meannessss

part three

Sergio's Song

I'm a paranoid, spoiled, Spanish Jew brat and I always get my way.
And now that I've inherited my daddy's firm, I'll do whatever I want.
I know everybody wants to take my money and cheat me 'til I'm blind.
My whole life purpose is to make sure that doesn't happen. I'm a cunt.

[written and sung surreptitiously by a group of incorrigible employees]

Every place he'd ever worked has been an unpleasant environment--concrete block walls (even in many of the offices); concrete floors; dirty, poorly sealed windows; factory-type atmospheres (even in many of the offices); the kinds of places that are associated in his mind with the sweatshop stereotype. Although (some of) the offices he'd worked in might have looked a little bit nicer than the dreary picture he holds in his mind, they've all had the same overall atmosphere. They felt like factories even if they were not; the ones that were not literal factories were paperwork factories, partitioned into cubicles, or even when they were not, they were furnished in such a way as to indicate that they were somewhat less than "genteel" places to work. In general, they have been cold and uncaring, in decor as well as in human association. (One engenders the other, he felt, although he wasn't certain in which direction.)

This is the business norm. It is not expected, generally, that work places should be "homey." (Yes, there are nice places to work, he guessed, but he's never worked in any. And anyway, expensive, tasteful furnishings cannot negate the "business attitude" he's trying to characterize. It can only be disguised.) This is his complaint: It's this very lack of hominess that breeds or is bred by the business attitude of "production above human qualities." No matter which way the causation falls, it is this "factory" (i.e., "production," as a bad word) environment that he abhors.

For a long time (even recently) he'd been attributing his aversion to the business world to a failing within himself. There has been some deficiency in him, he's thought, some shortcoming that causes him to rebel against the "modern" work situation, to feel that it is demeaning to his very human nature. But he's been at least half-wrong in this belief. It is, after all, they who are at fault--not any one person, not a specific boss or a hierarchy or series of bosses, not specific executives in charge, not even specific evil corporations, but the whole system in general, the attitude toward work--that you must suffer in some way to get it done, that you must put up with a certain hardship, that you must endure, that you must get it done despite the (human) cost. Bullshit. This is wrong. If we must, as modern workers, be miserable in our work, to whatever degree, then the business system is doing something wrong. We should be farther along as a species by now. The human race is failing itself. It doesn't know how to conduct its business with dignity and grace. Oh, sure, it pretends to these qualities in the boardrooms and among the top executives, but at the level of the people who actually do the work, it is a total failure. We are all not much more than slaves. And the fact that we are "free" slaves makes the problem that much worse. We "choose" to be this way. (It's really not much of a choice, is it? Adapt to this system or starve in the cold.) He remains disgusted.

...

It's difficult to blame the whole negative experience on Sergio, or even on the Weasel. At times, especially when awakening in the morning out of a dream, I realize my input into the situation. But it's just as difficult to blame it all on me, which is what the Weasel wanted to do. Each individual working there contributed his or her small part to the net conglomeration of misery that we all experienced. It was an exceedingly bad mix of people, assembled for the sole purpose of making money and existing without overt hostility, so that the whole place seethed with unexpressed disagreement, because those who would express it were eventually gotten rid of, and those who remained felt they could not say a disparate word. This condition leads to frustration and discontent. It's not any one person's fault that the mix of people resulted in everyone not expressing his or her personal feelings and/or pathologies, but they were felt nonetheless by the group, because you can repress those experiences, but you can never negate their effects. They will be felt, without ever knowing exactly why, when their motivation comes from an inability to express them easily, until the whole situation seethes with an ennui of purpose, a contradiction of emotions, no one ever saying what it is necessary to say in order to be normal. It's no one person's fault, being the motive of the whole. But it was Sergio's responsibility, because it was his company. He assembled it, and he maintained its existence. I want it to have been the Weasel's responsibility, because I hate her pathology the most, and because I like Sergio, still, even though I remember him sometimes with disgust. I have to see Sergio as the ultimate blamee. He is where the buck stops. He should have known better, except that he is as weak as everybody else is. He is a puppet of his own tortured soul, his unconscious drive to do whatever it is he has to do--to make money, to insist that none of it be wasted, to drive his employees, via his management "team" (at our best moments we were never really a team), to the brink of exhaustion and stress to get the absolute performance for the minimum of cost. He's a sick individual and his sickness has spread across this nation like a plague. It's called capitalism, and it is rampant, and its effect is ruining this country, and the world. Not that I am a communist, but neither am I a capitalist. When any dichotomy is rationalized, the truth lies somewhere in between.

...

The problem with working within a society is that you will always make mistakes that someone is willing to call you on. The trick in working with people is to find a niche and a technique where your mistakes are discounted. To do this, you have to make yourself an integrated member of a viable social group--in other words, you've got to network. The danger here is that people outside of your social group will always be sniping at you. You must rely on your networking skills and politics and the good will of people like you to shield you from outsiders' influences. But, at times, even people within your social group will be sniping. You have to be skilled enough in these cases to negate their efforts before they get you, to keep them in check. These are the positive and negative aspects of working within a social group. Society can be unforgiving and complex, and all but impossible to work in. But what other choice do we have, really?

...

Management actually had the nerve to require supervisors to read and discuss in formal meetings a substantial book entitled Management Minded Supervision, which contained sophisticated (read subliminal) language that, when it came right down to it, really said "agree with all of the policies and procedures, and everything anyone above you in the organizational superstructure says." It could have been subject matter for a long series of Dilbert cartoons.

...

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