I am very confused by “money.”€ These numbers that appear only to disappear, only to appear again in some account floating around online. I get a “paycheck”€and add some more numbers. I swipe some card and offer up my invisible currency to a store and return home with a dozen eggs. Isnt the National Debt something like 38 TRILLION dollars? If the US can continue on while 38 trillion dollars in debt, who cares about my student loans?
“What is the alternative?”€ my friend will ask me.
“Bartering, duh! We need to go back to that. Let me master the skill of harvesting corn and here if you want a few cobbs, trade me some of your pumpkins. You knit a rug out of dry grass clippings? Amazing! Would you like a cup I melded using sea glass that took me months to collect from the ocean? That would be living! That would be humans being skillful! Being savvy! Being a collective unit who depend on one another to survive!” I convey all this passionately, with conviction.
“Sounds like that show Naked and Afraid,” my friend says, after some thought.
Because of all these invisible numbers, I must spend five days a week concealed in a white walled room with florescent lights and no windows. I only have to spend exactly eight hours a day there, but when the hours are 8 to 4 with no lunch break it starts to feel like you never leave this white box. The white box haunts your life because everyday you escape it, the unnerving feeling that you must return the next day just haunts you.
I am talking about the corporate world, a world where people surrender all joy, all imagination, all creativity and all human emotion and spend their days seated on a tush cush writing emails that all begin the same and end the same.
Good morning,
Happy Monday! I hope this email finds you well. Fantastic to connect with you. Blah blah. Please let me know if you have any questions or feedback- I look forward to hearing from you! Thank you!
With gratitude,
Jennifer.
Sometimes I type out what I wish I could write just to feel something again.
Good morning,
There is absolutely nothing happy about Monday and I want to go home. I hope, sincerely, that this email never finds you, I hope you find yourself. I hope youve been set free.
With sadness,
Satan.
I know one day I will accidentally send something like this. When that day comes, the florescent lights will begin to flicker slightly, before all power turns off and I slowly rise, finally levitating out of the room. Leaving all my co-workers completely traumatized and in therapy for the rest of their lives.
The reason I have waived my lunch, is so that I can work a full eight hours, and also be able to pick up my son, Noah, from preschool. I would do anything for Noah, and if it means being chained to a desk, except for two ten minute breaks, I will. If you are a person who has a lot of energy, both physically and mentally, sitting still and staring at excel sheets is almost like being in prison. When I have a ten minute break sometimes I will try to expel my excess energy, similar to a toddler, by running up and down the employee stairwell of the hotel, arriving back at the office out of breath and slightly sweaty. After our HR Director began to take notice of this, I was told this was not acceptable. But luckily, outside the office walls, in the streets of Downtown Los Angeles, it is acceptable to walk around fully nude or wearing a ski mask and banging a frying pan with a stick over your head. So now I resort to the streets, where I truly belong. I speedwalk a block away from the hotel, out of sight from anyone lurking, and then run free, down the streets, dodging degenerates and jumping over all the bodies laying across the sidewalk.
My relationship with Corporate HR is like ice skating across a layer of ice that is slowly melting. Often I am called into the office where I realize I am being watched all day long, and my behavior is unacceptable. Everything from my laughter, my outfits, my need to take too many restroom breaks, it’s all under a microscope, and I have developed early onset Parkinsons as a result. “Where are you going every hour? It’s not like you are servicing events,” HR will ask me and I will be lost in the fact that she has lined her lips with lip liner but no lipstick. “I have to go to the bathroom,”€ I will reply, my hands tremoring. “Well, you need to tell everyone then, it’s a professional courtesy.” She scolds me, her lips two thin flat dark red line. So now everytime I use the restroom, I stand in the middle of the office and announce to everyone, humiliated, “I AM GOING TO THE RESTROOM.”€ One day I want to say “potty,”€ like how Noah will announce to me, “Mama, I have to go potty,”€and then scamper away while pulling down his pants in a panicked rush. Once everyone knows that I am answering natures call, not sneaking off to do cocaine, I will go to the fourth floor bathroom, weep silently in a stall, and return to my desk, defeated like a shaky little kitten.
“Your dress is inappropriate,”€ HR will tell me scanning my dress that reveals, scandalously, my shoulders. “Also, your shoes,”€ she will add and we will look together at my feet. “They have to be closed toe,”€she will say, looking at my exposed feet with strappy heels like I was walking around wearing a thong, my ass exposed to the world. “You could trip and fall,” she explains, adding, “we care about your safety.” I only heard “we dont want to pay you workers comp if you get injured or worse deal with a lawsuit that will be headache and too much paperwork on our end.”
“I could trip and fall in closed toe heels,” I pointed out, adding, “or even no heels at all. I could just fall down.” She raises one eyebrow at me and I apologize for my critical thinking. The rest of the day I walked around wearing my long trench coat, which in my opinion, was more alarming than my black dress. An arm, a foot is one thing. But a tall figure, covered up in a lumpy coat, walking down dimly lit halls in a hotel screams guns, knives, bombs, danger and threat. Now I wear the same thing everyday- a black shirt, a black blazer, black lady trousers. One day I paired it all with black converse and I felt like Ellen Degeneres all day. It was not a good look for me, aestheticlly, emotionally, or spiritually.
“It’s all about optics,”€ HR will carry on. “That one day I walked into the office and you were speaking to a colleague and you scattered back to your desk at the sight of me,”€she was leveling me with her eyes. “That is not ok.” It is true that if I am anywhere not near my desk and an executive appears, I scatter like a little roach, to the safety of my desk. But it is because days earlier I was being scolded about leaving my desk. Whereas long as I am seated and answering phones and making clicking noises from a keyboard, I am safe to be an invisible cog in the machine of capitalism.
The top of the food chain, is a man, who is French. He also shares a working space with me, to his dismay, as well as mine. “JEHNIFURZ, I LUHVE LAUGHTAHR, BUT PLEAZE ZTOHP.”€I must be heckling out of control like a lunatic, like a Julia Roberts chortling laugh, one that is just horrendous and disruptive. In my shame, now when my colleague answers a call and has to explain to a guest that no, the steamer in the closet is not a hair dryer, I just have to remain silent. I will stare at the white blank wall in front of me and think of things like racism, or the current price of a dozen eggs, anything depressing and not appropriate to laugh at.
We have a Transient Sales Director, Paul, who only works at our location one day a week and on Tuesdays he will sit at the desk next to mine. We both have kids around the same age, so sometimes we will share stories. Like how Pauls wife accidentally curses around Koa, his three year old, and now when Koas flashlight doesnt work, he will adorably say, “Oh Fug.”€ Frenchman does not like this one bit and has now condemned Paul from sitting next to me. Similar to a teacher discipling fourth graders. “Paul is not allowed to sit next to Jennifer.”€ Paul now has to work out in the open space, away from anyone who may ask him how his family is. There is no time for that in the workspace. Emails have to be answered IMMEDIATELY, and chit chat is the killer of productivity. You can’t get anything done finding humor in things that happen throughout the day. Wildly laughing like some sort of deranged cavewoman who doesnt understand the rules of civilized society.
Paul was also mentioned to me in a meeting with HR. “I have never seen a Director take a subordinate out for coffee or lunch,”€she said to me, again raising one of her penciled in eyebrows and bearing a striking resemblance to the pro wrestler The Rock. I stared back at her, my own eyes turning completely black. “You and our GM have lunch together everyday?” I wanted to point out, but that would only bury me. I decide though, to step one foot in the grave and I say, “Paul also takes other people out for coffee, not just me? Is it not ok to get a coffee with a co-worker?”€She will shift in her seat, annoyed, “its all about OPTICS.“€ Paul and I, in life, are of similar age with kids the same age, but in the office I am nothing but a subordinate who needs to send him the BT Report before 9:30 every morning.
Corporate ugly is suppressing everything bright and colorful about the human soul deep deep inside yourself where it will remain to rot or turn grey and dull in the honor of professionalism and collecting the most invisible numbers. This suppression is critical for survival, specifically when you know that immediately after any conversation you have with HR, whatever you said will be reported back to all the executives, for them to all discuss without you present.
One time I was in the restroom too long and I had to sit with my hands in my lap and tell HR that I was on my period, please forgive me my sins- like I was a woman of capture in The Handmaidens Tale. Which HR then reported to the executives- she is excused this time. I cannot believe my menstrual cycle was something discussed among them all- isnt there money to be made? Arent you important executives with very important executive level things to do? Also, may I respectfully point out, on the streets this would be considered gossip or even shit talk. This behavior would get you shot by someone named Smooth. But in the corporate world it is called human resources. It’s all about optics.
Corporate world is composed of many individuals who are ranked by their salaries and everyone is expected to kiss ass accordingly. If you are sitting at the top, it’s like all your shortcomings or errors must be overlooked and ignored because of the power of their position. Is this why people want to be on the top and rich? While I, an insubordinate peasant, see the people at the top as they are and how they treat me and others around me- and from what I’ve experienced, it’s pretty fucking rude and unkind. This is the reason I will be forever poor. There are characteristics I respect very highly, and characteristics I do not. I never witness these characteristics in “executive leadership.” I’ve always found them in all the scrubs on the bottom who aren’t important enough to carry business cards. I dont care about your title or “power”€ over me. Realityz check! Zis is life baybee! Big picturez! Youz cant take your invisible moneyz or excel sheetz with you when you die! Only your experiences and how you made others feel! But not in corporate life. The upper echelons believe they are treating people well, because they are the decision makers of that too. Decorum is decided by those at the top and everyone must follow suit. When my French boss yells “HOO-HAH!”€at a meeting, we all must be right there behind him, HOO-HAHING as well. What a charismatic leader! We are all so lucky!
Below the French Dictator is our Director of Sales, a tiny man who wields his tiny bit of power with great enthusiasm. “You answer my emails first, I am the priority,” he will tell me. And when I fail him, which sometimes, I answer accountings email before his own, he will punish me in a number of various ways:
- Find fault in anything and everything I do. Gleefuly pony trotting over to my desk to point out your mistake and make me feel like I am an absolute idiot, even though he asked me who Anne Frank was just the other day.
- Freeze me out.
- Gather his other Director goons to all pick on me in embarrassing meetings centered around my failure to please him.
- Go to HR and complain about me and arrange more meetings.
- Deny any time off requests I ask for.
- Give me write ups that are, again, more meetings, but without the audience of the team of directors, so twenty minutes of him blatantly degrading me.
There was a day when he used the word “retarded”€while yelling at one of our revenue managers and we complained to HR. “Hes supposed to be representing leadership,” we said. “Is this a good representation of all you assholes?”€
He actually did get reprimanded by HR and afterwards he called out of work for three days- he basically hid from us. Upon his return he used his company card to buy us all salads from Sweetgreen. Never once was there an honest conversation or apology, or even accountability taken.
I would have had a lot of respect for him had he sat us down sans bribery salads, and just said, “I am sorry.”€
He believes he is the leader of his team but really he is a man with no country. We all cant stand him and quite frankly hate working for him. And we are not his original team, we are the team erected after his first one all quit on him.
Sometimes I can get him to show true human emotions- if it relates entirely to him. But revolving around him is absolutely exhausting and whats worse is he somehow believes that he actually is very caring and accommodating to others-though every€”nice”€thing he does for you is held over your head and used against you later. Its all psychological warfare.
But these dummies thrive in corporate America. Corporate America was built entirely for them. They are clowns armed with a high amount of invisible numbers that they weaponize and use to treat others horribly. To validate their existence and never have to look inward, or gain any perspective.
I fantasize about things all day while sitting at my desk. Cutting the phone cords, writing REDRUM in blood on the white wall above my computer, answering the phone “thank you for calling The Department of National Security.”€ Relaying information- “Yes, the email is S for sinus infection, t for tsunami, e for exorcism, p for pilfer, h for hallelujah…”€ Introducing coworkers via email- “allow me to introduce our Reservations Manager, Edgar Allen Poe, who will be able to add your Marriot points to your account. If he doesnt respond right away its because he is in a state of despair and tending to his ravens.”€ The environment turns my soul to chaos. Destruction, terror and mayhem the only cure.
Where do the creative happy people go? Im convinced its Trader Joes.
€
Word Vomit 