I have not worn a rubber band on my wrist, probably since grade school. This one is a little too tight. It has been reprovisioned after serving to keep a container of strawberries sealed shut. Not vacuum sealed, just holding the lid down on a semi-aerated container the likes of which strawberries typically ship. I have already removed it from my wrist. It was tight enough to be irritating but not tight enough to create a risk of cutting circulation and gangrene and amputation of one of the hands typing these words, all before a breakfast comprising aforementioned strawberries, a banana, and a pear.

On an elevator earlier I reflexively felt inferior to another person in the car. Why? She looked no more sartorially or superficially superior to me. I don’t even know what that means. But she seemed like a worker. It was the higher floor she was going to. I stop at 15. She is 2 tiers above me, or so I felt it to be the case, in terms of ascendency through corporate being interpreted by how high a floor you are on. I felt myself improved upon when moving from the 14th floor to the 15th floor about a year ago. My self-congratulatory slack-bapping may have been unfounded but I nevertheless maintain, from earlier corporate forays, that higher floors mean high value. 

One memorable memo from a job many moons ago was from my boss, writing that a certain piece of communication had to be approved by “the people upstairs.” The company was, for the most part, organized by physical hierarchy, with executives on the higher floors and workerbees down below. If I remember right the company occupied floors 15 through 35 of a 50-story building.  The lower floors housed the mailroom and the janitorial stuff. I think around floor 19 is where Marketing and Product Development started. Buying, supply-line management, business development, etc… I don’t know what the order of the pile was but it culminated at 35, the executive wing, where the bathrooms were massive and had several showers. I had never seen an office bathroom with showers and it impressed me that these executives (mostly men) might find themselves showering together in this open space with no stalls or dividers. I lived with permanent risk of walking in on a bunch of naked executives bathing their way to greatness. 

It’s not that I failed to grasp the value of having full facilities of this type available to globetrotting executives. One of them might have traveled overnight and had to report directly to the office upon arrival and, not happy to appear unkempt after that period of showerless confinement, having a shower at the workplace makes a lot of sense. 

I just considered it a bit of an extravagance, but well within the domain of the executive, that controversially influential failed-up leader of billions.

I believe my reflexive reaction to the woman going to 17 while I ignominiously reported to the lower 15 in indicative of my feeling that this job is dead-end and my rank will never rise, largely because I don’t want it to. It is dead-end by choice for me. I will rank lowly and perfunctorily as long as I persist in this station of life.

…

I spent yesterday, Sunday, revisiting my life before I took this poverty-wages job. That life, before this, just dipping into it a little bit, still makes me feel I am drowning. It is too much but it is also never enough. I failed but in my failure was my success. My only success is being alive.