Love Your Job, Bitch
Published by McBoing February 7th, 2007 in Big Business, Work, Ze Goggles! Zey Do Nothing!, ConformityWell hello! Long time no see! I’m sure nothing whatsoever has happened in my absence. I have actually been writing here goddamn near every day but fucking Marc has scrubbed the archives in fear of… ellipses and incomplete sentences. I cuss too much, apparently, and somebody had to scrub my dirty, dirty, filthy fucking mouth. Fucking dirty, filthy mouth. Do you like that?
I’m Catholic.
Fap is about right, I thought during our AM meeting last week, when the big cat sauntered into the Big Media Co. conference room and told us how much we have to love our jobs, lest we lose them.
“I can hear how much you love your jobs in your voices, and if you’re unhappy, there’s the door,” said Big Cat, oblivious to how inconvenient it is to be called into the office at 7:30am on a whim for an unnecessary meeting about how incompetent the peons of the company actually are, and ignorant of how condescending it is for a salaried VP to march in and tell a bunch of hourly wage slaves to buck the fuck up and smile while we’re treated like shit. Drive your fucking beamer coupe away from me right now, you sack of corporate type-A crap, before I … mumble under my breath, afraid of losing yet another job this year. The majority of the employees present at this meeting were single parents who had to find emergency daycare at the last minute in order to drag their asses into the frigid cold and prop their eyelids open while lectured on the importance of stats. But we loved it so much. I personally thanked Big Cat for gracing us with pie charts (courtesy of incorrect corporate math) before sunrise.
How timely that Ms. Ehrenreich picked up on this very sentiment.
Nobody said it would be easy. In fact, the YES! Attitude takes constant maintenance, and one of the illustrations shows Gitomer wearing a blue work shirt with the label “Positive Attitude Maintenance Department” on his chest. Read something “positive” every day, say “positive things all day long.” Practice being “selfish on the inside” while exuding helpfulness on the outside.
How’s this for positive?: If today is Monday, that means Friday is only four days away.
Don’t be distracted by the crude selfishness. What Gitomer and countless other motivational gurus are recommending is the mentality of a crafty slave: “Oh master, I am SO glad you transferred me to the Dayton accounts (even though they’ve been inactive for 18 months), and, while I’m at it, would you like me to polish your shoes with my neck tie?” Smiles, at least in human society, are gestures of submission, and routinely demanded of women as a token of subordinate status. The happy slave smiles; the well-trained “lady” smiles; now even the male white collar striver has to keep his lips pulled back in an expression of eager compliance. Only the top guys get to snarl and snap their way through the day.
The rest of us are tethered to our cubicles by computerized headsets answering questions like, “You people don’t want my business, do you?” and “Life has been so hard lately. Really, really hard. Can I come in later and pay my bill? Can I?” and “I didn’t order any of those movies. Can you read the titles to me? Slowly?” and try desperately to emulate the perfect worker.
The perfect worker, you see, not only does his or her job efficiently, effectively, and always on time, the perfect worker is adverse to crazy ideas like free will, worker input, and constructive criticism. All employee concerns are registered as complaints, obviously, so the perfect worker is concerned about nothing other than how well he or she can eat a spoonfull of shit and keep a straight face.
Hi! I’m Bambi Eloi, and I’m a genetically altered employee! Morlock BioTech creates workers who lack the protein in the brain responsible for free will. I was born with a biological aversion to unions, benefits and minimum wage! The very idea of a paid vacation gives me the dry heaves!
Since I’m completely unable to make a decision, I’ll do whatever you want, however you want it, whenever you want it! I’m also sterile, so you won’t have to worry about maternity leave!
But truly perfect workers are adverse to paychecks, and that’s why they pay us so little. The very idea of a living wage gives me the god damned vapors. I’m so close to perfect my pearly white teeth hurt.
Join me, PABbers, with your monthly McBoing-ly bitch session. What is the most offensive work-related thing a boss has ever told you?
I really wish this post didn’t have the word “bitch” in the title. And also, I hear “fap” is Finnish for “leaky anus.”
My bad. I always forget profanity is under the jurisdiction of people who decorate their blogs with Confederate flags.
I’ll scrub that in 3… 2… 1…
While hanging out near the soda dispenser of our (as usual) deserted restaurant, my co-workers and I were engaged in a rather witty exchange about how much we made an hour ($2.13). Keith, Manager from Planet Asshole, swooped in to offer these words of encouragement:
“Hey, it adds up.”
I still wonder what would have happened if one of us had stated the obvious (”It would add up over twice as fast if it were minimum wage”). Too bad the welfare-to-work woman hadn’t been there, as she was trying desperately to get fired so that she could go off and find a more convienent job without losing her far more lucrative welfare benefits.
Hell, I didn’t need the job either. I should have said it.
We’re not allowed to swear in titles anymore?
More importantly, the Finnish have a specific word for “leaky anus”? Whaaaa?
I despise cursing. [scrub scrub scrub]
Well, McBoing isn’t a girl, so it’s not scary if he swears.
Manager of Some Stupid Corporate Title: Guess what? The government has decided that they will pay what they said they would pay before they said they wouldn’t pay it. So you’ll be getting a raise in March!!!
Peons who actually do the fucking work: Yeah!!!!!
M: Yes, so the new level for tier 1’s will be $12.50, tier 2’s $14.50, and senior reps $18.00.
P: Yeah!!!!!!!
M: (walking out the door) Oh yeah, any of you over the current wage determination will be reassigned to that level.
P: Whaaa?!?!?
M: Well, the government told us to.
P: So we’re losing all our raises?!?!?
M: Well, only for 2 months. (picking his teeth) And one more thing, instead of 3 weeks of vacation, you’ll now have one, which you won’t get until October, and all sick leave will now be unpaid, and your health insurance costs are going up 200%. But you’re getting a raise! Now get back on the phones!!!! (door slams)
Old woman who can’t get her pills: How stupid do you have to be to get to work there anyway? You’re useless. Why am I even talking to you?
Boss: Are you working at [department B of same organization] tonight? Tell me you’re not working a [15 hour] double shift!?
Me: Um, yea. They really got me with the scheduling…
Boss: I don’t want you working doubles like that. That’s crazy.
(Moments later)
Boss’s Boss: Are you working at [department B of same organization] tonight?
Me: Um, yea–
Boss’s Boss: Fantastic! I’ll see you there!*
But the party never ends. From this exchange, it’s having a customer/client respond to your “hey, what can I do for you?” with “What the fucks the matter with you? Fucking Japan.” Good times.
*(She never shows up that night. I later learn that she often makes these phantom “i’ll be down there to check how things are” comments to our staff.)
I used to be a phone slave for MBNA, back before MBNA got bought by Bank of America. It’s kind of hilarious because I was nineteen and impossibly naive when I got the job, so I believed most of the smoke they’d blown up my ass in training sessions — hilarious, I know, but the most serious job I’d had before then was a tech-support gig that ran from three to midnight and where I saw a manager (not just *my* manager, but *a* manager) twice in six months.
I actually lasted there for a year and a half, through such loveliness as three-sided half-cubicles exactly large enough for a desk (and not for a chair or a person, which meant your ass stuck out into the aisle), raises that didn’t happen, incentive plans that turned out to be worth any serious money only if you worked yourself half to death constantly — but which, if you didn’t hit any of the incentive levels you’d eventually be fired — and the crowning glory: somebody reported a ‘bad smell, like something rotting’ in the general area of my desk, for which I was called down to ‘human resources’ and made to answer for twenty minutes or a half-hour. I mean, in what universe is is reasonable to ask someone if he has a medical problem that might make him smell bad? In what universe is it reasonable to go on from there to imagine maybe somebody’s just left some food in his desk rotting for months and *not noticed*? I finally just said ‘Look, are we done? Because I’ve got *work* to do.’ and left, consoled by the knowledge that it was at least a private humiliation.
Oh, and I didn’t even mention them telling us in so many words to vote for the bankruptcy-reform bill. (No, really. They distributed a memo, the paper copy of which I devoutly wish I’d had the wit to save, saying ‘We can’t ask you to vote for a specific measure, so here’s a page on how bankruptcy reform will make our company incredibly more profitable^W^W^W^W^W^Wsave our company from going under because all these freeloaders keep not paying their bills*, and also if bankruptcy reform doesn’t pass you personally will lose your job, and do the right thing, won’t you?’
* Freeloaders like the woman dying of cancer who called in the hope of getting a small extension to her already-overdrawn credit line in order to pay for medication. I spent an hour and a half on the phone with her, no small thing in a call center where the average call time is under three minutes, both of us crying through a big part of the call, and talked to a half-dozen credit representatives, all of whom said ‘Nope, can’t do anything, life is hard’. If I’d had more sense, I’d have walked out right then, just like with a half-dozen other things.
That place taught me pretty much everything I’ll ever need to know about seriously big corporations and the people who work in them; if I never work in one again, I’ll be happy, and I don’t even care if that means I’ll never make more than double the minimum wage, like I’m doing right now. Hell, that’s more than enough to live on, and what do I care about anything else?
It also taught me just about everything I’ll ever need to know about credit; if you’re clever and you pay attention, you can learn a hell of a lot in a job like that. I’m not talking about stupid bullshit like how to get a low rate or get away with skipping a payment, either. That’s not the lesson; the lesson is in the overwhelming institutional callousness of a business which exists to treat human beings as revenue-generating devices.
The lesson is *also* in class differences. When there’s a special phone queue specifically for rich people, and that queue is handled by specially trained representatives who have much more than the usual leeway for doing things like fee waivers and delinquency removal and credit-line increases, it’s difficult to miss the point, you know? Likewise when one of the innumerable VPs calls and you learn that, yeah, they really can abuse the phone staff with impunity. Hell, who’s going to call them on it? (It’s pretty goddam amazing to see how they use their cards, too. $25000 at a time like it’s *nothing*.)
my old boss called me in for a performance review once and said that everything about my actual work was fine but that he was concerned I , and that some people had come in and complained … mind you, this was an office full of grumpy, grumbley, anti-social scientists and researchers who hardly raised their head as they walked down the hall, but I think because I was female and a secretary, i was supposed to go out of my way and overcome my natural inclination to shyness to personally greet and smile at each person I passed in the halls
concerned I didn’t smile at people enough in the hallways. that’s what that meant to say above, but it for some reason dropped off mid-sentence at “concerned that I.”
I worked at a local hotel a few years ago at the front counter. When I started, there were two gals and two guys that worked there. The gals had these awful uniforms that were dresses while the guys merely wore their own slacks, button-up shirts and ties. They didn’t have a dress/uniform for me so they ordered one. When it came I took it home and stuck it in the closet and continued to wear my own (pants) suits.
One of the gals got pissed because I wasn’t wearing the shitty uniform, so when the three of us were together one day she brought it up to the General Manager (and me).
I said, “First, the guys don’t have a uniform. Second, the women’s uniform only comes as a dress. Third, I’m wearing business attire and we’ve yet to have a negative comment from the guests.”
In the end, the three of us gals went and bought our own suits and the GM cut us checks to reimburse us.
The daughter of the owner came for a site visit one day and asked me why I wasn’t in uniform.
I told her that the women’s uniform only came in a dress and also pointed out that my male co-workers didn’t even have a uniform.
“Yes, well, I think women look much better in dresses,” she said to me.
I eyed her up and down. She was wearing a fucking pants suit.
I said, “What you just said is sexist. I’m not wearing a uniform that only comes in a dress for women, while my male co-workers do not have a uniform to even speak of, and I’m especially not going to wear it because you think I’d look better — since I’m female — in a dress.”
She conceded.
I still have the uniform, packed in a box in the basement.
I just miss working in radio. Goddammit.
Great stories, from everyone in the thread, though. Major props.
I once had a boss who forced us to practice karate in the lobby during all of our breaks.i worked at a movie theater, so this was definitely NOT job related.
i also had a boss (different) put a sign on the employee message board indicating that I and another employee were too fat, and that everyone should take any food we brought in before we could eat it. That one I got fired - although amazingly enough, not for that. It was for her later calling one of the other staff members by a racial slur - in front of customers. The sad part is I doubt she would have been fired if the customers hadn’t been there.
Should I even mention the boss who accused me of not wearing a bra and wanted me to prove that I was?