Man-Child

My dad was relentless when it came to his career. A year out of High School, after dropping out of the first semester of college without ever lifting a book, he went to work for the phone company. Before the existence of my older brother and I, he was that guy you saw in the bucket next to the road repairing phone lines. Much like the people you see in movies from the 1970’s, he wore a mustache, week-old flannel shirts, and tight blue jeans. He showed up everyday, put in the time. Knew his job; did it well. When my older brother, Phil, became a reality instead of a hypothetical, my dad and my mother married, and are together to this day, 30 years and still going. He continued to work for the phone company, and when the higher-ups realized that he wasn’t a full blown idiot, that he actually knew what he was doing, he began to move up through the ranks. Yes, kids, believe it or not, that’s how it used to work: you put forth the effort and you were rewarded by your company.

  By the time he got moved into a more controlled environment, the central office of that area, I was old enough to shadow him at work on Christmas Eve each year. The year I recall was when I was 7 or so. My dad treated his fellow employees the same way he treated my brother and I. Phil was two years older than I, but it didn’t matter when it came to lectures. Well, no, I shouldn’t say “lectures,” more along the lines of a quick remark like, “Don’t be an idiot,” or “Sleep at night.” That’s one of his favorite witticisms. “Don’t be an idiot,” he’d say, “Sleep at night, huh?” It’s a good rule to live by. If you’re ever worried about your next move in any situation, no matter how trivial, just think to yourself, “Would an idiot do this?”

  When I went to work with him as a child, if an incident occurred that someone couldn’t problem-shoot, or that was too urgent to put on their action-items list, my dad would come over to them, look at the situation, and resolve it effortlessly. When the operator, or whoever made the mistake, tried to rationalize their own faults, my Dad would get a bug-eyed look on his face. His eyes would grow wide, probably in disbelief. Most people, when they hear something that confuses them or that is completely irrational, they squint their eyes, as if they couldn’t believe their ears, but not Tim Jenkins. No, his eyes would pop out of his sockets, like he was taking an optimal picture of this epic mental collapse.

  The woman in front of the computer would say to him, “Well, Mr. Jenkins, I figured that the C-79 fuse was overloaded, so I transferred it over to C-80, hoping to alleviate the burden on the one tower…”

  And I remember seeing my dad’s face as she tried to explain, the whites of his eyes in plain view for the whole office to see, and he’d say, “Well, don’t DO that next time,” as if she were caught eating her own boogers. I knew the look; he gave Phil and I the same speech after he came home from work one day and found that somebody had spray-painted the kitchen with Coca-Cola.

  “Well, Dad,” we’d try to explain, “The soda fell on the ground, and then we opened it and it…”

  “Well,” he said in response, his eyes sticking out further than his nose, “Don’t DO that next time. Sleep at night, huh?” It wasn’t an angry tone that he took with us; it was one of those tones of, “Jesus, has logic failed you that badly?” It seemed embarrassing to him that one of his own offspring could mentally falter, even at a prepubescent age.

  My dad’s career was typical of the American Dream. By the time he earned his corner office, I was in college, and I bought him a framed print of the Grand Canyon for Christmas. He had finally moved up to a six figure salary. That was when I finally began to see my father as a man trying to provide rather than my dad who simply does it. If I couldn’t get him something for his new corner office, I wouldn’t have gotten him anything that year. It was too big of a deal; his whole life, our whole family, our way of life was based on the success he had been accumulating since before my older brother was born. I wouldn’t have been able to go to college if it weren’t for his dedication. Well, yeah, I might have been accepted, but I would have been kicked out for not making payments on time. And as for my brother Phil, he was fortunate to get into a nice union job with the phone company thanks to our dad. Dad pulled some strings and got Phil into Pole-Climbing school, only to have Phil drop out after a couple weeks. Months later Phil wanted back in, which forced our dad to exhaust whatever resources and favors he may have had in reserve in order to make it happen. I don’t know what promises he had to make or whose ass he had to kiss in order to achieve it, but I do remember when my dad came home from work that day. He was in the kitchen, shoulders slumped, his thinning hair in disarray. He shook his head and said to me, “Now, don’t you ask to get in, because I’m done. Don’t ask.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said, “I wasn’t planning on it.”

  I was in college at the time.

  I was going to be rich!

  Phil now makes nearly four times the amount of money I make, and I will admit that it does get to me sometimes and I will mention it nearly every time I see him. If we’re standing in line at a convenience store and he has the gall to pick up a Skor Bar or some Bubble Tape (that’s 6 feet of bubble gum. For you. Not them,) and put it in with my pile of stuff, I don’t mind making a scene.

  “Whaaaaaat?!” I’ll screech. “You can pay my monthly bills with four days’ work! Put it back! Put the Bubble Tape back!”

  Of course, he doesn’t make it easy for me, either. He’ll send me a message on my phone just to let me know that he is sitting in the company truck, doing a crossword puzzle and collecting time and a half overtime pay. If he asks for some help with the crossword, my answer is always the same. Hint: seven letters, slang for rectal orifice.

  The end of my dad’s career with the phone company was atypical of the American Dream. It used to be that a man worked for so many years, showing loyalty to the company, and was rewarded with a cheesy gold watch, a small gathering of people making lame jokes, perhaps even a cake. But somewhere along the line, that all changed. One day, the company’s higher-ups bring in this young college graduate and say to my dad, “Here. Teach this guy how you do your job.” It was unfair. It was tricky. It was clever. In order to keep his job for a few more weeks, my dad had to train somebody who would do his job for less money. Now, I don’t know how you train a 25 year-old to work two offices state-wide, or how to establish communications in late September/ Early October of 2001 in New York City, or about being called a “scab” and other callous names by his own workers when there’s a strike, or about sleeping in his office, working 20 hour shifts to keep the place running, but when the training of the kid was complete, a woman approached my dad with a pamphlet and before she even started her spiel about retirement, he said, “Just give me the papers, I’ll sign ‘em.” It happened on a Wednesday, I think. Who retires at 1:00 on a Wednesday afternoon?

  He was forced into early retirement, meaning that he still has to work another five and a half years before collecting social security. They really boned him. Honestly. I know that it’s all about money: how the company can save X amount of dollars and blah blah blah, which is understandable, only the price for that particular type of profit has loyalty as a casualty. It seems to me that companies aren’t just greedy (greed has always been the name of the game), but they seem to be insecure as well. I imagine corporations to be these insecure little girls who won’t commit because they believe the person they’re with will just leave eventually. Trust was lost somewhere, either when the insecure little girl got too fat, or the person they were with decided to start sleeping around with other corporations. Either way, they need a television psychiatrist to sit them down and say gently, “Who hurt you, Verizon, hmm? Who hurt you?”

  My dad now works at a corporate home improvement warehouse, wearing a blue apron with a nametag. He does the returns. At first, I thought that the transition had jaded him. He takes orders from people who are fifteen to twenty years his junior. One floor manager, a perky-voiced mother of two, inquired about his lack of charity at the workplace. Most of the other tellers had a whole slew of cl
over shaped cut-outs that signified a customer’s donation to a charity. My dad’s station was bare. “Tim,” she told him, trying to be helpful and suggestive, “we need more clovers around your desk. You have to up-sell the clovers.”

  To which my dad responded, “Um, actually, I don’t. I don’t have to sell these things at all.” Then he told her to go away.

  When his 30 year old manager made a scheduling mistake, my old man shot his bug-eyes out at him and said, “Just…just how fuckin’ stupid are you?”

  Just as my dad was easing into his “retirement,” it just so happened that the management at the mail-order catalogue warehouse were offering me a supervisor’s position. Although I wasn’t planning on spending my whole career at Regina Carter Gifts, I felt that maybe the place did need some fresh blood. Management was getting a little long in the tooth so to speak, and perhaps with a little insight I could help the place run a little smoother. I would bring sound reasoning back to the company and bridge that ever-increasing gap of hatred between the day shift and night shift. It was a monumental task to be sure, but I was about to be entrusted with responsibilities, Supervisor responsibilities, and they wouldn’t offer it to me if they didn’t think I could do it. I told my parents about it. My mother was happy for me, and my dad stuck his eyes out at me and said, “Chase the carrot, Michael. Chase the carrot.”

  The metaphor was completely lost on me, so I said excitedly, “I start training on Monday!”

  I trained for a week, filling out the proper paper work, doing the quality-checks, spot-checks, error-checks, and every other type of check to ensure that quality merchandise was being sent to its appropriate destination. It seemed like a cushy job; I knew nearly all aspects of the place, I could trouble-shoot nearly all problems sent my way through experience alone, and being trusted by management motivated me to work even harder. The most important part of my plan as supervisor was to open the field of communication between the workers and management, and to especially notice and reward good work, an idea that had been lost on management since the mid-twentieth century.

  However, while clocking in for my third day as an official supervisor, I was told that I was being demoted.

  “Wait—what?” I asked my boss. “Did I do everything ok? If something was wrong just tell me and I can fix it.”

  “No, that’s not it,” he told me. “You need to start stocking again because we’re getting busy.”

  “But you told me you were making me a supervisor so that when it gets busy, Mark didn’t have to supervise two areas at once.”

  “Yeah, I know,” he said before walking away, “but we’re busy.”

  It still doesn’t make sense to me. But what did make sense right then was the carrot metaphor. I remembered a Looney Tunes cartoon from years ago and said in a moment of clarity, “Oh! The mule chases the carrot that’s on a string!” and my enthusiasm dropped when the metaphor came full circle, “But the mule…he’ll…he’ll never get...it…”

  So I went back to my usual strenuous routine at the warehouse, only I felt betrayed and my attitude took a quick turn for the worse. If you’re working at a job—any job-- you always hope for something a little more; that maybe your hard work will be rewarded with a promotion or a pay raise or maybe even just a scanty amount of respect. Just some form or idea of escape from the present situation is necessary, but because I worked hard and put forth the effort I was told that I cannot go any further. It wasn’t until after I received a photo from the day shift general manager, Jeff, that I grew a voice.

  Jeff was in his mid-forties and like most managers he was an easy target for workmen’s ridicule. His wardrobe was that of an effeminate man who was unsure about the ways of masculinity. Jeff’s long blond hair was parted neatly on the left side and flowed around to the back of his neck where it formed a fluffed up, curled mullet that tucked itself right up to the back of his skull. The mullet was delicate, and although I cannot say whether or not it displayed any type of homosexual nuance, I can say that time was spent on the placement, length, and frothiness of the mullet. Time was spent. However, his delicate follicular and facial features were immediately juxtaposed when scanning further down. He wore flannel; heavy flannel, the kind reserved for lumberjacks and shady hitchhikers who carry switchblades. Only the flannel was neatly tucked into his jeans. I could imagine him in Sears, holding up a sample shirt from the rack and asking his wife, “Honey, is this…is this what men wear? ...Well, ok, if you say so, but I’ll make sure it doesn’t dangle.”

  His wardrobe reflected his managerial style: uncertain, unsure, unconfident, and frightened of any kind of confrontation, which led to him taking photos of various things around the warehouse. It used to be that he would walk around the warehouse and make notes on a legal pad, copy them, and distribute them to the supervisors, but he acquired a new toy that year: a Blackberry phone. Now he could take a photograph of what was wrong, e-mail it, then send it to be printed out in X amount of copies. What made it so terrible was that Jeff was not concerned with the amount of work we were getting out per evening, or how much time was spent in each area. What concerned him was whether or not a skid was inside the yellow-taped line on the concrete floor or if a piece of cellophane was left hanging on the edge of an opened box. He would take the picture, not say where he took it, and the next day my night shift manager would be walking around the building, holding the printed photo and trying to determine where it was taken so that the near calamity could be remedied.

  Two days after my demotion from the illustrious title of Supervisor, my boss handed me a photo taken by Jeff. It was a picture of two boxes placed underneath what appeared to be the Stocker Desk from the “SR” area, with one word written above the photo in frilly cursive: “WHY?”

  I thought I had snapped in my workplace before. I’ve kicked boxes in frustration, punched them, hurled them, even punted them. I’ve shouted, screamed, sworn to my loudest capacity, but the real snap occurred when I saw the photo. It was a deep snap, too. I always figured that it would sound like a slowly-falling branch from a dead tree, but it wasn’t a long, boring creak. It was a quick flash of the wrists, like a crisp carrot being broken in two.

  I carefully took the photo from my boss, analyzed it and said, “Ok, I’ll take care of it.”

  I went to my standing desk in the “SR” area, grabbed a pen and wrote underneath Jeff’s “WHY?”

  “See reverse side for explanation --------”

  And this is what I wrote:

  TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:

  I APPRECIATE BEING GIVEN THE OPPORTUNITY TO RESPOND TO YOUR QUERY REGARDING THE TWO CASES LOCATED UNDERNEATH THE “SR” STOCKER DESK. IT IS CRUCIAL THAT IDEAS, EXPLANATIONS, AND VIEWPOINTS ARE EXCHANGED TO ENSURE THE COMPANY’S GROWTH AND SUCCESS, AND I’M HAPPY TO CONTRIBUTE.

  I WOULD FIRST LIKE TO ADDRESS THE WANDERING BOX OF ‘SMORES MAKERS’(SRD 8358) THAT IS NOW NESTLED UNDERNEATH THE DESK AND NOT ON THE STOCK SHELF WHERE IT BELONGS. I REMEMBER THAT SRD 8358 IS A RATHER POPULAR PRODUCT, AND CASES WERE ORDERED IN FREQUENT MASS QUANTITIES. I, SADLY, CANNOT RECALL MY EXACT MODE OF THINKING AT THE TIME OF THE MISPLACED CASE, BUT THERE ARE A FEW THEORIES:

  1. SEEING THAT THE STOCK SHELF WAS COMPLETELY FULL AT THE TIME, I PUT THE BOX UNDER THE DESK, THINKING, “I’LL JUST PUT THAT CASE ON THE FLOWRACK WHEN IT EMPTIES OUT. I MEAN, WHO DOESN’T LIKE S’MORES?” ONLY, I FORGOT ALL ABOUT IT, AND IT RESULTED IN INSUBORDINATION.

  2. THE CASE MAY HAVE BEEN ON MY CART, READY TO BE NEATLY CUT AND PLACED ON THE FLOWRACK WHEN ONE OF THE THREE PICKERS I CATER TO BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 3:30 AND 5:30 (NOT TO MENTION WORKING THE BOX CAROUSEL AS WELL AS PUTTING AWAY THE LINESTOCK FOR AREAS “SY” “SN” AND “SR”) CALLED FOR A HOT NUMBER AND I ACTED SWIFTLY BUT CARELESSLY, TURNING MY CART AT SUCH A SPEED THE BOX OF S’MORES MAKERS SPUN OFF THE END OF THE CART AND INTO THE DUSTY DEPTHS UNDER THE DESK. AFTER RUNNING UPSTAIRS TO GET EVEN MORE HOT NUMBERS, THEN REFILLING THE CAROUSEL, THEN EMPTYING ANYWHERE BETWEEN FIVE TO ELEVEN CASES OF LINE
STOCK, THE S’MORES MAKERS MIGHT HAVE BECOME A CASUALTY OF MY OWN RACING BUT FORGETFUL MIND.

  3. PERHAPS THE CASE WAS PLACED THERE PURPOSELY BY ME; A CONSCIOUS ACT OF DEFIANCE THROUGH BLATANT STOICISM. IT MAY SEEM FAR-FETCHED, BUT WITH MY ATTITUDE AT THE WORKPLACE, I CAN NEITHER SUPPORT THE THEORY NOR DENY IT.

  NO MATTER THE ACTUAL REASON BEHIND THE MISPLACED BOX, IT DID OCCURR ON MY TIME, AND I TAKE FULL RESPONSIBILITY, REGARDLESS OF HOW BADLY IT MAY HAVE SCARRED THE COMPANY.

  MOVING ON, I WOULD LIKE TO DISCUSS THE OPENED CASE OF ‘COUNTING MONEY JARS’ THAT WERE LEFT HAPHAZARDLY ON THE FLOOR LIKE SO MANY SCRAPS OF CARDBOARD AND DUST-BUNNIES. SEEING THAT THE CASE WAS OPENED, I CAN ONLY DEDUCE THAT THE PRODUCT WAS AT ONE POINT ON THE FLOWRACK. HOWEVER, THE FLOWRACK WAS SO FULL (AS IT ALMOST ALWAYS IS), THAT THE ASS-END OF THE CASE JUTTED OUT OVER THE BACK OF THE FLOWRACK AND WAS LEFT VULNERABLE TO THE ELEMENTS. PERHAPS AN ORDER PICKER FROM THE OTHER END PUSHED THE ROW OF CASES BACK, CAUSING THE ITEM TO BE THE VICTIM OF EARTH’S HARSH GRAVITATIONAL PULL. THE MOST LIKELY THING THAT HAPPENED, THOUGH, WAS THAT SOMEONE WAS WALKING AROUND WITH A BLACKBERRY CAMERA PHONE AND HIS/HER SHOULDER KNOCKED THE CASE OVER. AFTER THE SOUND ALERTED HIM/HER, HE/SHE LOOKED DOWN AND EXCLAIMED, “OH, THE INCOMPETENCE!” AND SNAPPED A PHOTO, ONLY TO LATER ASK, “WHY?”

  THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME.

  PLEASE NOTE:

  INGENIOUS METHOD OF USING THE ALWAYS MORE COSTLY COLORED INK FOR THE PHOTOGRAPH. I HAVE NEVER SEEN MY OWN MISTAKES BROUGHT TO MY ATTENTION IN SUCH VIVID HUES.

  I was proud of that letter. It was nearly 550 words and only took me fifteen minutes to write it with only two false starts and absolutely no spelling errors. I was so angry, so keyed up, that the frustration just flowed out of me and onto the page. I felt cleansed after writing it. I took a deep breath through my nose and slowly exhaled through my mouth, releasing the anger. Yet, I needed something more. I needed closure. I had an ex-girlfriend that did something similar. When something angered her, she went over to her desk and wrote a letter to the person that upset her, relinquishing all of her frustration to the letter and never mailing it. I remember her sitting down at her desk and writing two letters to me after I had angered her. After she wrote them, she put them in the top drawer of her desk and she came back to bed as if nothing had ever happened. That kind of emotional release was admirable, but unfortunately, I was not as emotionally stable. As long as the letter to Jeff was in my hands, no one would see it and my job would still be somewhat secure (at least until the layoff in the Spring), but, no. Screw ‘em, I thought. Just…screw ‘em.

  I gave the letter to my boss, and after he turned the picture over and saw an entire page filled with tiny angry lettering, I thought his head was going to explode.

  “What the hell is this?” he asked. “Are you serious?”

  “He asked ‘why.’ I’m answering his question.”

  The next day, my boss pulled me aside and decided that he and I should have a little chat. He sat me down at his desk and began, “Listen, we know that you’re very frustrated here and we want you to know that we appreciate all the work you’re doing here.”

  I looked around the room and thought, We? Who is we?

  “You’re a very smart guy, and we know you’re a lot smarter than nearly everybody working here, but things are done a certain way.”

  When he said that, I reflected back to earlier in the day while I was at my local convenience mart making myself a cup of coffee. I opened a small disposable creamer container, poured the creamer into the trash bin and dropped the empty vessel into my filled cup. It was the second time I made the mistake that week and it was only Wednesday.

  “I am not as smart as you might think,” I told him. “All I am saying is that this place is ridiculous.”

  He tried to sway me back to the company-man mode of thinking, tried to stroke my ego and appeal to my vanity by saying that I was better than this person or that person, but I wasn’t falling for it. He wanted to make me think that management knows how great I am, but they were unable to show it through pay-raises or promotions, and all I could think was, “Management should never judge workers while speaking to their other workers.” They lost me. Completely. After my boss’s speech ended, I nodded my head and asked for the letter back. It was a good letter. Now I felt it could go into my top desk drawer.

  Just… screw ‘em. Screw who, exactly? I don’t know, just…them. The same people who my boss speaks for when he reprimands me and says, “We know you work very hard, but…” and, “we appreciate all that you’re doing, but…”

  After seeing how my dad was treated after pouring so many years of his life into one company, I just found the whole idea of being a company-man completely pointless. So, I float. I work the warehouse job in the fall and winter, and after I am subjected to the layoff near spring, I float on over to the golf course and try to get as many hours as I can, earning minimum wage and hopefully make just enough to coast me through to the fall when the warehouse work picks up. I have no insurance benefits. I have no retirement plan, no 401K, no IRA. They’re all acronyms for ideas and plans that I cannot believe in.

  My attitude has shown mild improvement at the warehouse. I am not yelling or kicking and punching as much, but I am also not trying to change things for the better. It all just…is. When my boss hands me a photograph taken by Jeff, I will either laugh at it, or immediately crumple it up and throw it out before getting frustrated. Sometimes I’ll screw with Jeff. I’ll put some things out of place, or leave things behind, just to get him worked up so he’ll take more photographs, just to let him know that I really don’t care and that his photos are an absolutely fruitless endeavor. He will never confront me about it. I’ve worked there for three years, and he has never said an entire sentence to me. One day, while he was leaving work, I was going to the break room, and he held the door open for me. I didn’t thank him. I didn’t politely refuse his gesture. I walked through and said, “Damn straight!”

  Screw ‘em.

  Thinking about my dad at his new job motivates me to find new ways to slightly disrupt the flow of my place of work. Just recently, I snagged myself a maintenance work order form and filled it out. In the area of the sheet marked, Tools required, I wrote: Pliers, vacuum tube, coat hanger, miner’s hat, petroleum jelly.

  Area of problem: Jeff’s anal cavity.

  Description of job: To gently (or harshly, depending on how he likes it), extract Jeff’s Blackberry phone from his own rectum. If extraction is deemed too damaging to host’s body, at least turn the phone off of “vibrate” mode-- Manager is getting too much pleasure from that particular phone setting.

  I chuckled a bit when I wrote it, and I thought for a moment that maybe what I wrote was a bit over the line, but then I remembered my Dad, the former company-man working at his new job in the home-improvement store. The corporate heads of the company decided that, for morale purposes, employees should get together every morning in Aisle 3 and recite a chant of the name of the store, ya know, for camaraderie. Everyone puts their hands in the middle of the circle, like a quarterback calling a Hail–Mary late in the fourth quarter. Fortunately for my dad, he’s stuck in the return section and can’t participate, so when he sees one of his blue-aproned brethren making his way to aisle three, he stands there, bug-eyed as they go past, braying, “Bahhhh…..Bahhh…..”

  Yeah, I think I’ll hand the order in to maintenance. They could use the challenge

  Contents

  Talk to Your Hand