TheCorporation Read online

  She met Jay’s gaze over her glass and shrugged. “Well, just for the record, I’m still bored,” she said. Jay laughed.

  “So is Paul’s daughter okay?” Michelle asked. She scooted her position so she was a little closer to him. Jay appeared momentarily surprised by her question but recovered. He began filling Michelle in. Yes, Paul’s daughter was fine, although she suffered a mild concussion, a broken arm, and a compound fracture in her left lower leg. She was still in the hospital but was going to be fine. Michelle said, “Well, I’d be out of my mind if it were my kid.”

  “So is your job more important than your kid? Or should that be plural?” Jay asked. He lit another cigarette.

  “It isn’t plural, and I don’t have children.” The little painful memory flashed briefly as it always did whenever anybody asked if she had children, and was quickly gone. “But if I did, my child would be more important than my job. What about you? You have kids”

  “I have a son. He’s a year old. And it’s really nice to hear you’re not like the rest of these dolts.” Jay leaned back, fresh cigarette in hand. “You’re a breath of fresh air. And from Corporate Financial—you must be new.”

  Michelle blinked, not sure what Jay meant by that remark. “Well, I am new. I just started with Corporate Financial a few weeks ago.”

  “Really? Do you like them?”

  “So far so good.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, really.” Michelle took a sip of her beer. “Why do you ask?”

  Jay shrugged, took a drag on his cigarette. “I always wondered what it was like to work for them. I hear the perks are pretty good.”

  “They’re the best I’ve had so far.”

  Jay appeared to think about this for a moment as he smoked. Everybody else at their table was still talking about the project, which Michelle had no interest in now. She shared Jay’s opinion regarding after-work discussion with co-workers. She’d worked jobs in the past where she went out with co-workers to a bar or restaurant after work to unwind and hang out and their jobs rarely came up in discussion. When it did, it was to complain about them. There were a few times members of management came to these after work drink-fests, and occasionally they would talk shop, but even they, too, eventually found other topics of discussion more varied than the office. Michelle commented on this to Jay, leaning toward him so she wouldn’t be overheard by the rest of their group and Jay leaned over the table so he could hear her, nodding in agreement. “Exactly!” he said. “I dig ya. That’s normal. These guys,” he indicated the group with an impatient gesture of his cigarette, “aren’t normal. They behave like mindless zombies.”

  “Are they always like that?”

  “Pretty much.” Jay took a drag on his cigarette. “It got worse after Corporate Financial started doing some work for Building Products.”

  “Oh?” Michelle prepared herself for the slam against the company she worked for. Not that it would bother her; she’d learned long ago to separate her working time from her personal time and, as a result, things like what happened to her at work rarely bothered her. Even criticism against the company she worked for didn’t bother her. She wasn’t her company; that’s how she was able to take the criticisms levied against her employers. She didn’t make corporate decisions. Some faceless drone in a suit did. “How so?”

  Jay regarded her a minute and his eyes flicked briefly to the group at their table. They were still deeply involved in their discussion of the project. Jay’s dark eyes went back to her again. “Well, I can tell you’re cool because of what you said earlier about choosing your personal life over your job. Don’t construe this as a slam against you or anything, or a slam against your employer, because it isn’t.”

  “None will be taken,” Michelle said. Despite having quit smoking seven years ago, the urge to take it up again was strong now, mostly having to do with breathing Jay’s second hand smoke.

  “I’ve been at Building Products for five years,” Jay began, his voice lowered slightly. “And it was cool when I first started, but like all jobs it has its ups and downs. You know? Office politics, management bullshit, that kind of thing. I don’t give a shit about any of that anyway. Never have. They pay me to come in and do their website and maintain their servers and do anything internet and web-related and that’s what I do. I don’t give a flying fuck if my boss is fucking his secretary, or if Barb over there is a closet alcoholic who neglects her kids—which she does, by the way—or if some know-nothing executive wants to initiate some stupid bullshit policy that will end up costing the company thousands of dollars in productivity because it’ll make his bottom-line look good to the stockholders and it completely wastes my time when I can be doing stuff that’ll keep the company running. I don’t really give a shit, long as I get paid on time and have my medical insurance and 401k. I just come in and do what they ask me to do and I try to do as good a job as I can, to the best of my abilities, and in my humble opinion I think I’m pretty goddamned good at what I do. There are times if I see something that will be a waste of time, I let my boss know and many times he agrees. If he doesn’t, that’s cool. Whatever. Like I said, I don’t give a shit. They want me to put porn on their website, I’ll do it even though I think it’s wrong, know what I mean?”

  “What about bestiality photos?” Michelle quipped.

  “Then I tell them to go fuck themselves and I walk. I can always find this kind of grunt work anywhere. Although now that I think about it, a lot of this shit they’re sending overseas to India where pretty soon they’ll be replacing human beings with trained monkeys since a monkey will work for less than five dollars a day.”

  “And if that happens you just find another way to make a living,” Michelle said. “Right?”

  “Hell yeah. I mean, I’ll work as an auto mechanic again if I have to. I’ve done that before too. I can do it again. Sometimes I find that line of work more preferable than what I’m doing now. Less bullshit to deal with.”

  “So how have things been bad at Building Products since Corporate Financial came into the picture?” Michelle asked in a lowered voice. She didn’t want Alan Perkins to hear her; God forbid word traveled back to Sam that she was gossiping.

  “Building Products wanted them to develop this Human Resources software,” Jay began. “They had a shitload of meetings for, like, six months, talked to everybody in the company from the receptionists to the CEO to get their input. Like input from the receptionist matters, know what I mean?” Another drag of the cigarette. “Once they got that together, they started working on the software and I uploaded a couple of Beta-versions of it to the Intranet server for some in-house testing. And ever since then, everybody who works in this place has walked around with a severe stick up their ass. It’s like working at Building Products has become the most important thing on the planet. There’s guys working long hours and on weekends for nothing in return—they’re not getting overtime, they’re not taking comp days or anything. One time I joked with one of the office managers about it and he was all serious. ‘The work has to get done Jay. There’s no other way around it.’ I’ve been suggesting real subtly to my boss and other people that we could really use another IT tech at this place and nobody will listen. They’d rather pay two guys to do the work of four and five people and when shit happens and work piles up, they want you to sacrifice everything to make shit happen. Fuck that.” Jay took another drag of his cigarette. “I don’t play that shit. You get what you pay for is my opinion.”

  “I don’t either,” Michelle said. Talking to Jay was like a breath of fresh air, cigarette smoke notwithstanding. “My life is too important to miss out on the good things in life.”

  “Exactly. There’s guys here that miss activities their kids are in. Barb...she’s a complete whackfuck if I’ve ever met one.” Jay’s dark eyes centered on Barb briefly. “She’s in the office by six-thirty in the morning and leaves at seven-thirty, eight o’clock at night. Sometimes later. And she’s here on Saturd
ays, too. Sometimes Sundays. She has two kids, and she’s married, and one of her kids is out of control at school, getting in trouble and shit. Her husband works too, so he ain’t around. She makes more than enough money to enable him to stay home, or at least take a part time job and make sure one of them is around for their kids, but they don’t.”

  “Maybe they have a lot of bills,” Michelle suggested.

  “With her salary? She’d have to be spending money like the Federal Government to be that deep in debt.”

  Michelle shrugged and took a sip of her dwindling glass of beer. “Well, they say the more money you make, the more you spend.”

  “Barb really gets off on this shit,” Jay said, his voice still lowered. “She was always like that, but she’s been worse since Corporate Financial stepped in, and a lot of people, especially those at the managerial level, have become like her. It’s kinda creepy in a way.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. It’s like that Jack Finney story, Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”

  Michelle grinned; she liked Jay even more now. It was rare to meet somebody who worked in the corporate world who was well-read. “I gotta admit it does sound like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Managers will get like that when the suits above them initiate some bullshit policy or something. They all lose their perspective and fall into line. They stop thinking for themselves or what’s best for their departments or the company in some cases.”

  “Well, it ain’t just the managers at this place. It’s most of the other employees, too. They’re not as bad, but I can definitely tell something’s up. But then I might just be overreacting to this shit. I mean, I’m one of the only people here at Building Products who would rather be doing something else, know what I mean? A lot of the people who work here actually went to school to learn their jobs. You know...they all majored in Accounting or got MBAs because it’s what they wanted in the first place. Me, I just fell into this shit because I saw it was a way to make some good money. I could easily do something else.”

  “What would you rather be doing?”

  Jay looked at her, as if he were deciding whether he could trust her. “Let’s just say I have my own aspirations for a vocation that has nothing to do with Building Product’s corporate goals and visions and leave it at that.”

  Michelle could dig it. She was wearing a similar shoe.

  “Besides,” Jay said, dragging on his cigarette. “Even people who really like what they’re doing here have changed. They’re more into the company than they ever were. The shit they’re doing, the work they really like doing, has taken a back seat. At least that’s how it seems. It’s like they’ve lost all focus of what makes them happy and wakes them up in the morning. They don’t realize that what it all boils down to is, what we’re doing here at Building Products are just jobs. They’re not saving the world or anything, but some of them are acting like what they’re doing is the most important thing in the world.”

  “If that’s the case, what are you working at Building Products for, Jay?”

  Michelle started at the sound of Barb’s voice and turned toward her, feeling slightly embarrassed. Barb was regarding them coolly, a fresh glass of whiskey in front of her. For a closet alcoholic she didn’t appear inebriated yet.

  Jay didn’t look surprised or embarrassed that his comment had caught Barb’s attention. He fixed her with his patented stare and said, “What do you think? I’m there for the paycheck. Isn’t that what most people work for? The money?”

  The conversation had caught the attention of the rest of the group and Alan was leaning back in his seat, looking interested. A couple of the Building Products people were silent, some grinning as if waiting for the fireworks to start between Barb and Jay. Barb took a sip of her drink. “It’s not why I work at Building Products. What about you Gregg? Bob? Mark?”

  The other guys shook their heads. Barb nodded at Alan. “What about you Alan? What motivates you to work for Corporate Financial?”

  “I enjoy interacting with my clients and helping to improve their business,” Alan said. He leaned forward, catching Michelle’s eye quickly. “What about you, Michelle?”

  For a brief moment Michelle was at a crossroads. She was still new to Corporate Financial Consultants, and didn’t know Alan well enough to let loose around him. She was quick enough to respond with a neutral answer. “I enjoy the work, I’m good at what I do, and I like the compensation.”

  “Of course you do,” Jay said, and Michelle could tell from the vibe she was getting off of him that he understood where she was coming from, that she was trying to avoid getting into trouble with her co-worker at Corporate Financial. “That’s the sane answer. It’s always good to like what you’re doing as well as the money. But if you were a millionaire would you be doing this?” This last question was directed at Barb.

  “Of course,” Barb said. “What else would I do?”

  “You wouldn’t want to spend more time with your kids? Do the things you’ve always wanted to do?”

  “I’m already doing what I’ve always wanted to do.” Barb answered.

  “So if you had all the money in the world, you’d still be working twelve and fourteen hour days, six and sometimes seven days a week for Building Products?”

  Barb smiled. For a brief moment Michelle was chilled by that smile. It was utterly devoid of emotion. “This is what I do, Jay. What you do for Building Products is what you do. That’s how it works.”

  “No shit? And it’s like this for everybody?”

  “Of course it is.” Barb had her attention wholly centered on Jay. “You heard the consensus from the group here at the table. This is what they do, too.”

  “So you’re telling me that despite overwhelming opinion polls that indicate the majority of workers would rather be doing something else for a living, what they’re really doing is what they’re meant to do and they would continue working the same mindless jobs that provide them with no emotional or personal satisfaction even if they were financially able to quit?”

  One of the men at the table—Michelle wasn’t sure what his name was—frowned. He was fat, wore glasses, and was wearing a suit with a white shirt and a tie that was still knotted. “You’re suggesting you wouldn’t be working at Building Products if you were financially able to quit?”

  “Fuck yeah! Wouldn’t you?”

  “No.” The man said. He managed a small grin that reminded Michelle of Barb’s smile; it was cold, emotionless. “Like Barb said, this is what I do.”

  “Fine. Maybe it’s what you do, but what about seventy-five percent of the population?” Jay was on a roll and Michelle was now silently hoping he would shut up. She agreed with him one hundred percent, but she was afraid he was putting his job in jeopardy by letting his mouth run.

  “You’re suggesting that most people don’t want to work? Is that what you’re saying?” This question came from one of the other guys at the table. Unlike Mark and Barb, he actually appeared to be mulling this question over.

  “Shit yes!” Jay said. He stubbed the butt of his cigarette in his ashtray. “You talk to most people, they don’t want to work. They’d rather be on a permanent vacation in California or Hawaii or some shit, going skiing or traveling or partying twenty-four seven. Maybe some of them would be doing shit they really like doing like painting portraits or writing poetry or watching old movies all day or going bird watching. They wouldn’t be pushing paper for some faceless corporation or standing behind a check-out stand all day.”

  “Then why do they do it?” Barb asked.

  “Because they need the money! Why else?”

  “You really think the reason most people go through all the trouble they go through to get a job is for the money?”

  Jay was looking at Barb as if she were the stupidest person on the planet. “You can’t be serious?”

  “I am,” Barb said, still fixing Jay with that patented glare.

  “You’re telling us that people manipulate their wa
y—sometimes even outright lie—to get jobs they feel no overwhelming desire to do otherwise?”

  “Yeah, they do.” Despite Barb’s smoldering gaze, Jay didn’t back down. He matched it with his own. “I’m sure not everybody does it. I know there’re people that genuinely like what they do for their chosen career. People who know what they wanted to do when they were ten and then went out and did it when they got out of high school or college or whatever are excluded. I’m talking about everybody else, the poor saps who either had no fucking clue what they were going to do when they got out of school or those unlucky enough to fall into the jobs they currently have. Those are the ones who would rather be doing something other than what they’re doing. They exaggerate on resumes, they mislead, they manipulate their way into job interviews. Then they do this thing called performance art when they finally get the interview. They do every-fucking-thing they can do to convince the person who is interviewing them that they are the best and most qualified person for the job. They do this because they need the job to make money to pay their bills, put food on the table, and keep a roof over their head. If they didn’t have to do the dog-and-pony show to get the job that would give them the paycheck which enables them to provide for themselves and their family, they wouldn’t do it.”

  “So you’re saying most people lie on resumes and in job interviews to get a job because they only want the job for the money,” Barb asked.

  “Yes.”

  “They actually lie?”

  “For the most part, yes.” Jay lit another cigarette. Somehow his coffee cup had become empty since Michelle started talking to him. She was already pegging him as an ex-drinker by the way he instantly pegged Barb, as well as by the quantity of coffee he was drinking. Stick an ex-drunk in a bar with drinkers and coffee is usually their drink of choice. “They might be telling the truth mostly in their interview regarding their skills and shit, but get them in an interview and ask them stupid questions like ‘what would be your prime motivation for working for our company,’ and they’ll bullshit you. They don’t give a damn about being a part of some bullshit company mission statement and all that teamwork crap. They say they do because they know HR managers get their rocks off when they hear the shit.”