I have a confession to make. I’m starting to like my job. Working middle management for a medium-sized manufacturer of food service equipment is a lot like being an American military advisor to the South Vietnamese at Saigon in 1962.  At first you think, are these people just willfully stupid, or what? Why are they trying to sabotage their own operation – are they enemy operatives? But you catch on after a while. We’re all just trying to put food on the table. Don’t rock the boat. Don’t try to be a hero. Why would we want to drop ten tons of napalm on a village full of blind women and one-legged children? Job security, stupid. 

 

At work, people ply me with the most incredible excuses. “My boyfriend lost his undercard this weekend and now he’s in a coma, so…I need to leave early to pick the kids up from bible school.” Or, “the steroid I take for my thyroid reacted with my anti-psychotic and, well…I’m in jail up in Michigan. Pretty sure I won’t make it in today.” Like, so sorry Yankee Joe, we not put hammer to anvil on VC guerrillas cuz General Cao hemorrhoid flaring up like crazy today! Palms up, shoulder-shrugging motion, big grin. 

 

It’s all eminently understandable. Like right now the strains of BTO’s “Takin’ Care of Business” are floating into my office from the factory floor. I take a moment to nod my head agreeably to the beat. But BTO are Canadian, you say. And America were from England. None of that shit matters anymore!! Have you ever heard of fucking Foreigner?!! 

 

You know, they wouldn’t put Iran in the USA’s group in the World Cup because our boys would have ripped the Iranians’ heads off and shit down their puny necks. Possibly warranting a red card. Our boys are all 6’8” and 300 pounds. You’ve never seen anything like it on the pitch. When that VC in the Ken Burns documentary says the Americans lying dead on the jungle floor looked like slain giants…that should bother you. 

 

I think of my direct reports at work as my second family. And I treat them like family. I enable bad behaviors that are too hard to correct. I play favorites. I put outsized responsibility on anyone with a guilty conscience. But I go to bat for them. I chase after doctor’s notes, grant exceptions, fudge the labor report in their favor. It’s so much easier than sitting them down for an attendance counseling. The way they look at you…like you did something nasty behind their back. Like you betrayed their trust. I don’t like to hurt people’s feelings. It’s why I haven’t been on Facebook. I’m going to call my memoirs Road Rage on the Information Superhighway. 

 

You’ve all probably noticed I’ve been missing from Twitter again. I didn’t run afoul of Elon’s henchmen this time. It’s fucking Steve Jobs busting my balls from beyond the grave. You see, my MacBook is more than five years old. All my applications are slowly shutting down. I’m like the lone pilot of a dying spaceship drifting far out to space in a melancholy Philip K. Dick story. I’m going to call my memoirs 2021: A Cyberspace Odyssey Where I Travel Five Years Into the Future to Buy a Computer That Won’t Self-destruct in 2026. 

 

I know what you’re thinking. Why can’t you just buy a new computer if your job is so great?  Well, a family man has to make sacrifices. If he is keen on maintaining a tenable position in this current American economic milieu he must whittle down his interests. He must cast off all comforts he might live without. He must make daily pilgrimage to the altar of upright living and offer up armloads of his time and of work and cash app his kid fifty bucks so he can buy some faggotty hat shilled by a gang of white douchebags that got rich making tick tocks on golf courses. 

 

We’re an American Band!!!!! That’s what I’m talking about!! A nice declarative statement for once. I thought Band of Brothers was going to be a documentary about the Bee Gees. I had my popcorn and poppers all ready. People use poppers to get into hedonistic, unnatural sex. I’ve never done poppers but we used to huff all kinds of industrial coolants when we were kids. I even huffed gasoline once. It was a harsh buzz. I’m not proud of it, but it did lead to a lucrative career in cyber-writing. I take my profit in esoteric clout. Anyway, people do all sorts of shameful things on the internet. Grown men lock their wieners up in little metal cages and beg for things that would make their mothers cry. Russian dudes with scary tattoos do things to women you’d break up with your dog over. Come to think of it, I’m sort of glad my computer is dying. I might breath a little easier without all this muck in my soul. Muck in my Soul sounds like a Tom Petty side project from 2007. I just won’t have it. 

 

I’m not going to lie. Sometimes it’s a relief to come into work after a long weekend. There’s just so much…craziness out there. Here we have processes and procedures. Protocol. A chain of command. Things make sense. You know where you stand. People like me around here, I’m a swell guy. 

 

To tell the truth, I think my family is a little embarrassed of me. Not my work family, of course – my real family. I mostly spend the weekends drunk. But it doesn’t seem to help. Monday mornings I wake up with what they call a vague sense of foreboding. What I like to do on those days is go in to work extra early. There’s a certain peacefulness in the factory before everybody gets here. An expectant quiet, a reverence, almost, that awaits purposeful people doing virtuous things. It’s how you used to feel in an empty church at an odd hour of night. When you could still go inside. Before they had to start locking the doors to keep out the bums. 

 

My old little league coach said something to me once that’s stuck with me ever since. “Don’t think,” he said. “Once you start thinking up there, you’re dead meat.” It’s sound advice. I quit baseball pretty early on. I just couldn’t pick up the ball. I think my eyesight was deficient. I would dive out of the box on pitches in the strike zone. It got to be embarrassing. Ironically, my youngest boy turned out to be a baseball player. Now I spend my summers caravaning around the Midwest with his travel ball team. Standing by a diamond in Cumspoke, Indiana or Rustedsquaw, Iowa, in the 100 degree heat and no shade, breathing the noxious fumes cooked up from the billion tiny black rubber pellets they use to fill in the turf. It’s a lot like Vietnam. And we drink A LOT of beer on those baseball weekends. The parents all arranged in a grim share circle in the lobby of yet another Holiday Inn Express…pouring down booze against the specter of our disillusionment…ruing the day and sick for the sight of each other. It’s pretty much exactly like ‘Nam. 

 

It’s easy to indulge paranoia these days. How did Don Dellillo know so much about the internet in 1996? Did Bobby Thompson’s parents have to buy him a $500 bat? Maybe Jack Kennedy’s incompetence really was just that dangerous. 

 

I came in to the office at 5:15 this morning. The only sound in the building was the humming of the mainframe and the hiss of compressed air. There were storms in Illinois this weekend. The tournament schedule got pushed back. It always does. Sitting in the parking lot of Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ Community College, waiting  to play a meaningless consolation game. Playing out the string as the sun sets on a Sunday and the scouts have all gone home. Build character today for the youth of tomorrow. Stuttering through the Chicagoland traffic with a full bladder and a sick stomach. Too much beer and bad restaurant food. Not enough sleep. My hands shake slightly over my keyboard. Trying to hold down my morning coffee. The phone rings and I let it go to voice mail. Thirty seconds later the transcribed text pops up in my inbox. Hey Ted…this is Tiona. So Ricky’s mom got kicked out of her place in Florida…they found out she had a dog in there. We told her not to bring that stupid dog. Anyway, we’re on our way down to pick her up cuz she’s got no place to stay. I won’t be in today for sure. Hoping to be back Tuesday. Okay, bye. 

 

A few of the other early birds start to trickle in. There is a grim, early-morning horniness to their gait. They like to get to their stations and stake their territory. Move shit around on their coworkers. They’re invested. Do their sons play travel baseball? Or are they chained to some other catastrophic financial decision? Is their entire immediate family insane? I have no idea what they’re running from. But I understand finding comfort in a sane, reliable structure. The deliverance in devoting yourself to something greater than yourself. And I’d miss the comfort in being sad. 

 

Someone out on the floor turns on the radio. 

 

 

 

I feel the Boss’s voice vibrating in my chest more than singing in my ears. My body teems with a fond sense of purpose. Gratefulness. An almost patriotic fervor. I sweep my keyboard with a blast from my company issue air duster. Then I take a hit for myself. I open up Outlook. 

 

Good Morning Team,