9/1/97-9/15/97

By the time you read this, I will be alive.

The last few weeks have been, to say the least, eventful. Saying that is kind of a paradox, actually; this month has been intensely eventful, and yet I spent almost every day doing nothing.

As promised, my first day of work for the promotional merchandise company came early Monday morning. In sleepy mindlessness, I chugged some pink vaguely-lemon gritwater and donned my itchy interview clothes (now my itchy job clothes). I briefly surveyed the image of Dilbert personified in my bathroom mirror and marched out the door almost an hour before I was due at work (8:00 a.m. sharp, as instructed by Underling). After all, it had been a long time since I had to get up before the sun did and hack my way through rush hour. Turns out it hasn’t improved; in fact, the city’s insistence on doing construction on every single road everywhere simultaneously has made it worse than ever. In my world, the road crews would consolidate and quickly fix one road area at a time, perhaps even working 24 hours a day in shifts, to ensure that motorist inconvenience was minimized. (Then again, in my world I would carry a scepter and shoot lasers from my eyes.)

I swear, somebody at the highway department is getting kickbacks from the guys who make orange barrels.

The commute was executed flawlessly, and I arrived at work about ten or fifteen minutes early. I was bemused to learn that everyone else was already there; some of these people, despite having children to nurture and family members to snuggle with in bed, had freely chosen to arrive at work as early as 7:00 a.m., “just because”. It summed up my impression of corporate life nicely: people coming early and staying late, not because they were getting more money, not because they wanted to, but just in the hopes of scratching their way up the ladder so that they wouldn’t have to work quite so hard someday in the distant future.

(I later learned that it was necessary, even expected, for some of these people to just surrender their free time to the toil gods. It was the only way some people were able to complete their assigned workload, and it usually happened several times a week.)

My workday began in the 10 x 10 lobby, again waiting to see the face of Underling and trying to resist the urge to smack it. This time, the troll was prompt, and a tour of the facilities ensued.

“This is the break room. That’s the refrigerator for your lunch or snacks. We throw all your food out weekly, so don’t keep it here. That’s a coffee machine. If you empty the pot, make more. Those over there are some offices, but you’ll never go in them. That’s the receptionist’s desk. That’s the receptionist. Behind him is the front door. Don’t go out the front door; there’s a door in the back by the warehouse for employees.”

Underling grinned nervously. “It’s not that we don’t want people to see you or anything like that.” Grin grin. “It’s not like we want you to use the ‘servants’ entrance’ or anything.” Perky grin grin perk. “It’s just... that... the receptionist would go crazy looking at tons of people coming in and out the front door all day!” Grin grin twitch.

As we went to conclude our tour with a look at the servants’ entrance, I figured out why Underling was the locus of evil in the western hemisphere. It wasn’t the damn grinning; it was the forced perkiness that acted as a thin veneer to hide the troll’s cubicle-blackened heart. She was happy happy happy to see you, and it was her job to tell you you’d been fired.

The rear door was indeed in the warehouse. A 7’ tall indoor chain link fence acted as a corridor to the door, separating the merchandise from the thieving employees. The image was potent. Above the door was a dark reflective ball, which I recognized as a “concealed” security camera. I had to smirk; the huge shroud for the camera attracted ten times more attention to itself than the camera alone ever would have. Underling acknowledged it.

“That’s a security camera,” she said, pointing helpfully. She then added much too quickly, “That’s the only place in the building where there’s a camera. We don’t have any in the break rooms, or watching you in the bathroom, or anywhere like that.” She then hurried away as if she’d never said it, leaving me in the office to ponder how completely bizarre and freaky it was.

I took most of the concerns I had about all this overtime and fecal surveillance and swept them under my mental rug. I had more pressing concerns; I didn’t even know how to do this job yet. I was ready to learn, though, yes sir-ee. I had been commanded by Underling that it was absolutely necessary, above even the necessity of my very first honest-to-Jesus surgery, that I arrive promptly at 8:00 a.m. Monday morning. That was when training started. Inflexibly. Period. Monday morning. Bleed all you want; we’re on a schedule, dammit!

Needless to say, nobody had a freakin’ clue what to do with me. The training woman had no intention whatsoever of training me Monday; the very idea seemed ridiculous to her when I told her. The troll who had hired me knew nothing about my training schedule, and the woman who was to train me had no idea I was hired.

Everybody there was very nice, though. Even my boss seemed pleased with me just for being alive. I soon realized why, however; since they had no intention of training me, they quickly decided to give me all of the menial tasks they’d been staying overtime to finish. I actually spent my entire first day making copies of, ironically enough, the training manual. The training woman was too busy not training people to assemble it herself, so she had me make 100 copies of it. Then I punched holes in all the copies. Then I put the copies into 100 binders. Then I put 800 dividers between the chapters in the binders. Then I beat my head on the desk.

For the first time in history, I actually found joy in my lunch hour. Because the Galleria was nearby, I spent my break wandering around the mall, looking at all the things I could suddenly afford again. In my itchy job clothes, I was mistaken for a store manager no less than three times that hour. I sold people on $50 worth of merchandise that the stores might not have even carried. It was a blast.

On Day Two, I ran out of copies to make. They came up with a project for me. It seems a guy named Stan had quit in April, and none of his work had gotten done since. I had to do it. I entered data into a spreadsheet for eight hours that day. And the next day. And the next day. And the next day. And every day the following week.

The training woman, to celebrate my first week on the job, went on vacation. I rescheduled my doctor’s appointment for the next Friday afternoon.

Training began my third week on the job. I learned that my job entailed wearing a Judy-the-Time-Life-operator headset, earphones with a microphone. People would call me, wanting Apple or 3M or somesuch merchandise, and I would type their orders into a computer system that was so old that it looked like something SLU would use. Every order had a special rule; international orders had rules, rush orders had rules. The IQ test made more and more sense.

After a few days of perusing the manual I’d constructed, the training I had waited for did not, as it turned out, require the trainer’s involvement at all. I just had to sit there and watch other people work. It was during this stint that I learned the most alarming thing of all.

At this job, one did not pick up the phone. The phone picked up the worker.

In an attempt to prevent people from ignoring calls, the phone system was given control over the people instead of the other way around. Instead of ringing, the phone just... started. One minute, you were alone; the next, you were in the middle of an order. The system decided when calls began and ended. Workers just rode the wave of noise.

I found this really, really jarring. I’d be sitting there, talking to my new coworker about the job, and with a loud BEEEP we were suddenly on the phone. I felt like I was being experimented on; I expected grad students in lab coats to come out and take my blood pressure any minute.

On the fourth (4th) week, I was scheduled to actually do my job for the first time. After what had turned out to be about four days of training. I must say that, at this point, I did not consider myself unhappy in my work. Sure, it wasn’t exactly fulfilling. I wasn’t keeping people’s houses from burning down. I wasn’t steering the Mars Pathfinder. I wasn’t operating a really cool forklift. But my job did not, to my knowledge, suck. My company wasn’t hiring ten-year-old Guatemalans to sew basketball shoes for ten cents a day. My company was not strip-mining the Pacific Northwest. I got paid to stay home on Labor Day. I had a dental plan. As a first job, it would do nicely for a while.

Then, three days before I started doing my actual job, Jerry called.

Jerry was my manager at the movie theater years ago, until I accidentally got him fired. He didn’t hold a grudge; we’ve been pals for years anyway. Jerry worked for an internet company, a company that promised its clients higher web site traffic by getting other sites and search engines to link to those clients. Jerry and his coworkers surfed the web and sent e-mail for a living. Jerry wanted me to be one of these blessed, blessed coworkers.

Like magic, my current job immediately began to suck.

Jerry and Chris (the man doing the actual hiring) needed a few days to determine if they actually, definitely needed me. As a result, the weekend before the First Week of Real Work felt like living on a fault line. It was head-throbbingly tense: would they really want to hire me? Would they pay enough for me to justify leaving a job the day after training had ended? After being offered a job this cool, how could I ever live with my current job if Jerry’s offer fell through?

I patiently waited until Monday morning. I called Chris before work, in the hopes that I wouldn’t have to go to work at all. (By Monday morning, I had convinced myself that my job was a death camp.)

Chris wasn’t ready. He needed to have a meeting with his boss. He’d call my house in the afternoon.