Twenty-one Dog Years: Doing Time at Amazon.com. Mike Daisey

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СКАЧАТЬ like a professional diagnosis, a syndrome. Doctor, Doctor, what’s wrong with him? Why is he so jaded, so cynical, and so goddamn poor? The doctor shines a light, cops a quick feel while making the subject cough, speaks into his microrecorder: Seattle. Disaffected. Temping. Treatment: regular doses of dogma to encourage development of a belief system. Subject is delaying adulthood and responsibility by pretending he is possessed by an unknowable destiny, chosen by fate, et cetera. Subject’s head is currently located very far inside subject’s ass.

      I really enjoyed temping; it agreed with me. I was living in a room over a crack den for two hundred dollars a month, which meant I could afford to take months off between assignments and simply drift, directionless and guilt-free. I often had to step over the passed-out junkie who lived across the hall, but I was in love with the way I didn’t obey the corporate clock—at 10:00 A.M. on a Tuesday or 2:00 P.M. on a Thursday you would find me asleep. Sleep! Who knew I had been so starved for it? It was heaven.

      The idea of being a permanent employee terrified and perplexed me—those who were looked uniformly unhappy and if you asked them, they would say that yes, indeed, they were miserable. It was hard to imagine how I could or would ever enter their world, even though more and more of my friends were emigrating to that great undiscovered country of medical insurance and 401 (k) plans.

      Not so for me—I knew my place. I saw myself as a mercenary of the temping world. It was an ongoing fetish fantasy in which the good folks at Parker Staffing Services were sergeants, barking orders:

      “Listen up, you weak-kneed vomit-licking dogs! Hamilton and Fitch needs a receptionist on the forty-second floor. It’s lawyers—it’ll be ugly. Who wants it?”

      “Sir! I am trained for all reception duties, including simpering and fawning!”

      “Daisey. Brave words. You want to live forever?”

      “No, sir! I can also kill a man in three ways with a pencil, sir!”

      “You like nine dollars an hour?”

      “I like it fine, sir! Whatever it takes to serve those fucking lawyers, sir!”

      “Goddamn right. Get on over there, Daisey. Move it!”

      I loved the illusion of freedom: this job is terrible, but at least I don’t have to stay like the rest of these poor bastards. This is the linchpin on which temping turns, the idea that you are free to walk at any time. It is an illusion: I never left an assignment early, never really made use of the “flexibility” I had in my grasp. The temping companies encourage you to think of yourself as a “temporary staffing professional” and work at instilling pride and polish into their recruits. Before long you are loyal to the temping company and unwilling to end a contract early.

      When Parker called me because I had the gall to request and then take two days off, I was told by my liaison: “At Parker we insist that temping be your first priority.”

      “That’s odd.”

      “Why?”

      “Does anybody make temping their first priority? I mean, are you really flooded with folks who went to college dreaming of the day they would be temps, fiercely loyal to whatever employer wanted them on that one particular day?”

      Silence.

      “You know what I’m getting at, don’t you?”

      Silence.

      “I’m pretty certain you didn’t dream, all those years ago over the keg at Beta Phi Epsilon, that you would arrive at this lofty height, a placement officer discussing the ethics of temp work with an aesthetics major. We are not so different, you and I, are we?”

      Silence.

      “I guess this means that I can’t have this Friday off?”

      “You can have every Friday off.”

      “Oh? Oh. I see.”

      After being expelled from my agency I became very apathetic about the temping industry. I was indignant that I had been let go so abruptly; I felt betrayed, after the years I had spent in loyalish service. I found myself thinking, What do they think I am, their slave? That the question was rhetorical hadn’t dawned on me. Only teenagers, dogs, and dilettantes are capable of this flavor of thinking.

      It was summer and so I whiled away the time in a variety of exciting action poses: reading, sleeping, watching television, and a variant form of the reading pose that incorporated eating. My girlfriend and I became obsessed with The Newlywed Game, hosted by the creepy Bob Eubanks. A trained viewer can predict which couple will win within minutes of the show’s opening—the couple with the largest smiles who strike each other while still smiling always wins, just like in real life. We played Super Mario Kart obsessively. We bought a Rocket Chef after the television told us to do that—it was always telling us to do all sorts of things in those days.

      I was feeling very Zen and willing to listen to the advice of inanimate objects because I wanted nothing—I was in love. Jean-Michele had just become my live-in girlfriend, and it was the first time I had ever moved in with someone. I left my artistically hip neighborhood for a much more sedate burb that cost a lot more than the crack den, but I didn’t care. We were delirious in love—we spent all day having sex and fighting, both at the same time when we could manage it.

      Cross Anaïs Nin with Encyclopedia Brown and you get Jean-Michele—sensual, funny, and possessed by the dark, passionate practicality of the Polish. I learned about Poland quickly: the first time I met her family we sat in the garden drinking and getting to know one another, two activities that are indistinguishable and interchangeable to the Poles.

      We were all drunk and laughing when Babcia came up from downstairs. Babcia is Polish for grandmother but with Babcia it had become a capital B: she was the Babcia of Babcias, the woman about whom I had heard a hundred stories, who had delivered her family from the horrors of the Nazi occupation and to America.

      Jean-Michele loves her more than life itself, and meeting her for the first time I was amazed at how tiny she was: I was certain I could fit this matriarch inside of my thigh, that I could have smuggled her over the East German border if necessary. Later I would learn that she was also capable of feeding a person so insistently that they could actually die of a creaminduced embolism right at the kitchen table.

      My first glimpse of Babcia was not over a bowl of borscht—she had come outside to find out why we were laughing and shouting at the tops of our lungs. Her eyes were bright and disapproving as she surveyed all of us committing the cardinal sin of drinking in the garden. Think of the neighbors! and Be quiet and careful! were artfully knitted into the shawls she gave away at Christmas. Babcia remains the only woman I have ever met who can actually make guilt shimmer like heat waves in summer.

      Maybe she was equally unhappy with all of us, but her gaze settled on me—I had obviously brought this laughing into the house. I saw how clearly I was read, judged, and found unworthy. She knew what I did for a living (nothing) and my ambitions (AWOL). Under duress I would have admitted to being a slacker, but beneath her withering gaze I felt I had earned a more emasculating title: bum. Man without job. Dead weight.

      She stood for a minute until everyone else noticed her, and when she had the attention of everyone she said in a clear voice: “You’re all laughing now, but you’ll be crying later.” Then she walked back inside the house without another word.

      Later СКАЧАТЬ