10/20

In honor of this moment I am typing today’s words in the Tempus Sans ITC font, for its name is closest in spelling to the town from which I moved in 1990.

Today I sit in The Chair, that extravagant piece of home furnishing I saw at Macy’s soon after arriving here. Macy’s itself is, in fact, the very first place I remember seeing after stepping out of Penn Station and beginning my walk to Lincoln Center to meet the college friend who let me stay at his apartment for a week.

This mission-style recliner seemed impossibly extravagant to me when I first saw it, and I could only imagine the day I sailed up the escalators of that department store and paid for it with $1,000 cash-cash money. It must have been 1998 when I came up with the $1,000 by throwing coins into a red bucket. The bucket got so heavy that I could barely move it. I had to sort the coins, and I was not even half way through emptying the bucket of its coins and adding up the riches when I reached $1,000, mostly in quarters. Several laborious trips to the bank later I had money in the bank for The Chair, a piece of furniture which has lived up to the desires that I had for it.

I moved to New York based on a lie, and much of my progress here was based on lies. They were never intentional or planned, they just sort of happened by inducement and naivete. Poring over newspapers at the public library I believed all those jobs listed in the New York Times classified section actually existed, and I believed all the nonsense fed to me by employment agencies whose purpose, I came to understand, is to waste people’s time. I still have a business card for the guy who vigorously promised me job after job after job but who only lied. In retrospect there is something charming about his act but at the time the feeling of being robbed crept slowly in. He never took any money but he robbed me of time and other precious commodities.

A few years later I actually got a job through one of these time-vampire employment agencies, and I did it by lying. It was not planned, and in fact I can’t say that I remember if I actually uttered a lie outright. I had gone to an agency to take a word processing test. My experience with computers was limited. I had never owned a PC and had used word processing stations only in passing while at college. The idea of taking a word processing test seemed like any other stage of the bullshit employment agency rigmarole, although up until then I had not seen any agencies that had word processing tests. This agency was fancy!

I made an appointment to take this test, but when I showed up at the scheduled time I learned that the computers were not working, and that I should come back the next day. I called the next day to schedule another appointment but before I said anything the woman who answered said “You took the test yesterday?” I said yes, not exactly lying since I thought she would realize her error and re-schedule me for the test that I could not take the day before. Instead she asked if I wanted to work the next day. I said OK, and the next thing I knew I was sitting at a computer, a fully unqualified temp thrust into 12 hour workdays typing decks and presentations for marketing managers at a midtown cosmetics company, making what seemed like a jackpot wage of $18 an hour.

Once in a while I would talk to the woman at the temp agency, she calling once and again to see how things were going, assuring me that I could take the job permanently if I wanted it. I had been at the company for about 3 months when the formal job offer was handed to me in a closed-door meeting with the manager who brought me in as a temp. The formalities were sort of a gag, as we stepped through the job interview questions with nudges and winks and a sense that this was corporate machinations incarnate — today I refer to this sort of behavioural bloviation as “Corporata”.

She said the job was mine and that I was lucky because “It’s a good company!” I didn’t know what she meant by that at the time, but I now know how right she was. I thought she was simply referring to how the company was well-known and financially flush, and while that was true it was not what she meant by “good company”. She meant Good Company as opposed to Fast Company or what would later come to be known as a Fucked Company. This was a good place to be. This was not a company that engaged in ritual employee abuse or worker exploitation, and for me it was great fun for a couple of years, learning how to have a job, learning how to use computers and hijacking the company modems for Internet access before anyone there had even heard of that global network. After 3 years there I had had enough of but I was never taken advantage of or disrespected as are so many people I know today at their companies. I was lucky, because I was prime material for having the marrow of my soul sucked dry by an unprincipled employer in a very cutthroat industry.

Eventually I left to take a job in the New Media division of an even bigger company, a decision that was considered a crazy risk by the few people I knew who had even heard of the Internet at the time. The IT and tech guys at the company told me the Internet was a fad, like Interactive TV and the teletype, although I did whet the chops of particularly hungry marketeer. Standing in my office he saw me pointing and clicking on hyperlinks on web pages. It was his first exposure to the Internet and I could feel his energies perk up as he watched this most elemental transaction — the clicking of links. That experience could not have been his only motivating inspiration but he soon left the company to become Interactive Director somewhere else, a job he held for 3 or 4 weeks before his ignorance was revealed.

That place feels like a lifetime ago, and I have no contact with anyone I knew there. There is, however, a lingering relic that inhabits my days. Two women who worked at that company during my time there live in my neighborhood. I see them walking around. They do not seem to recognize me, and I do not remember their names but I recognize not just their faces but that look about them — a self-satisfied air of thievery and wits. These were the types who did as little work as possible, whose every day was spent evading their bosses and putting forth as little effort as they could before going home feeling like a success. Their techniques, developed over many years, allowed them to pace themselves so as to spread minimal work across a maximum time horizon. The woman I see most often these days was fired after 18 years at the company, but she was hardly alone. A corporate redesign poured over the company like hot lava, emptying it of hundreds of employees, most of whom were re-hired months later at higher salaries. Maybe she was among the re-hirees.