Bror Myer, A Guide to Dancing on Ice, 1921
Tomorrow is moving day! I can see the little crusty house from here. I’ll be moving with a cheap handcart in the snow. Maybe the wheels will fall off.
I love idiotic challenges like this. Today I was determined to buy groceries though I have no money. I found a way to convert credit card points to Instacart gift cards and, behold, I now have a full pantry—to be moved on a handcart in the snow.
You might think that dishwashers, being among the lowest status workers in society, would at least be deemed too worthless and disposable for bureaucratic afflictions like performance reviews. Wrong!
On Wednesday my bus broke down, and when I arrived at work an hour late, it was my great pleasure to be called into the office of the Head Chef, a classically dull-witted sadist. While I received the highest marks on whatever nonsense criteria they invented, scouring and drudging, smiling through agony, etc., my attendance was shown to be suboptimal. This sallow and bejowled weasel man printed my absences so that I could physically reckon with empirical evidence of my failure. I folded the paper into a tiny square and suggested he take it up with the bus system. Or the chemical manufacturer. Or respiratory viruses.
On Monday I walked into the dishroom and two of my coworkers were visibly ill—ashen, expressionless, leaning heavily on equipment. I asked if they wanted to leave or at least take a break. They told me they were at risk of being written up—even fired—for attendance violations. One of these coworkers has had chemical burns on her hands and arms for months. The other I hid in a study room after she suffered a concussion but refused to clock out early for fear of reprisal. While they were no doubt fighting off illnesses of some sort, we’d also been without a fan for three days. In a windowless basement filled with churning industrial machines and jets of 160-degree water.
I snapped, dredging my decades of worthless education to write an email to various bigwigs about three days and counting without a working fan, chemical burns and autoimmune flare-ups, black mold. Naturally they rerouted it to the sadistic boss and the sadistic boss’s sadistic boss, resulting in a ‘talk’ with said über-boss. Why didn’t you come to me first? he asked. Because you are vacant and dismissive, I said. The burns are rashes, he said, and we bought gloves. The mold is mildew. The maintenance ticket has been submitted, what else can I do? Drive to the store and buy a fan, I said. It wouldn’t be adequately powerful, he said. This is the worst job I’ve ever had, I said. It’s not for everybody, he said. It’s not for anybody, I said, it shouldn’t exist. I’m concerned about you spreading negativity, he said. Preventing worker attrition by heat exhaustion does not qualify as spreading negativity, I said.
Cool, I won. Except the joke’s on me because I’m still a loser, and he’s still in charge.
After dinner service, after the cooks went home, after the ghoulish chefs slunk off to their stucco mansions, the archangel manager wanted to relay a parable, and it is this:
Eric is a great speaker, but if you don’t want to watch the video, he says: in order to be successful you have to want success as much as a drowning man wants to breathe.
I get it now.
No one wants the world to be this hard, and some of us spend a lot of years wishing it weren’t. But it is this hard, so it’s time to tighten the belt of discipline to the very last notch, blow this popsicle stand, get out of Dodge—hell, get out of Kansas altogether. If Dodge is the dishpit and Kansas the field and plain of menial toil.
H., my recovering meth addict friend, tells me to watch “Attitude of Gratitude,” a speech by a man born with no arms or legs. He showed it to his boys when they were going through the ‘I can’t’ phase of childhood, that rebellious defeatism. He has ‘Juggalo’ tattooed on his arm and explains it means the outcasts of society taking care of each other. He’s thankful for a dishwashing job, thankful he can pass a background check, thankful he’s physically intact. He hates corrupt authority as much as I do, but steers clear, collects his paycheck, waits and plans.
I get it. I’m thankful, too. Thankful to have met him. Thankful for the capacity to earn a living. Thankful for my country hut. I’ll be writing here every week from now on. It won’t be my best work, but it’ll get done. I’ll continue to set my alarm every morning to spend the hours before work applying for jobs. And I want to open a poster shop. Yes, though I have no skills in drawing or printmaking. It’s completely irrational, a download, a gut feeling.
And what about you? What upwelling of the spirit do you want to honor in the new year? Tell me publicly or privately, because we’re entering an era of unconstrained experimentation.
Let me close this one out with some of my favorite poster shops.
And a friend from college, Stukenborg Press:
“I turn off the lights, wrap up the day, blow out the candle—thank you, I say!”
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