We Want Your Soul

More than ten years ago I took a break from university thinking I would find a job as a copywriter in a public relations or advertising firm; get out and see what the real world of work was all about. A few months and several hundred resumes later, I found myself working midnights for a pharmacy chain, tearing up old carpeting, moving shelving units around, or cleaning out long-neglected cellars. Another month and several dozen resumes later I scored a job as a "management trainee" at a sports store in the mall. Glad as I was for the steady pay cheque, it was one of the most demoralizing events of my life. And I had yet to attend my first company meeting.

The thing that galled me most about that dead-end sports store job was how the corporation that owned it sought to insinuate itself into my very soul. To anyone who has never worked such a job, this certainly will sound overwrought, exaggerated, and ridiculous. But it's true. I suppose I should count myself lucky that corporation didn't have its own cheer. The quite possibly do by this date.

Yeah, I was hired to sell merchandize, and God help me, I did my best. Yeah, I know I was there to absorb all those company-published binders filled with selling techniques, product information, and miscellaneous motivational tracts. I read it all. What I couldn't handle was the constant unspoken pressure to never take a full lunch-hour. You see, I'm one of these weak, flawed people who needs time to himself. After a morning of straightening shelves and racks that didn't need straightening, trying to sell shit to the odd parents who straggled in, I need some time to recoup my sanity from the crushing boredom -- to use my lunch-hour to read in the food court. This was openly ridiculed, but being a writer and booklover, I was used to how anti-intellectuals viewed books as though they were stink bombs. Worse, woe to anyone worked their eight-hour shift and went home. It was "understood" -- the same way bullies make themselves understood without raising a hand -- that "motivated" workers put in the extra time. Sure, we were paid on commission, so the longer we hung around and sold shit, the more money we'd make. Again, I'm one of these wrongly-programmed, faulty human beings who is tired by the end of eight hours of sheer boredom. Being a writer, I looked forward to an evening of writing, watching movies, or reading, or seeing friends.

In the end, the beancounters at head office asserted themselves and workers such as myself found their base salary cut, and our commission raised ever-so-slightly, so that we had to work twelve hours to earn what we used to make in eight hours.

That was the end of my tenure at the sports store.

A person close to me recently took a job at "big box" store, and quit within weeks of being hired. The "big box" store -- not Wal-Mart -- has its own cheer. It also has a tangled bureaucracy that would make jaded old Russian desk jockeys misty-eyed with nostalgia and envy. The "lifers" -- and there were many -- the people stranded in this place for life, joked that when cut they bled "orange." At least they admitted to bleeding at all when cut -- more than any corporate vampire from that old sports store's head office could claim.

And like virtually every business under the sun, this big box store was run by a conflicting meld of personalities who coalesced to create a united front of people who don't know their asses from holes in the ground. Their approach to employer-employee relations seems to be an amalgamation of Mein Kampf and The Dao of Pooh; setting all employees in a cast to be viewed as recalcitrant high school kids.

Interestingly, the managers of this store selected the person close to me for some specialized training, which no one else in the store received. This was a good thing. However, after a number of scheduling SNAFUs -- that touched the hands of nearly everyone in the store's revolving door of incompetence -- the person close to me simply chose to leave. So, this person leaves with that specialized training the big box store spent all kind of money to provide, seeming to have no thought about attempting to retain this person I know.

This is how the world runs, I know it. No matter how the economy lumbers along, I'm continually amazed that it performs as well as it does given the legion of gimps, assholes, incompetents, ego-maniacs, and just-flat-out-maniacs who man its ranks. Were the world's economy be distilled down to a single rowing team in a single boat, it would be mere seconds before every rowers' paddle snapped because they would be so out of synch.

And it insenses me to no end that this retarded, wall-eyed, lurching leviathan actually puts out its hand each time I take a job and believes I'm willing to put my soul into its sweaty palm. I have not, I will not, and never will.