When I was eight, my older cousin Jamey told me that she had seen the movie Faces of Death. She said the movie showed actual deaths of humans and animals. The most upsetting segment, she said, was when they showed a monkey being beaten with a hammer. Faces of Death was the only movie in the Horror section of my childhood video store that I never rented, but it had one of the most lasting impacts. I can still remember the cover: Black, with the text in large red print, a drawn human skull encompassing the lower half of the cover. On the top right hand corner was a blue banner that went diagonally from the top right corner to the middle right side. It read: BANNED! In 46 Countries!
Never did I have the courage to rent Faces of Death. Just hearing secondhand that a monkey was beaten to death with a hammer kept it out of my VCR. And how troubling is it that I can remember to this day being told at the age of 8 that a monkey was beaten with a hammer? Imagine if I actually saw it! I might be in a rubber room right now. Of course, even though I never did see the monkey getting attacked, I still conjure up an image of what I think it might be like whenever it is mentioned. It’s a small monkey, like a spider monkey, in a sterile white room, backed into a corner. The camera is set on a tripod while a solitary arm emerges from the left side of the screen holding a tack hammer, ready to strike, the monkey gritting its teeth in fear. I never had the tenacity to strike the monkey of my imagination, but it was unsettling all the same.
The reason I mention Faces of Death is that I was trying to go my whole life without watching something as horrid as animal torture. I thought that with my steady history of watching Jason Voorhees slicing campers in two, Freddy Krueger slashing his way into people’s dreams, and Pinhead tearing the flesh off of puzzle-box aficionados with rusty hooks, then surely I was numb to the human condition. I must have seen a few thousand human murders through my television, and that’s nothing more than entertainment to me, just don’t let me see any monkey torture! My mission has failed though, for every day at work I watch metaphorical monkey torture, and it’s as unnerving as I imagine it would be to watch that tiny spider monkey in the sterile white room, the tack hammer getting closer and closer.
There’s this guy at work. He’s as defenseless as that monkey in my imagination, and every day I have to watch him get harshly reprimanded. I’m new at this place of employment, and I don’t want to cause a fuss, but even on my first day on the job I was told by my manager that not only was this job so easy, “a monkey could do it,” I was also told to stay away from the guy near the Deacro 1 machine. “He’s a fuckin’ moron,” the boss told me. “Don’t go near him, and don’t ask him for any help.”
I was not introduced to the guy, was not made aware of what he was working on, nor could I make the mistake of saying ‘hello’ to him if he passed. Immediately, though, the point was made: this guy was the workplace pariah, and communicating with him would be a dire mistake.
There are only five of us machine operators in this small section of the company. We cut plastic film from one large size down to several smaller sizes and sell the pieces to companies to use to wrap their own products. First day on the job, my trainer, the supervisor, was explaining which machine I will be operating and how it works, when the pariah came over. My supervisor’s face immediately turned red, “What? What the fuck do you want? Get the fuck back to your machine!” My jaw dropped, and the guy quickly turned on his heel and went back to what he was doing.
Never had I seen someone treated so terribly in a workplace. He is frequently called, “Moron,” “Asshole,” “Dumbshit,” or “Fuckin’ Moron,” each of which is preceded by a simple, “Hey.” As in, “Hey, Dumbshit, what the fuck did I just tell you, you fucking moron asshole?”
Personally, I think the reason behind the sheer ferocity of my co-worker’s reprimands lies solely in his name. The guy’s name is Guy. With a name like “Guy” it allows a certain emotional distance from genuine human interaction. How would you like it if you looked up your own name in the dictionary and saw that the transitive verb form of your name meant, “to make fun of; ridicule”? I’ve also heard his name used to address a pair of kitchen tongs or a soup ladle, as in, “Hey, pass me that guy over there.”
Guy is an adult, somewhere between the age of 30 and 50. He has brown hair, or blonde, I don’t really remember. He has two eyes, a nose, and possibly some teeth. He really is as physically indistinct as his name would suggest. No, wait, I know he has teeth, because he shines them big and bright every time he gets yelled at by the supervisor. It’s an old fashioned defense mechanism, a relic from our simian cousins. When a chimp or monkey smiles, he is not happy; he’s nervous, scared, apprehensive. The same can be said for the Guy when he is backed into a corner, the manager telling him that he, “cannot wait to fire his stupid ass,” Guy’s lips spread apart and he smiles big, which infuriates the manager even further. My boss thinks Guy is screwing with him, but smiles do not mean “happy” for chimps, and neither do they for the Guy, especially not when there is the tack-hammer of unemployment looming over his head.
The Guy’s wardrobe consists of random work shirts from previous places of employment: Pane-Less Window Installation, L&M Contractors, Homestead Carpentry… He seems to have a different work shirt for every day of the month. Severance packages, I presume, from a lifetime of being hired and subsequently fired. Think of all the Monday mornings when Guy got the call from his foreman, telling him not to come in that day, or the next day, or the day after… “And you can keep the shirt,” he might say before hanging up.
Now, from the management standpoint, Guy is a total screw-up. Not only does he make mistakes every day, he makes the same ones over and over. There was a time, back in the long-long ago, when people in the company were patient with Guy, but that was before I came on. Unfortunately, I came into this job eight months after Guy started, so I didn’t get to watch the slow disintegration of the bosses’ patience. I only now watch the maturity of their hatred for him, and it is difficult to watch, to say the least. What adds to the tension is that my boss will tell Guy over and over that once I am trained on the machines, he is going to be out on his ass.
I can’t do anything about this. I have absolutely no clout with this new company, so defending Guy will only hurt me in the long run. The best I can do is avoid the conflicts. When I see one of the bosses heading over to Guy, I make myself scarce. I dart behind my machine on the other end of the room where the whirring of my machine drowns out whatever is being said to Guy. I still watch, though, equating it to something like a slow-motion car wreck, but I paint a happier picture for Guy in my head. “This is an excellent label you just printed out here, Guy,” My boss might say. “You are really excelling in this area of the workplace. I see a great future for you here. Your job is completely safe.”
Of course, when my boss is really angry, the conversation gets a bit more animated to correspond with his red face and wild arm gestures, and it takes all of my skills to keep it positive. “Guy! You highfalutin’ genius! This work is brilliant! Holy shit, you are so awesome! I’m so proud of you! I think I might tell you to take the rest of the day off! Look! There’s the door! It’s maroon!”
Surprisingly, Guy doesn’t treat me like a threat. He might say ‘hello’ to me before we clock in, with the popular adage, “Is it Friday yet?” I laugh at the joke, simply out of pity. He says it to me all the time when he walks past my machine, and I give the comment the same amount of hearty laughter each time. If Guy is seen making a comment to me, my boss will yell across the room, “Hey, Asshole! Don’t fuckin’ talk to him, get back to work!”
Something has to give. Guy should find better employment, or management should just drop the hammer and fire him. I don’t see how anyone can take such verbal abuse on a daily basis and not just go on a tirade. If Guy would at least defend himself a little bit or show that he has just a small amount of self-respect, the future I imagine for him would be much happier. But as it is, his anger and frustration with the company must be bottled up someth
ing terrible, and it’s not such a far-fetched idea to imagine Guy walking in with a loaded weapon one day. The cliché, “Is it Friday yet?” echoing off the walls with each pump of the shotgun.
As badly as Guy needs to go (not just for the company’s sake, but for his own sake as well), I have to admit that I need Guy to keep working here. He’s the best training tool I have ever had. I am constantly asking my co-workers what Guy did to get yelled at, and they’ll say, “Oh, he printed out his labels in kilograms instead of pounds,” and I’ll make a mental note: Print labels in pounds, not kilograms. Half of my training came from my supervisor, and the other half came from hearing about Guy’s mistakes that cost the company money.
Not only do I need him there for his mistakes, I also need him there to take the abuse. I get the feeling that if Guy ever leaves, all of that negative energy has got to flow somewhere and I think I will be the next monkey in the white room. It’s happened to me before, with my friends in 8th grade. The dynamic of our group had changed, and instead of being funny and supportive, we turned on each other like wolves. We had a chubby friend in our small group, and out of nowhere it became funny to mock and insult him, something we had never bothered doing before. The guys would take his seat at lunch, would write nasty things on his book-covers. I didn’t partake in the insults, but I didn’t defend the kid, either. After the kid decided he had had enough, he stopped hanging out with us and suddenly, it was my seat that was always taken in the lunchroom, my schoolbooks scribbled with insults, the snickering and notes passed in the classroom were about me. It was a truly awful feeling to be treated like that, and I went without any friends at school for nearly two years, until I finally found friends that were worth keeping. Friends who helped each other and only playfully mocked, not constantly insulted. Friends that I still have to this day.
I respect myself enough now not to be treated like that ever again, but this isn’t school anymore. This is a job, a means to pay my bills and sustain my life. If I was talked to like Guy is talked to, I’d quit without a thought and worry about the consequences later. But this job has good hours, has benefits, even some vacation time after a year. I’ve never had it so good. I’ve been with the company five months now, my training ended after three, and still Guy is there, despite my boss’s promise to fire him after I finished training. My boss reminds Guy, though. Telling him every day not to get comfortable, he will be getting it soon. The tack-hammer hangs high in the air, held by an unknown man, the monkey with his back in the corner, smiling wide at his perpetual doom.
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I Could Go For A Laugh…