Do It For The Children

Sit down, sit down. And how are you today? Great, that’s just great. Wonderful, even. Have a good weekend? Super, just super. Now, I just wanted to have a word with you about the management program you’ve shown interest in and maybe gauge where you’re at developmentally-speaking. We both know you’re a good worker, but there’s much more than hard work involved when it comes to management and I think you know what I’m talking about. Yes, two words.

Volunteer work.

Volunteering is a very important part of the culture here at SoulDestroyingMultinationalCorp, as you well know. We feel that taking an interest in the community is more than just a nice thing to do; here at SDMC, we see volunteering as a responsibility, a vital component of our brand image — an image, I might add, that has been polished to a high lustre by hundreds – no, millions – of hours of volunteer service by management and underli – er, teammates alike.

Now, you have made it well apparent through your work ethic that you are both a go-getter and a self-starter, a team player who values hard work, even harder currency, and knows how to kiss just the right amount of ass so as not to come off as an outright ass kisser. In other words, you, my friend, are management material. The only problem is, I do not see much volunteer history on your resume. No, sorry — serving coffee at union meetings does not count. In fact, doing anything union-related actually counts as negative volunteer hours, so you had best pipe down while you’re still ahead.

You see — and this is just between you and me — no one here actually gives a shit about the people on the receiving end of our bankable volunteer hours. I mean hey, look at me, I might donate flavour crystals and old floppy disks to the local English as a Second Language school but I’ve never lost any sleep over starving Africans. I mean really, Africa isn’t even a real country, is it? Certainly not. Sure, they might have a flag and an anthem, but… well, do they? I really don’t know — No no, don’t answer me; that was a rhetorical question. Anyways, where was I?

Right, volunteering. 

Volunteering sends a message. What message is that? No — stop trying to answer me. Do you want to be part of the management team or not? The message volunteering sends is this: “I am willing to work a few extra hours here and there without expectation of monetary compensation.” This is the most important message one can send if one wishes to be considered for the management team. Now, wait just a minute now – you wipe that smug look off your face. You think you’re better than me? I’ve given twenty years of my life — the best twenty years of my life, to this company. How long have you been here? A year and a half. Indeed! I bet you don’t even have a drinking problem yet. In fact, I’d be willing to bet you have a happy home life, a wife who loves you and children that don’t cringe at the mere mention of your name. Ha, I’m right, aren’t I? I bet you can even remember every moment from last weekend, no – every weekend from the past five years! I bet you’ve never even drank a quart of rum in five gulps and blacked out on the sofa for twelve hours when you were supposed to be watching your kids. Huh? Not so smug now, are you? Ha.

Now get back to your pod. I’m disappointed, but I’m not going to let you ruin my day. I just bought some new plexiglass polish for my twenty-year service cube and I want to try it out before I have to go to the airport. Yeah, that’s right: I’m volunteering tonight. The assistant VP of upper eastnorthwestern regional marketing and logistics, beta division – no, not like the VCR – is coming in for a sales-lead powwow and I get to pick him up, maybe grab a bite to eat, few drinks and, if it goes as well as last time, maybe squeeze in a massage later on. I’m getting quite good, you know. Upper management says I have the hands of a much younger man. I credit the booze. It’s a preservative, you know.

And once and for all, wipe that goddam smug look off your face!

Bathroom Woes

The mens washroom at my place of employment is a real horrorshow (not to be confused with real horrorshow, which is the exact opposite of my intent). I cannot speak for that of my female coworkers, but judging by some of the smells that come wafting hence, I can only assume a similar sight lies in wait beyond that foreboding orange door. Revolting — and the last thing anyone wishes to endure in the dying hours of their otherwise nausea-free shift. I try to avoid the entire area during that daily juncture, when a full complement of workers sit pod-bound and thus occasionally stall-bound — the crossover period, shall we say — but duty, as they say, calls.

During this time, between five and seven, the bathrooms can become downright overpopulated and the air quality takes a hit — a boot to the groin, if you will. It becomes unbearable. The worst sorts of human smells imaginable, all mixing together in a sensory stew that would gag a maggot.

Once you get settled into your business, the stall interior becomes a feast for the eyes. Granted, not a very good feast. Sort of like barbecued dog food. Have you ever really taken a look at your surroundings when crouched in a quasi-public bathroom stall? Horrible, horrible stuff. The people I work with are absolute barbarians. Dried finger-flung boogers hang from the institutional white cinder block walls. The flimsy metal door is smeared with shit of “beneath fingernail” origins, judging by the shape. What the hell was going on? Just calm down, son. There is never any reason, outside of plumbing related endeavours, to become soiled with one’s own excrement while at work. At least have the decency to use a piece of toilet paper.

Maybe the culprit used this as a means of entertainment, a “break up the routine” exercise. Or it may have been mere thickheaded laziness. Either way, the results sit approximately one and a half feet from my face at least once every night. No one ever cleans it. What, you think I should take it upon myself? Hell no, friend. I might as well eat a bag of frozen, preformed hamburger patties. Sheer madness.

But I won’t change stalls — it’s the best one, the only one with a wall on one side. This allows for more room and room is everything isn’t it? Unfortunately there isn’t sufficient quantities thereof in this shit shower of a room. Things both animate and non are in far too close a proximity to one’s person at all times like some sort of invisible bathroom fog of unpleasantness. It sucks.

So maybe I should cut down on the fibre.

I Sit In a Pod

I sit in a pod. This is my essential existence, which is to say that if one were to compile a catalogue of photographs taken on the hour, every hour, of me doing whatever it is I’m doing at that juncture (au natural – or as close as one can get to it these days) and proceeded to fashion a crude flip-book from the resulting images, the effect would be that of a stationary subject/object, seated, face illuminated by the other-worldly glow of a computer screen with the odd blurred figure rushing past in the background every ten photos or so to serve as a reminder of the highly managed climate-controlled pseudolife taking place on the perimeter.

Of course, I haven’t actually tried this. Nor have I asked anyone if they would consider taking it on as a sort of personal project, a document of: a) the times, b) my generation, or c) the ever-expanding employment segment foisted on people my age as the only sweat-free and thus, respectable, post-graduate commercial undertaking – one depending on and back-feeding the crippling depression and sloth which drains the ambition to actually do anything other than ponder the vast possibility of some alternative fantasy land: office “work”.

Neither of my grandfathers sat in a pod. They hauled pulp and gravel in trucks whose oil and grease worked its way into the folds of their skin, marking their flesh like arteries on a road map. They built sawmills, houses and communities with the same hands that furrowed the soil. Providing sustenance and guidance without ever once stooping to the so-called man. Rising early, going to bed the same. A life of labour understood beyond mere commodity; drinking clean water from their own wells, and sweating it out in rivulets from under rolled-up shirtsleeves, beading on their brows and the backs of their necks, moistening calloused hands.

Ambition was more than mere ideological rhetoric before the invention of convenience, when “factory farm” seemed a contradiction of terms – long before Ray Kroc got his greasy paws on a milkshake machine. Farmers were more than a cuddly novelty for rock-stars and politicians to rub elbows with when convenient, to remind their consumers and constituents of their marketable working-class roots. The “ambitious” Maritimers of my generation have forsaken the land of their forebears.

The land and those who worked it were the backbone of a rural population, a former majority that has since thinned away to nothing but a tree-laden suburbia, its exposed ribs barely weathering the flurry of our culture’s left-right combinations of greed and complacency. Bruised and bloodied against the ropes, eyes swollen purple-skinned and gaunt, locked in a purgatorial standing eight count.

Sweat is dirty, sweat is evil and we have myriad products designed to stamp it out or cover it up. No one can make a living wage through sweat-inducing jobs anymore since they’ve mostly been replaced by machines, with the notable exceptions being that of prostitute and professional athlete.

So I sit in a pod. And maybe I should suck it up.