Let’s talk a little about my coworkers and working conditions. Apparently, you can run out of worthwhile podcasts after a mere 24 or so hours, so I’ve found myself having interactions with them that are proving perhaps the wrong kind of thought provoking.
What rides the surface of every single one of them is how unhappy they are. There are no real jokes. There isn’t a genuine sense of camaraderie. You have people swallowing shit for a living and the only way to get through it is with dozens of, “Having fun yet?” questions that never need to be answered.
Even with an extremely limited amount of words or time spent truly interacting but to point out where something might be located, the internal drama and politics are alive and well. So and so resents so and so. “Well who is she to say that?” I almost feel like a record has been broken for the sheer deficiency in the amount of words exchanged that could still provoke conflict.
The smell. Someone has it figured out that you can shit on company time. I’ve never gone into the bathroom, no matter what time of day, someone isn’t either shitting or just taken a shit. You’d think to yourself, hey, at least it smells like shit where it’s supposed to. The floor just smells like cardboard and food right? No, it does not. Not if you’re working with 2, yes 2, gentlemen who on more than one occasion have smelled like wide open ass with every pass.
One of those gentleman considers himself a multi-faceted tradesman who is worth at least $25 an hour to do things like remodels, which he does on the side. The other wears all of the hateful things he thinks about you on his face, his tiny tiny face, and doesn’t even respond to the most basic of acknowledgments that you are in the same space.
The chatty gentleman is not an intriguing, but illustrative, example of the types that seem to find me endearing. I listen to their 3 or 4 stories I’m positive they have no memory of telling me already, in our total 10 minutes of conversation over 2 weeks. He’s a good God-fearing man who paid for people even poorer than him’s Thanksgiving one year when he heard they only had $5 for bologna. He’ll take cash under the table so he can keep cashing his social security. This job isn’t good for him, just the 20 hours a week to keep him off the street is what he’s after.
I’m not the buy you Thanksgiving dinner type. I can look at his example, and mostly think to myself a pure sense of generosity isn’t so much talked about as it is felt. But he’s an extreme example of how much of the world operates. They get stuck in a particular narrative about their place or worth and recite it ad nauseum, even and until they don’t bother with proper ass wiping as if to really sell the nausea.
The last coworker he got into it with sprouted an important line. They asked him if he went to college, to which he played it off matter-of-factly and claimed Harvard. They bought it. In his explanation of the argument to me he said of course it wasn’t true, but who are they to act better than him? They’re right here with him stocking shelves or checking people out through the line. And, in a sense, he’s absolutely right. I certainly don’t feel “more worthy” or “better” in pure human terms to such a degree that I won’t take the peon job, even in limited fashion, to keep my head above water. The idea that either side of a Kroger employee battle would feel so emboldened to protect their pride, either through ridicule and or lies, is where I see the difference in people.
I won’t lie to you about why I’m there. I won’t pretend I have some special knowledge or access to something I don’t. All of my entrepreneurial goals have been described as experiments and trying to provide myself the freedom to “fail forward.” All I fundamentally know is how to budget. I haven’t grown anything, let alone tried to sell any of it. I haven’t engaged marketing campaigns and fucked around with analytic software and email lists. I’ve read a ton of books, I know I work hard, and I’m unbelievably pretentious. It’s a recipe for success eventually, and at the very least, I’ll be able to relatively soon piss off into a field and pop my head into the working world when I want to afford some indulgence.
My story isn’t different because of the ideas I have, money I’ve made, or things I own. My story is different because the same one I’m telling you is the one I’m telling myself. The term “wage-slave” was invented by people experiencing much closer to slavery conditions than we are. I know I’m exploited. I know most of the world, including the ever-decreasing size of the one I care about, isn’t particularly prepared for a shock to the system. I know we’re all worth what I want to give you and we’re all shelf jockeys in a world that does not give a fuck about us.
I just urge you not to fake it. You don’t have to be obnoxious or feel borderline about to get fired like I do, but every bullshit smile, every cliche about another day, every turn away from some glaring problem you know is going to hit is just going to make you smell like shit. You’ll have your own self-congratulatory story about who you really are as you dissolve in internal tears. I can’t wait until the robots come to take the stocking jobs. I can’t wait until everything you ever need can be printed at home. The page we’re on is with stunted people in suffocating circumstances, and I feel like a proper nutter exclaiming as such, were I not privy to what they actually say and do while I’m there.
I suppose I’m persistently struck by how “together” a huge pile of presumptive failures can really take something. The middle-management is all but useless. The guys at the top were both required and willing to give several hours of explanations about how to bring items to the front of shelves and move carts out of the hallway. Hours people, I’m not kidding. Someone spoke for literally hours about how to line up crackers to the edge of a shelf. His privilege for 15 years of service and climbing the ranks, still made to hold up his hand with the store manager and pledge to follow through with promises made to the backroom he subsequently defaulted on immediately.
I sympathize with trying to hold onto and protect whatever little world you’ve made for yourself. I get why you’d never want to leave school. I get why you’d think to yourself it’s better to try and “help people” when your experience of the world primarily consists of interactions with your “average employee.” I might be provoked from some recent Hardcore History podcasts, but anymore if we’re going to claim “progress” is still being made as a species, we can’t keep playing along. The damage old white men and frat boys do by holding seats of power cannot be understated.
Anyway, if you’re wondering what the path to no longer hating my life is feeling like, you’ll probably be getting a lot of that for a while.
