Horse's Ass

  Chapter Eight

  Mike walked through the revolving door at the building’s entrance at eleven am, as he had each workday since he started working for G.O.D., right after the first of the year. A few minutes prior to entering the building, he had parked near the yellow caution tape that surrounded Alan’s impact zone. Crows noisily flew away as he passed. Walking by the security guard, the guard asked, “ID?”

  Mike parroted back “ID!”, and continued echoing, “ID! ID!” He fumbled his badge from his pocket and flashed it to the guard. Mike’s picture was recent, within the last year, and showed him with short black hair severely parted to the right and black, horn rimmed glasses. He was in the middle of six feet one and six feet two, a no man’s land that he usually rounded up, and weighed a beer or two under two hundred pounds. An athletic geek with socially awkward tendencies, Mike walked to the elevator bank.

  Unknown to his coworkers Mike suffered from situational echolalia, an uncommon form of autism (not formally recognized by the medical community) in which the sufferer parrots the tail end of a conversation as a declaration of fact. In Mike’s case, the echolalia manifested itself with women to whom he was attracted and with those that held positions of power over him. The disease had proven itself a destroyer of personal relationships.

  Date: “What do you want to do?”

  Mike: “What do you want to do!”

  Date: “I asked you first?”

  Mike: “I asked you first!”

  Ad infinitum.

  Interestingly, in the work environment the disease was often mistaken for deep thinking, a sign of great intelligence as still waters run deep.

  Management: “Will the business grow?”

  Mike: “Will the business grow!”

  Management: “Sales are increasing?”

  Mike: “Sales are increasing!”

  In the foyer, Doug’s executive elevator sat unused and cordoned off with a velvet rope. The elevator looked like a cheap set for a community theater production requiring an office. Unfortunately, the staff elevator was in use, and it would be at least fifteen minutes before it returned to the ground floor. A crowd began to form alongside Mike, and as Mike waited he pondered his status as a muddling middle manager whose next likely step was working in the mail room if things persisted as they had recently. The promotion he had recently received resulted in the loss of any management responsibility, a pay-cut, and effectively positioned him as the company’s pariah.

  As humiliating as working his way backwards, Benjamin Button-like through the organization was, working at G.O.D. appeared the least painful of many possible employment scenarios. Much higher on Mike’s list of concerns was a perpetual fear of finding himself only employable in the state of New Jersey whereupon he would be forced to live next to the Buttafuocos, The Real Housewives, or that imbecile, Snooki. Mike was the first to admit his psychosis was irrational, and wasn’t naïve to the amount of brain space he consumed, and time he fretted, over the New Jersey-Buttafuoco scenario.

  Mike graduated with an associate degree in biology from a junior college in the late 1980s to find there was no money counting ducks on ponds, and too unnerved by the body’s inner mechanics to pursue a medical degree. To pay the bills, and move from his parents’ home, he took a job with a national firm that sprayed ‘cides’ on the lawns and trees of suburban homes in order to wrest control from nature. The manual labor, coupled with a need to undergo weekly blood tests, quickly ended with his termination. At the end of the short run, he was certain he didn’t want a career that involved the testing of carcinogen values. He still remembered asking the area vice president whether the permissible value shouldn’t be zero given they are spraying nerve agents. The vice president chuckled and patted him on the back.

  His next stint was as a pharmaceutical sales rep. A godforsaken job glad handing the office staff, with the majority of the day spent sitting among the ill while he waited to deliver a thirty second commercial. After the Food and Drug Administration disallowed the frequent prescriber programs that rewarded doctors with trips, cash, and prizes, based on the number of patients they prescribed medicine for, the doctors had no inclination to see sales reps. Thereafter, Mike spent most of the day driving office to office handing out samples. Mike quickly realized he was a UPS delivery man absent the brown shorts. The job paid well, required little more than a few hours a week, and came with a car.

  Mike skied almost daily the two years he worked for the pharmaceutical company - on water and snow. Eventually his addiction to gravity sports commanded his life, and he began to create fictitious records of the little work that was expected of him. “Met with the doctor and he loves the product,” repeated endlessly in his call logs. The charade came to an end when his Regional Manager surprised him with a visit and rode with him for a day. Mike was unable to find any of the doctors he’d reported calling on, and got lost in his territory a half dozen times. To make matters worse, empty beer bottles, pizza boxes, and a couple pairs of skis wedged diagonally between the front and back seats, littered the car. It was a long day which ended with him fired from his second job in three years. Other, more dramatic, firings would come later.

  On the plus side, his work experience provided enough material to fabricate an impressive vitae (vitae being from the Latin, to lie) and gained him access to a four year college where he studied business. It helped Mike that in today’s litigation crazed society the only information his prior employers would provide were dates of service. In bold letters, under accomplishments, he fabricated that he’d tripled sales and received the President’s Favorite award. He based the remainder of his resume off an illustrative example he found on the internet.

  In school, Mike surrounded himself with the self indulgent gluttons of the world. His classmates were mostly pretentious little pricks who hungered for the trappings of wealth, and idolized festering piles of shit, real and imagined, like Trump and Gecko. Caught up in the mob mentality, he sallied forth and figured it would take a year, two at most, to reap millions from the heyday of the internet. When the internet bubble burst, he jumped ship to try day trading. From day trading, he entered the real estate market, and from there the sub-prime mortgage market. With his work history a long tale of too little too late, he found himself in his forties with no savings as he plunged into bankruptcy.

  Mike was comfortable with failure, and at this point in his life he expected it both professionally and personally, as his dreams repeatedly slipped through his grasp. Recently divorced from his wife, having been unable to reconnect emotionally after her parole, he had yet to re-enter the dating world.

  He’d met his wife at a local bar. She was a militant vegan and animal rights activist who’d had her jaw broken when the dairy cow she was trying to free from human oppression kicked her. Around her neck she wore a pair of wire cutters, a necessity should she vomit and need to cut her way out of the wiring that held her jaw together. Small and dumpy, with mousy brown hair, neither could remember what they spoke of on the night they met – he with his echolalia and she with her jaw wired shut. They were married for eight months before her sentencing on animal cruelty charges for starving their two dogs, Teardrop and Jupiter, nearly to death. The fateful conversation that led to her incarceration played, over and over, in Mike’s mind.

  “Should I make the dogs vegan?” his wife asked.

  “Make the dogs vegan!” Mike responded as his wife unbuttoned her blouse for bed. The circumstances of seeing his wife’s pear shaped body naked drove his situational echolalia.

  “Should I do it?”

  “Do it!” Mike gasped for air, unable to repeat her full sentence, as his wife stood topless before him.

  The dogs didn’t respond well to the meat free diet she put them on, losing fur and weight until they stood naked at death’s door. An SPCA raid featured on local TV saved the dogs. Her resultant trial was a short, unpublished affair that ended with he
r incarceration.

  With the goal of a steady paycheck, Mike got a haircut, dug out an old suit from his pharmaceutical sales days, and updated his resume. Weeks after he e-mailed his resume to thousands of firms he received a phone call from G.O.D. asking him in for an interview. The interview was a strange affair that took place in Alan’s office.

  “Mike?” Alan asked when Wilma dropped him off at Alan’s office for his interview. Alan didn’t stand to greet Mike at the door. In an effort to disguise his height, Alan always remained seated at work. To cover his lapse in manners Alan extended the smallest courtesy and pointed at the coffee maker on his desk, “Cup of Joe?”

  “Joe!” Mike echoed back.

  Confused, Alan looked at the resume on his desk, “Mike?”

  “Mike!”

  Alan grew more confused, “Joe and Mike?”

  “Joe and Mike!”

  Alan rested his thumbs under his chin, drummed his fingers together in front of his nose, and contemplated the value in a scapegoat with two first names. It could prove most fortuitous to Alan if he could declare he’d fired Shap, Joe, and Mike, when the time came. The Board too old and infirm and Doug too divested to know Joe and Mike was the same person.

  The day after his interview, Mike received a thick packet in the mail from G.O.D. offering him the business lead in charge of a handful of business analysts within Alan’s Finance organization. Mike knew G.O.D. didn’t offer the get rich quick scheme he’d planned his life around, but a couple of years of work would pad his resume and give him the money he needed to pay down his bills. He also hoped to move out of his parent’s basement, and, God willing, buy a new car. His father’s words, “failure to launch,” rang in his ears each time he descended his childhood home’s basement stairs to his room.

  An ominous start to his job, Mike presented at work an hour late on his first day. As Mike waited in the lobby the security guard phoned Alan, who, having forgotten Mike the minute the interview concluded had no idea what the guard was talking about. Mike could clearly hear Alan through the guard’s phone. At the front desk, Mike argued vehemently, employment letter in hand, he now worked for G.O.D. The guard shrugged his shoulders and reached down to unfasten his pepper spray. Mike left quickly, as the guard had the calm and cool look of those used to spraying caustic agents into the eyes of irate customers and out of control employees.

  Mike returned home an hour after he started the day. Seeing his son, his Dad commented on the obvious, “Jesus Christ! Fired? That’s a record. You didn’t even make it to lunch.” Fifteen minutes later the phone rang. It was Alan telling him to come back. Alan had forgotten it was Mike he’d hired as his scapegoat for the inevitable fall. Alan didn’t offer any apology, nor did he bother to stop by Mike’s office and welcome him on his first day of work.

  Mike had never developed a computer system but figured, “how hard could it be?” He’d played video games for years. Mike had no idea what he was up against and saw firsthand the destruction that manifested from unrealistic expectations with mortgages and family on the line. Mike sat directly across from Shap during the series of meetings in which Shap nearly bore into his brain. After the fateful meeting in which Mike and Shap sought sign-off, it became clear to Mike that his career was dying on the vine. When the meeting ended Shap sent Alan, Cuddy, and Mary, an e-mail explaining Doug’s refusal to sign-off, and that it appeared the project was again stillborn.

  Cuddy hit ‘reply all’ and told Mike, “To get his ass over to the office supply store and buy as many green 3x5 cards as they done have.” Cuddy figured he’d pass them out, and his staff could keep track of the pet information on the green cards. Cuddy was never keen on having to train the hundreds of employees on a new computer system, and, from his perspective, this had worked out for the best. More importantly, Cuddy wasn’t going to let Alan succeed. It wasn’t his problem the shareholders had spent over a $100 million coding a system that would never be used.

  When Mike returned a half hour later from the office supply store the project team had been disbanded, and Mike was a manager without a project or staff to manage. This strange state of limbo lasted for weeks. Mike didn’t mind not doing anything, but he did feel a lot like a, “Japanese window sitter.” A futureless employee who reports to work daily, draws a salary, but has no job responsibilities.

  Alan wasn’t sure the time frame before The Board learned of, and reacted to, the additional money squandered on the IT project, and didn’t want to fire Mike prematurely. The Board required their pound of flesh, and it was better to wait until The Board meted justice; otherwise, they might go after Alan in Mike’s absence. Best to leave Mike waiting; like a lobster in a tank he wasn’t going anywhere. Eventually Alan had Mike assigned to a team of consultants Doug retained to develop a strategic vision for the company. Mike’s reassignment came with a title change. He was no longer a director he was a special guide, and his pay, paid time off, and benefits were scaled back accordingly. It also moved him out of Alan’s cost center, and made him someone else’s problem.

  The project Mike was assigned had nothing to do with strategy. It was a cost-cutting initiative focused on firing employees without incurring lawsuits. To that end Mike was involved in the non-discriminatory downsizing based on the color wheel. More specifically, he was responsible for herding the employees into the conference room where they were fired by Doug via speakerphone. Mike quickly became a pariah at work. A status which didn’t end when the project was abruptly halted after the irreplaceable middle managers were terminated. As bad as shepherding his co-workers onto the killing floor was, it was no worse than hanging around watching Shap try to collect business requirements from Cuddy, Mary, and Doug, for an IT project that none of them wanted completed.

  The strategic vision project wrapped up several months ago and Mike again showed up for work only to sit in his office and wait for something to do. To kill time he wrote verse, and produced a poem that was so dreadfully awful the literary agent to whom it was submitted was certain it would stand on the podium of worst fiction of the year and win the Bulwer-Lytton award. Surprisingly uplifted by being the best at being the worst, he next tried to teach himself French, alone and in his office.

  Lost in his thoughts Mike missed the staff elevator when it returned, and the crowd surged past him and filled it to capacity. Mike got on the elevator fifteen minutes later, when it returned to the ground floor. With the elevator stopping at each floor, and the shuffling of passengers to accommodate those in the back, it took another fifteen minutes to get to his floor. In hindsight, and thirty minutes later, Mike realized he should have taken the stairs.