I got fired. It's the first time I've ever been fired, and it happened because I refused to put my head in the sand and keep pretending the company I worked for, Clustertruck, wasn't lying to customers in order to steal driver tips. I'd made my appeals to management over the year I worked there. I delivered thousands of orders without incident. Eventually, I tried to compensate for the loss of money you take in going across town (sometimes 40 minutes to get back to the kitchen) and only making $4.50. The unwitting customer might've tipped you $1 or $2, but that money isn't realized unless it's in cash. This was a point of confusion and frustration for me when I first started, not understanding people were actually tipping, just not in the land of double-speak.
So I started telling customers on the far trips how they could be part of the solution. This translated into a couple of them complaining to management and, of course, construing my words into a some weak bitching about my job or “tip solicitation.” Neither of which were true. The person willing to spend $9-$12 for an egg and toast isn't altogether concerned for the plight of the a delivery driver, so the explanation I was offering was more than a little lost in translation.
I hated the job. It was as monotonous as any other. It was proud of its lack of obligation to its workers. It had many good and motivated personalities leave once it set in how they were getting particularly manipulated or taken advantage of. I justified it by trying to kill two birds with one stone. I drummed on my wheel or tried to practice my trumpet. I watched my shows, and I showed up an hour or two early to get reading done. I spent 80+ hour weeks to learn that true aggregate numbers of what you could expect to make there, and after 23 eleven hour days, you might finally start to feel like you can breath a little, as long as you're on SNAP, don't want health insurance, and nothing goes wrong.
I've so organized my life that I can weather nearly any type of employment and still keep my head above water, so what's at stake is more to do with my ability to look shining on resumes and pop into an “eager A student” persona during an interview. Turns out, my degree may actually be potentially useful for finding a job in a field related to family case management or children in need services. This area only explored because Byron clued me into the general hole these agencies are unable to keep filled, and the many people who can't deal with the “stress” of seeing the true horrors of what people do to each other or go through. ::yawn::
There's a larger issue though that speaks to the culture and psychology. In my appeals to try and improve working conditions, I was attacked by fellow workers. I've been texting every customer number in my phone who I delivered to the lie that CT operates under to “grow fast” and “disrupt the food industry.” Most are supportive. The PR team and different managers adorn befuddled looks and shrug their shoulders as they pay deference to “The Algorithm” impervious to common sense that could make the kitchen run smoother. CT is a tech company masquerading as a “fixer” and “innovative” food company. They merely invented software that obscure language and tries to figure out exacting metrics for exploiting its workforce.
But what they're doing is celebrated and persistently defended. It's a land where earnest concerns or complaints are forgotten and ignored. It's where, you're an independent contractor, idiot! is said without irony or reflection as to what they really means. It's Ooo-rah at the “company's success” when none of it will ever trickle-down to you. The hostility is one thing from lashing out insecure ignorant drivers. The silence and denial from those who brought the company, or ones like it, into existence is what kills me.
It's a general trend of people adopting the language and attitude of the “most moral” and “most efficient” which completely “disrupts” how people understand themselves or responsibility to each other. It's across industries and services. Schools aren't bad. Greed is. Redlining is. When you're racist and defund schools, or stash owed taxes overseas, you bankrupt how society functions. When you make a public good “compete” with a for-profit entity offered and available to a privileged few, you ensure society will continue in its decline. How many piddling faux-apologies do you hear from the owners of “gig-economy” apologists about the ground-level realities their drivers or couriers experience? How many people would “choose” to deliver food if good-paying jobs in their field were available all along? I don't want to spiral too far away from the point, but there's an entirely corrupted culture of what a “job” constitutes, your obligation to it, and what it should be able to provide that we willing hand ourselves over to, degrading the gains made my unions.
I spent the better part of a year in my car, in a parking lot, driving food around. I got a lot of watching and reading and playing done, as I did when I was doing drug studies, but I was/am still at the mercy of whatever morally bankrupt institution comfortable espousing the language of “business as usual.” Part of me thinks my subconscious will to not be a fucked up piece of shit again self-sabotaged knowing it was time to move on and put my back against a wall in order to figure out something new. I still firmly believe that just because everything around you is a lying piece of shit, you don't have to be, even when and while you're compelled to play along to a degree for practicality sake.
I suppose I again feel a measure of hopelessness because I'll never “escape” culture. It doesn't get better than feeding off the table-scraps of the self-righteously deluded if you're unwilling or unable to create something else. Co-ops that work exist. People who own their labor and earn to give are out there. There are charities who's money goes to helping instead of salaries. There are voices that remain morally sound and consistent after their camps turn on them. I want to be like those examples, I want to work like those examples, and I want what I say to remain true in spite of whatever consequences may come. Every time you give up an inch, in a way, you're giving up the whole world, and figuring out how to walk the line of what you “have” to do and how to manage the breakdown of the illusion seems a nearly impossible task.
The biggest part of me is most proud that I'm already fatalistically and dispositionally set for scenarios like this. I can remain “poor” for long enough to work at Wendy's (if things, dear god, ever got that terrible) and maintain the life I've established. I don't know what I'd do if I got fired or laid-off and had deeper obligations or debts. My concept of “progress” is what me and mine can create, not number of years or more sophisticated titles. And honestly, in the interim, perhaps there's much I could be doing as far as prepping the land or exploring options I never would pursue sitting and waiting in the parking lot. My mental environment has an opportunity to move on.
I don't like feeling desperate all the time. Desperate to cling to something bad just because it's there and barely meeting a need. A quasi-reliable $100 a day isn't something to sneeze at, as long as you don't get too far into the weeds on what it means to procure it. But anymore I'm more desperate for sincerity. I'm desperate for a work ethic that's not making excuses for itself or how it operates. If your business model requires lies and exploitation, maybe that's not the kind of business the world needs. Maybe you don't deserve to profit any further. Whatever I create in life, it shouldn't have you thinking of 1984 as I insist I'm not stealing from the people I work with.
However desperate I feel, I'll never be so much so as the people who run, cry, or fight against the truth of what they're a part of. I need to live with myself, every day. I need to know that if I'm getting fired, it wasn't telling people to fuck off and throwing food at them in frustration, but because an easily corrected perceivable wrong was disrupting every level of honest communication and causing no longer tolerable strife. I want to be alive to keep the fight alive and not be a martyr for the cause, but if I have to go down occasionally for some reason, I can live with this one.
