I’m in a spot where I can type clandestinely, no obervsers unless they have the threatened spy cameras trained on me. That’s not a specific threat, just one levied against the entire operation in which those suspected of using their phones in ways that distract them from the mission at hand will be surveilled and terminated or at least publicly skewered. This place thrives on firing people. It’s a genuine hunger that feeds the managers. I’m told we have every security one could assume but I’ve never believed it. I arrive here every single day expecting to be fired, expecting that my ID will not let me enter the building, that I will be escorted to the 16th floor, where the firings are said to take place these days. 

Remembering my earliest days and weeks on this job. I’d considered myself lucky if I lasted 6 months. As described, the turnover rate was nearly 100% among new hires, and I can vouch for the fact that the class I trained with has one surviving member and that is I. Others lasted a couple of days, others a couple of weeks, while otheres never really even showed up, bailing out the day paid training ended. I remember someone telling me it’s an “easy’ job. I honestly never thought of it that way but there are certainly far more taxing ways to earn a livelihood. I always remember the mop boy at Show World, or maybe it was called Playland. It’s the only place of its kind I ever entered in New York, with rooms you would watch naked women masturbate behind a glass separator. One of them told me “You can go ahead and masturbate, too. Most men do.” Today I might take her up on that offer but this was early 1990s and I demured, just watching her stroke that twat for as many minutes as my deposited Playland tokens allowed. Exiting the room I spotted a dude with a mop in a bucket. He was going through each of the rooms where the experience I just had were also performed. He was looking for cum stains and jizz splatter to mop up and sanitize the rooms of semen andmaybe saliva and who knows what else. At the time I thought “That is the worst job I’ve ever seen.” Mop Boy at Show World. I later learned that there are jobs within the State Department where agents have to watch every second of ISIS beheading videos to determine if they are authentic, and that the head was truly decapitated. That sounds like a far worse job than Mop Boy, and and unquestionably an even worse job than what we do here. There are also the jobs no one asks for, like social media peeps who screen objectionable content reported to them. You spend all day looking at butchered animals and human carcasses and highly explicit and extreme pornography. Joy, right? And there’s no hazard pay for it. Yes, this job is far less taxing in comparison to those and other types of work but I still refuse to  label it as “easy.” Mistakes are made and a lot of bad information flies out of this place, and I’ve seen job evaluations make grown women cry. I have even left this place feeling defeated and worthless, though my generalized apathy about the consequences of my failures here have subsuded somewhat. I still believe someone is hungry to fire me and it could happen at any time; however I am more confident in my ability to master this job than I have been in the past. I just don’t want to be here anymore and I speak to virtually no one. I speak when spoken to.