My god, I thought, this place will kill me one day… The door squeaked shut behind me; there was no turning back.
The second floor of the office was as wide as a football field, with a maddening yellow tent and the stench of stale coffee and bleached paper. There was an unnerving clattering of phones, fax machines, and keyboards filling the ether. I walked past a massive whiteboard where Management, presumably, had pinned a collection of corporate slogans to reinforce our programming: Tactical versus Strategic Decision-Making . . . How to Champion the Customer Experience . . . Striving For Excellence, Everyday!
At the bottom was a warning: Welcome to the B Line Family! It was going to be a hell of a first day at my First Real Job.
Walking around, the employees looked busy. Their mouses and keyboards were moving but I had a creeping suspicion very little of anything was being accomplished. I studied one such pencil-pusher long enough to notice him moving numbers in excel over three columns, and then after some pretend action on his keyboard he moved them back. It was a good move, and it got him that much closer to 5pm.
Some of the workers wore collared shirts and slacks. Others wore jeans and ill-fitting polo shirts, as if to say—well shit, what’s the point? This was no McKinsey & Company. That was abundantly clear to everyone. As a career choice, this place was a fallback, a last resort, a surrender. Just being there, I felt my ambition breaking, my ideal of a hard day’s work a laughingstock. Meaningful work? Forget about it. This was my new reality now; there were broken dreams in every direction.
Now the challenge would be, how to square my two incongruent worlds?
The night before my first day, we smoked and held one more shitty band practice—your typical Richmond Day. Both floors of the duplex got together. Desmond, Morgan, Sammie, all the guys. By the end of the night, the trashcan was overflowing with emptied PBR cases, pizza boxes, organic hemp rolling papers, and scraps from the plywood wall we constructed out back to control the flow of traffic during our previous house show. Those crowds got out of control and we felt that a wall was the most sensible solution.
After everyone had stumbled home for the night, I wheeled the trashcan to the curb and it felt symbolically like the end of an era.
I climbed upstairs and began preparing for my first day. I prepped the coffee machine because I thought, this is what adults do. Then I began setting out my clothes and, good lord, was my outfit a disaster. It made sense that I had no good clothing options—I had spent the last 4 years buying my denim at thrift stores pretending like only squares and sellouts worked in corporate offices. And now they had my ass. Maybe there’d be 10 PTO days a year for some dreaming, but other than that, I was already a deadman.
The clothes were sitting there on my desk: cheap, ill-fitting, oddly shiny, and I hoped maybe they’d look better in the morning.
When I was young, my dad would steam his dress shirt and wear a tie and leave for some kind of office job every morning. Procurement, he told us, without that meaning a thing to me. But there was a house and a new car every few years and money never seemed to be a problem, so we didn’t question it. Then he’d return home around 6 pm everyday—day after day, year after year, all very predictable. Have a great day at work! How was your day at work? What do you do for work? Is work going well? It was as if I was doomed for some kind of world of following manuals.
My alarm buzzed and when I woke up I was disappointed to see that pile of clothes was still there—unchanged, still pathetic. I pulled on the gray slacks first. They were cheap polyester with a curious shine to them. We stopped going to church when it became inconvenient, so I hadn’t tried them on in years. Next, I tucked in a crummy maroon dress shirt and slipped into argyle socks that didn’t match. My big toe was approximately two days away from poking through. My belt was too large so I jammed a hole through it with a screwdriver. Last but not least, a pair of $20 dress shoes that looked like a prop of themselves.
On my way out of the house Desmond was twirling his dreads in front of the microwave reheating coffee. His eyes were barely open and the fact both of us were up before 8am seemed to be perplexing.
Shit! You scared me man…
Sorry Desmond, I was just getting ready.
Ohhh yah… your first day, right?
Yeh…
Well good luck with your Logistics, Chris, I’m proud of you bro.
Thanks Desmond. It’s a real accomplishment, isn’t it.
Yah . . . Hey, are you still gonna make it to my porch show this afternoon?
At Ghost House? I can’t… I work until 5pm now.
Shit, forreal? That sucks.
Well, bills… ya’know.
I squeezed through the kitchen and out the side door into the alleyway and loaded in my car. It was 7:25am and the service industry workers wouldn’t be up for another four hours. And there I was, the newest member of The Workforce, doing my part, contributing to GDP, with a thermos of coffee in my hand.
I planned my route the night before, figuring it was a 20 minute drive, 10 minutes for traffic, and 5 minutes to get there early. Yah, winners get there early. I was over-prepared. I even had that fuckin’ thermos so that I wouldn’t have to stop at 7/11.
The ride went smoothly. I arrived at the office park at exactly 7:55 am and there was something about that steady predictability that frightened me. Like maybe I’d arrive at the same time everyday. Jesus Christ.
The building I was to report to was enormous and straight to the point: brick, glass, three stories tall. There were three American flag poles out front to remind you of who you were doing this for, I supposed. Across the street was your mainline strip mall food: Panera Bread, Chipotle, Jimmy Johns. Next to that was a colon and rectal specialist for when you started to break down. Then there was an emergency room which I thought might come in handy for anyone who opted to dive off the roof and survived the fall.
I hung the parking pass from my mirror and pulled into a spot on the far end of the lot. There was a tan sedan with a trash bag for a window and I imagined the owner of this car was tan as well—tan shirt, tan slacks, tan socks. Maybe everyone in the office was tan.
Just outside the front door there was a grungy girl in combat boots next to a round, fratty looking guy in a hockey jersey. An unlikely friendship. They were taking turns hitting an American Spirit and bitching about some decisions being made down at City Hall.
It’s bullshit, dude! It’s a corporate handout!
Oh c’mon Liz, the casino would be good for the economy.
Good for the economy? Or good for shareholders?!
We’ll, it’s supposed to bring jobs.
That’s what the corporate media claims…
A punk and a fratboy. Their unlikely companionship validated my theory that there would be no rhyme or reason to this place. It was purgatory. It was a sedative. It was somewhere to report to during weekdays with pay steady enough to keep your ambition locked away in a cage.
I climbed up the stairs (rather than the elevator) because that’d be one less conversation to muscle through. Then my shift started. It would be a 9 hour day rotating around the office, sitting with different business units who claimed they did something for the company.
My first assignment was to sit next to The Bens. Ben S had dark, spiky hair with too much gel and a raspy voice that indicated he picked up smoking at a young age. His eyes were wide and some days he appeared to be on cocaine. Ben M was his calmer, dapper counterpart. Their cubicle was stationed in a corner and they positioned themselves back-to-back to get a 360 degree view of the office so that when someone walked over they’d quickly revert to their pretend work. They were locked in intense debate when I walked over.
You believe the fuckin’ defense gave up 30 in the first half?! Ben S shouted.
It’s certainly not what I anticipated. Ben M replied.
Why bring in a defensive coordinator and pay him fuckin’ 4 million a year to get bent over on the field!
If you had just wagered on the total like I advised you.
Well, shit dude, you think that’s what I want to hear right now down two paychecks?!
It’s not what you want to hear, but it’s what you need to hear.
Yah yah yah…
I walked over with my assignment notecard in my hand and asked, does Ben Sadwloski sit over here?
I must’ve surprised them because suddenly, I saw their screens flash from red to white. While muttering shit, shit, shit… Ben S smacked a key on his keyboard and suddenly the Vegas point spreads and NFL Twitter vanished and were replaced with the company org chart and Logistics News Today. Half a day in and I had already beaten their alert system.
Shit, kid… Ben S said. You scared me…
Oh don’t mind him, Ben M said. He’s stressed about his bookie coming after him.
Ben S rolled his eyes, then he checked the spike in his hair with his palm. Here, he said, take a seat, kid.
Thanks. So what do ya’ll do here?
That stopped them in their tracks. There was silence for a moment.
Then I said, did I hear you two were betting the dog tonight?
That’s what really got them going.
Once we established that sports betting was far more interesting than B Line America, the three of us spent the next two hours in a very important discussion of: why road teams fare poorly in Denver the first month of the year, Green Bay’s outstanding home field advantage, how the lake effect impacts the total in Cleveland games, betting against Kirk Cousins in prime time, why 6-point teasers to move the spread from 2 up to 8 are so profitable, how to use The Oregonian newspaper to identify key injuries and win betting Portland State, whether the Vegas point spreads are truly an efficient market, bankroll management, when to double down, 5-team parlays, Costa Rican sportsbooks, rogue number arbitrage, touting services, the best gatorade color, and predicting the length of the national anthem.
Not once did the topic of work come up.
The Bens and I talked and talked until somebody walked within earshot. Then Ben M would shout their warning phrase: boil the ocean! Boil the ocean! And Ben S would hit the hotkey on his keyboard and his pretend work would reappear on his screens.
I looked at my watch—I was 4 hours in and I still couldn’t tell you what the company did. My mission carried on.
After lunch, I spoke with a guy from Marketing who told me that he prepares market research for Sales. Then I talked to a sales guy who said, well it’s really about generating revenue growth. Then I spoke with an Account Manager who said he provides support for Sales and Marketing. Then I walked by that humongous whiteboard again and remembered the company’s mission statement: PROVIDING OUR CUSTOMERS VALUE. The mystery remained.
My next assignment was to shadow a Process Analyst named Karen. She was young and wore thick glasses. She walked around on her toes and snorted her nose often but didn’t seem to have a cold. In her free time, she seemed to be working on a romantic sci-fi novel. She never explicitly said this, but she left a word document on her right screen titled “manuscript” and a page that described two vampires having sex in vivid detail.
Hi, I’m Chris. I’ve been assigned to shadow you until 2pm.
Hi, great… I run the automation software. I’ll show you the tech we’re employing to automate various tasks.
What kind of tech do we use? And what kind of tasks does it automate?
Well, everything, really. We’re trying to automate reports so the Operations doesn’t have to key them in manually.
What will they do once that work is eliminated?
I don’t know… Operations.
And what exactly does that mean?
Didn’t you listen during orientation? You know we ship containers… on vessels, primarily.
I know, but this office doesn’t strike me as the place where any of that’s actually happening.
Well, no, but we support those activities.
Ahh. Gotcha.
I determined Karen was the most capable person in the office and was purposely delaying her automation work because 1) it would put half her coworkers out of a job, and 2) once she was done with that, they’d ask her to move onto her next task, and she wouldn’t have time to finish writing that sex scene.
For my last stop of the day, they had me sit next to Alfonso, a white haired Sicilian man who dragged an oxygen tank around. I wondered if he was decades younger than he looked. Everyone in Operations called him “Pappie” and they had made a special arrangement for his hours to run from 6am to 3pm so that he’d be off in time for physical therapy. He was hunched over at his keyboard grunting about boats when I walked over.
Ah the fucking vessel!
Good morning sir, are you Alfonso?
Yes! And what you want eez?! He didn’t turn away from his computer to look at me.
Sir, they asked me to shadow you for an hour, they want me to learn about the ocean side of the business.
I take break, then I come back and you shadow.
Alright sir. See you after the break.
I still smoking in my grave… he muttered, as he dragged that oxygen tank towards the elevator.
When Pappie returned he plopped into his chair and flipped his computer on, not once making eye contact with me. Then he pulled out a baggie of translucent pills filled with an orange/brown powder.
He noticed me eyeing those pills. You want one of theez, kid?
Potentially… What are they?
He coughed and then swallowed and then let out a low groan.
Theez shit? Theez are fucking cayenne pepper, they keep me alive longer, you know that? I drink theez shit in tea.
No thank you, sir… But I am curious what goes on over here.
Over here? We move the fucking caaaans. What else you want to know?
Well, how exactly do you do that?
Then he told me a story: you wanna’know something? The fucking mafia run all theez shit. You know that? I heard about a vessel arrived in New Jersey, the captain noticed it drag it goin’ real slow. So he sends a scuba down beneath the boat, and you know they find? The fucking container welded beneath the ass of the boat, filled with fucking cocaine.
Jesus Christ.
You know what happens to that fucking scuba diver?
Pappie coughed, swallowed, and groaned again.
He found some treasure?
Pappie slowly turned to me for the first time and mimed a gun to his temple.
Fucking bullet in his head… Now nobody checks beneath the fucking vessels.
So what’s our cut for each run of cocaine?
Pappie didn’t respond. He went back to keying something into his computer and swallowed two more cayenne pepper pills.
The clock eventually hit 5pm and since this was not an office where anybody bothered to work late, all us pencil pushers raced into the elevator and squeezed out the door and rushed to their cars to get in line to leave the parking lot. I found myself somewhere in the middle of the line of cars circled around the parking lot waiting our turn to merge onto the highway, exactly 7 cars per green light. That was the average. Sometimes 8 or 9 squeezed through, but the average was exactly 7 by my count.
And off it went, the start of my career.
I had a degree and a used sedan and managed to keep my manners together for 9 hours a day and enter shit into a computer. If all went according to The Script, soon there’d be a mortgage. After that, a house and a big fat insurance policy. Then a few more paychecks and a retirement account to put them in. Then the financial advisor calls. And the wife pushes for a nicer suburb. So the HOA comes knocking. Then a few more kids. And a larger van. The more I worked, the more and more I’d get to buy (and the insurance policies, to cover it).
Eventually, I made it out of that parking lot and onto the highway. Exactly 30 minutes later I arrived home at my duplex where my roommates were upstairs passing a joint around and testing the neighbors’ patience with hip hop.
None of my roommates had gotten Real Jobs yet. They were still floating around the restaurant scene working as Valets, Bartenders, Servers. I thought about warning them about this imminent doom lurking on the other side, but the right words escaped me. Instead, I rolled one and passed it to my left and sunk into the couch and closed my eyes to the steady thump of the kick drum.
I wondered how long it’d be before I could describe my job at the Cube Farm. Tomorrow, there’d be another chance to find out.
Main image from Easy Rider 1969
