-time television. More than anything, though, I think what made me unemployable in their eyes was my lack of interest in marriage and real estate. They figured once a guy put a down payment on an engagement ring and a tract home a "mere" two hours' drive from work they had him by the short and curlies. Me, I didn't swing that way. One of the "weirdest" things about me was that I lived in the city where the office was instead of driving to the suburbs at night; when I explained that to people it was as if I had told them I lived on the surface of the sun.
I basically feel the same way about corporations as I do about the government, which can be summed up in the words:
STOP TELLING ME HOW TO LIVE.
I don't resent you for controlling all the resources in society, for wasting more than all the world's needy need; it's up to God or whomever to punish you for that. I simply resent you for not being neutral in regards to your constituents' lives and life choices. I hate you for requiring conformity as well as compliance. Just because I don't want to get married and raise a family, just because I have no interest in owning a home, just because I don't drive a car, just because I don't follow sports or keep up with the latest game show or because I have a different hairstyle or like stuff you don't understand, doesn't mean you have to exclude me. Hell, I don't even want any part of your social life, just your economic life. I need to live to, and if you control everything, I obviously can't do that. And if it ever comes down to you versus me, guess which one of us has learned how to fight in his life.
I'm glad now to be past the point in my life of having bosses and a workplace etc. but I will never forget how I was treated in corporate America. I know what it thinks of me and I will never forget it.
|