Smile for the Gamma Ray Burst

About a decade ago, I was working at (Insert Corporate Office Supply Store) as a warehouseman, floor walker and all-around low-level logistics flunky. Nearly 40 years old and wearing a corporate polo shirt and a nametag once again, I wanted to shotgun blast my head off, gone in an explosion of pink mist and a blood spatter pattern on a slumlord’s already ragged wall and ceiling. When I had to go to work at that job (one of two I had), I prayed nearly daily for a quick and painless death: one of the heavy pallets of paper stored up high falling on me and instantly crushing the life out of me, a freak explosion of the cardboard compressor I was feeding endless boxes into, or poisoned cookies in the breakroom by a demented mass murderer of a coworker, anything to stop the shame of backtracking into an entry level, corporate retail gig at this late stage of my life. Social media didn’t help either. Through their pictures and posts, it seemed as if nearly every single one of my contemporaries (college friends and townies) were at the level that a middle-aged college grad or skilled tradesman with over a decade on the job should be: married, school aged kids, vacations abroad to exotic locations (season tickets to Disneyland for fuck’s sake), brand new cars and of course home ownership. Then came the chorus line of ARM loans snapping back to the tune of mass foreclosures and the banking fraud/housing bubble collapse that cut enough of my friends back down to the bone to give my misery some much needed company. Fucked up as that sounds, that gave my will to live a boost. The other two factors that kept my spirits up was my other job as a Language Arts Instructor at a local JC and the fact that while I may have been a worker bee at paper, pen and ink-cartridge central, I wasn’t one of the Sisyphean, sad-sack managers trying to scale the wobbly and greased up corporate ladder at that company, especially after hearing about “The Retreat.”

The heads of this company, like the top structure of most major corporations, come from a protected class of wealth sheltered sociopaths cast so far enough afield from the real world as to not comprehend the simple economics that the greed and hubris their fellow travelers inflict upon the masses in other areas and those effects that circle back on them. Hence, the bursting of the housing market leads to a slow down in housing construction which leads to a slowdown in contracts and purchase orders which means people don’t need as much fucking paper, pens, ink cartridges, etc., along with the pencil pushers, secretaries and support workers that come to the store to buy them as they join the ranks of the unemployed. The only people who did better in the early days of the Great Recession were the coffee house chains, the producers of sudoku books and crime scene cleanup crews. That’s a simple way to put a complex economic equation, but that’s the reality at the street level that anyone down here can witness first hand. Also, for several years, my two days a week at the local community college 15 miles away down the 91 FWY (a road that historically gets “mother-fucked” with road rage curses) were turned into a quick trip due to the roads being nearly “I Am Legend” clear because enough people were out of work. Unfortunately, the suits at the top of the pyramid don’t have this base perspective and start scrambling in the dark for reasons behind the sudden economic downturn in their sector and more importantly their stock portfolios tanking. It couldn’t be because their ivy league brethren in the banking field screwed the pooch so hard as to put enough people on the soup lines to stem the need for both office workers and the products they purchase. It must be something else that the people at the bottom are doing wrong, so send in some ridiculously high paid experts and consultants to fix this problem.

One weekend, almost all the various levels of management were gone. I came in for my normal Friday afternoon to evening close shift to the two new, freshly promoted assistant managers running the entire show with no upper or even midlevel management in sight. The two guys were a couple of young, homies from the local barrios who had put in their time for several years with solid work and earned their new rank. They didn’t seem happy though. They were bummed they couldn’t be at a hotel on the coast with the rest of the store’s management — the GM, the four section/store managers, and a half a dozen assistant managers — all on the company dime. When I questioned the new bosses, they said the rest of the managers were at some regional corporate “retreat” for the weekend. Only these two young bucks’ new positions and responsibilities had overridden their grief about feeling left out; that would change the following Saturday, when a mandatory 6AM “morale boosting” meeting with all hands on-deck would be held to disseminate the new changes from the head office.

Cult members have a certain look in their eyes. It’s a glazed-over effect that seems to come from not blinking as much, and the tear-ducts overcompensating for the cessation of normal processes. They also nod a lot and smile for no reason. I know this because, even prior to this job, I’ve experienced these types of folks first hand several times during my life, and each is a novel sized rant on its own. At 6AM sharp on the next Saturday morning, after closing the previous night and getting maybe three hours of sleep, I had to face several of these members of their corporate cult, namely the very vested upper management and several of the assistants whose dreams had been assimilated into this extension of the corporate Borg. Realistically speaking, there’s nothing that can boost my morale at 6AM of any morning short of being handed the winning Powerball ticket rolled into a coke straw on a mirror next to a Tony Montana size pile of blow by a trio of nude yoga instructors in some nearly impossible Kama Sutra pose, much less the dictates and drivel of a company floundering in the same economic bog and hemorrhaging with the rest of the country but too stupid to realize that everything and fucking everyone is connected. The catered Starbucks coffee and pastries was a nice touch though.

Despite her corporate programming, the GM, who I’ll call Mrs. Potato Head due to her uncanny resemblance, was a nice enough lady. I’ve had far worse bosses in my many jobs, and the only ire I could ever gather from her against the company was that she lived in a town 45 miles away and had to commute here, and the GM who worked the store in her hometown lived locally near our store and had to commute the opposite direction, and there was nothing either of the two of them could do to convince corporate to switch them up. The top brass felt it was good for company morale to have managers that worked other stores outside of where they lived. Spoken like people who truly live in a golden bubble that somehow magically doesn’t include rush hour traffic. So, of course a 6AM meeting on a Saturday morning in full work gear is how you get the rest of the slaves to scream “GO TEAM!” With coffee and croissants in hand, we sat down in the area set up for the conflab and were then given the burning bush wisdom from off the top of the mountain and down to our little ears: we weren’t selling enough product because we weren’t greeting the customers correctly; “Good morning. How can I help you?” just wasn’t good enough to overcome the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression, and they had a magic bullet, a spell as it was, to make things right again.

Before I give away their much longer version of “Anáil nathrach, ortha bhas betha, do cheol déanta,” I’ll say that the meeting came with a Power Point slide show including pictures of the two glorious days and nights they spent at some midline chain hotel with a connected convention center, and because it was on the beach, the same rooms professional call-girls would take their car salesman and small business owner clientele to a bit further inland for 80 bucks a night probably cost the company a pretty penny, even with entire floors being bought out. None-the-less, we were treated as close as media could bring us to the complete immersion of the experience felt by management. Through the slide show, we were able to see that they were made to sit through lectures by regional management big wigs (several that looked like characters from David Cronenberg films), a high dollar key note speaker who developed the program and concept being taught, perform workshops and do “team-building exercises” in between the brainwashing sessions; imagine the “Manchurian Candidate” training meets an Amway gig being run by a low rent, wannabe Tony Robbins that included a sack-race, trust-falls, complex group patty-cakes routines and cheering, lots of group chants and cheers, one of which the management team performed for us. I looked over to one of the new management homies I mentioned before, gave him my best John Belushi one eye up, and I could see him shaking his head and contemplating his life choices. To an ex-cholo gang-banger cleaning up his act and getting right with Jesus and society, humping freight and doing logistics has a machismo bent to it. The kind of up with people, prep-school antics on display was hitting him even harder than me, because my time there was temporary until I could find the next better job; he had plans to stay. Had.

By the end of the two-hour meeting, we were told by Mrs. Potato Head that the way to increase our sales in these just shy of John Steinbeck Dust Bowl days was merely to say to incoming customers, “Good (insert time of day). Welcome to MY (Corporate Office Supply Store). My name is (state your first name). Is there any product or service I can help you locate in our store today?” If I had been awake enough, I would have been flabbergasted at the entire situation, but that would have to wait until I had a full night’s sleep and come in for my next shift when I would have management lurking about every corner, nook, crook and cranny and haunting us like ghouls in an effort to make sure we were parroting this mouthful of hot garbage to the poor souls who had crossed our retail threshold. First off, treating everyone who comes in like they just hit a fast-food drive-thru is insulting, especially to highly trained executive secretaries and paralegals who know the store layout and products better than most of the low-level workers because they had been coming there longer than many of the poor gimps on the workplace attrition merry-go-round. Secondly, that’s a long greeting. These people are in a rush and mostly know what they want. I seldom made it past my name before being curtly shut down, sometimes with a raised hand and a smart business pantsuit blurring off in the distance toward the legal binders. The only people who would stand there for the entire greeting were the elderly looking for scrapbooking supplies and the paint-huffers who were coming in for our cheap two-packs of aerosol computer cleaners.

Thankfully, I really didn’t give a shit about that new directive and gave it up fairly quickly. My time there was coming to an end with another education job on the line, and even without the new work, I still wouldn’t care. It was stupid, top down stupid. Everybody knew it, probably most of all the miniature Tony Robbins grifter who sold it to the big brass for several mid-six-digit regional seminars, but I’m sure he was a school chum from Wharton or Harvard or Yale they were throwing a skull & bone to, another high dollar con in Scamerica to the only people who matter, the born rich. As my last few weeks there wound down, even most of the management began to slide a bit in their attention to detail in our delivery of the greeting, but they had that “Mormon group fear” that someone else is watching and waiting to report them, so when other management were present they were harder edged on enforcing the corporate will. In those tougher financial times, the only way to really move up was to backstab your management competition above you to take their space and a buck more an hour, which I saw happen there and was truly one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen, other than that Power Point slide show of “The Retreat.”