Vacant Eyes

I have a two minute commute to Job #1.

That is too short - no time to think or adjust my attitude from defiant to subservient, so I do laps. I leave 20 minutes early, I crank up the rock 'n roll, and I drive aimlessly out to the Circle K, which is a few miles down the road. If I still have time, or, more frequently, just don't care what fucking time I get to work, I'll do it again. It's possible as I cruise, that I administer a central nervous system depressant as medicine to get me to the right level of "I don't give a fuck."

You didn't think driving alone could do it, did you? This is a brilliant plan. It keeps me from killing my co-workers.

When I circle through the Circle K lot I often see a worker bee sitting on a concrete stoop outside the back door, taking her break. Cigarette dangling from her mouth, phone dangling from her hand. One day she was sitting in the rain, hood up.

To me, that was the perfect vision of the typical American worker.

Desperate to get out of the work environment for 10 whole minutes, desperate to sit outside in any kind of weather, desperate to grab at anything that might bring happiness, entertainment, or escape.

So sad. This country is viciously exploitative. Businesses are not designed to treat employees fairly. They are designed to suck every drop of blood out of the workers, while paying them the lowest legal wage possible.

Disrespect and condescension are critical management tools, taught in business school and refined on the job.

I am not sure employees have ever been treated fairly or with respect in the history of this country. I'd like to think so, but the era I grew up in exposed me to nothing but lies, condescension, and blatant disrespect.

So I am a wee bit jaded.

Originally I was going to label this post Monkey On a Phone, but I couldn't do it. She is not a monkey. She is a human being trying to take care of a family or herself, and this is the situation she finds herself in. She is demoralized and searching for "better".

She will probably never find it because the odds are stacked against her. 

Once you get into a situation like that, the entire employment apparatus is stacked against you. Free thinking from employers goes out the window. It's a lot easier to typecast potential employees, pigeon-hole them, and trap them into a vicious cycle of low paying jobs, rather than to look past the vacant eyes to get to a spark of humanity. A tell that reveals this person to be much more valuable than past experience would suggest.

"Nobody ever said that life was fair." Yeah, I get that. But nobody ever tells you that life is a vicious game that will crush you if you take your eye off the ball for even a second. Happiness is not part of the equation. 

Nobody ever tells you that you are nothing more than a necessary evil to management, and that if you die, they are indifferent. And they will replace you with another poor soul that they will try to pay even less, justifying the low pay with convoluted corporate speak, otherwise known as fucking lying bullshit. 

All those years ago, we should have known, should have seen this coming.

When they changed the name of Personnel Departments to Human Resources.