A Working Stiff's Manifesto (18 page)

“So what type of movie
would
you like to see,” I ask her.

“I don't care. It's really up to you.”

I go out on another date with another girl who wants to become a photographer.

“First I need equipment,” she tells me.

I have a friend who is trying to sell a boatload of used camera equipment, and I mention it to her.

“Not that type of equipment. I need a computer. To get on the web.”

“You want to buy camera equipment off the web?” This seems rational enough, but my friend's prices are dirt cheap, as I suspect much of his merchandise was discovered in an unsuspecting neighbor's home.

“No,” she explains, as if I'm a slow learner. “I want to sell my photos on the web.”

“So you already have camera equipment?”

“Not yet. But first I need a computer.”

What's happened to people while I was gone for a few short months? When I was up in Alaska, did I miss the Internet-Brainwashing Death Ray that has apparently affected everyone's rational thought processes? Don't photographers need camera equipment BEFORE they can sell photographs? Don't people who get paid for advice need to know what they're talking about? Nope, not anymore. The Internet has changed everything.

Determined not to be the last one on my block to be a millionaire, I start looking into this Internet thing. What we have here is basically a phone line that sends pictures, and I'm initially at a loss to understand why this will change the fortunes of everyone who uses it. But the advice-columnist girl explains that these pictures can show advertising, and companies will pay you to simply have a website that people will visit. So, I wonder to myself, what kind of website will people visit? The obvious choice is one with a lot of naked women, but that option, I find out, has already been taken. By about eight million people. The fierce competition here raises questions of its own that are relevant to the whole computer craze.

Who are these women? If you added up all the porn sites offering thousands of pornographic images, you've got pretty much the entire female population of the United States. Is that how the Internet is changing the economy, by enabling everyone to earn extra cash as a porn star? There's got to be more to it.

Over the next few weeks, I learn a little about the Internet, and find that it's not that different from anything else in the working world. Real money on the Internet moves in tight circles, just as it does in the trucking industry or banking. The companies that own the sites that get a lot of hits are big companies to start with, and they get paid a lot for their advertising, just as the networks get a lot for airing Super Bowl commercials. Therefore, the Internet is making a ton of money for large companies by providing people with the opportunity to do things like go shopping or buy airline tickets without leaving their houses. The only way the lives of regular people are changed is that we can now order T-shirts and have the mailman bring them to us rather than spend a few hours trying to park at the mall.

What amazes me about this is that everyone thinks their future is somehow tied up in a series of picture-sending telephone wires. The photographer girl thinks this is the most important step she can take in starting a photography business. The advertising for the Internet itself seems to be entirely word-of-mouth, and incredibly effective. Everyone, no matter what kind of business they have, now has to be on-line. Corporate restaurants, car washes, dog trainers, movie theaters, all advertise on-line. There are people who think it is easier to boot up a computer, wait five minutes, and start typing, than to open a newspaper and find out what's playing at a local theater. I know because I went to a movie with one of them. Yet again, I was wondering if there was something here that I just didn't get.

This is the computer industry we're talking about, the same industry that boomed in the eighties and put the nerds down the street on the cover of national magazines as if they were heroes and saints, helping someone other than themselves. The computer industry has always had a veneer of selflessness about it, as if the developments of that industry somehow benefit society, as if Bill Gates and Michael Dell are volunteer workers in a homeless soup kitchen. These are the role models of today, the cutting edge minds, the out-of-the-box thinkers. The same people who nearly got caught with their pants down by the end of the century.

Granted, it's nice to have on-line databases. If I needed a kidney, it'd be nice if there was a place I could visit immediately that would tell me if a match was available. It's nice to be able to find old girlfriends' phone numbers in the middle of the night when I'm drunk and reminiscing. It's good to be able to find a part for a car that most mechanics just laugh at. And the global porn network is a nice touch. But to suggest that this is changing all our lives is just a plain lie. Take a look outside. The homeless are still there.

So fuck the computer industry. I'm running out of my Alaska money and I'm going back to work.

I'm as sick of work as the next guy, but I'm still practical enough to recognize the need for it. Without work, where would all the new breed of millionaires that I read about in
Time
Magazine get their dry cleaning done? Who would fix their cars? Who would strip for them when they unload their trophy wives for the evening and go out for a night on the town? Us, the ununited workers of the world. I get the newspaper and dig through the classifieds.

It's the same old crap. “CAREER OPPORTUNITY!!!” screams an ad for a $6.25 an hour warehouse clerk. They mention that they drug test. Who are they kidding? They're discouraging their target market. Who but a crack head would want an opportunity like that? Opportunity, my ass. Why is it so difficult for the people who write these ads to present their jobs in a realistic and readable fashion? Why am I always looking at classifieds that say “FUN EXCITING PLACE TO WORK” and show up to see a bunch of desk jockeys a blink away from quitting, or suicide.

All the ads are like this. There's an ad that reads “NO MULTILEVEL MARKETING OR COLD CALLING SALES” for a company that, a friend of mine who applied there informs me, sticks you at a desk to do cold calling, only you're not supposed to actually sell anything to the people; you get the lead for the salesman. Therefore, they've made an end run around the phrase “no cold calling sales.” How brilliant. How delighted are the people going to be when they show up, fill out an application, get hired, and find out that the company they've just joined has, instead of providing them with a job they might want, carefully worded its ad to get through a verbal loophole? Then the people quit after a day, a day they've wasted when they could have been looking for something worthwhile. Does this benefit the company? Perhaps. With this endless supply of new marketing companies, a lot of them have a workforce that is expected only to last until they figure out they've been duped. If the new-hires work at the phones one morning, that's fine for the marketers. The next morning they've got a new batch. And none of these people even show up to pick up their nineteen dollar paychecks, so they have a labor force every morning that's on the house.

And at the warehouse, do the people working there, where nine employees have quit on them in the past four months, honestly think they're providing people with a wonderful opportunity? THEY work there, for God's sake; they know they're lying. Who gets excited about working in a warehouse? Would the quality of applicants really be any different if their ad said: “Just Fired From Your Last Job For Calling In Sick With A Hangover Three Times In Two Weeks? Come down to our warehouse and do the same to us—$6.25 an hour for lifting heavy boxes all day.” I think not.

There's an ad in there for a fish cutter, but I pass over it. After my experience in Scarsdale, I've had enough of the political, cutthroat world of fish cutting, and after my experience in Alaska, I've had enough of seafood in general. There are ads for movers, truck drivers, and restaurant managers, all things I'm drawn to because I wouldn't have to start from scratch. But at the bottom of the page, there is an ad for a temporary service. “TRY SOMETHING DIFFERENT,” it beckons.

Just what I'm looking for.

In these “prosperous” times of low unemployment, temp services are the largest employers in the country. This means that, while more jobs are available, fewer and fewer people have health benefits, sick days, or job stability.

Manpower Inc., which sometime during the last decade overtook General Motors as the largest single employer in the nation, does nothing but tell people where to go to work. All this huge corporation does is shuffle papers around and take a sizeable chunk of millions of individuals' paychecks. At least General Motors makes cars.

But, to their credit, they do get people working. They offer, as I discover, hundreds of different positions—everything from warehouse work to skilled medical positions, from truck driver to office worker. I've had enough of the physical grind lately, so I opt for office work. They give me a typing test, in which I do fairly well, or so I think, and then they ask me which of the two jobs that I've qualified for would I like the most: stuffing envelopes or unloading trucks.

“What does stuffing envelopes entail?” It sounds like an intriguing line of work, and I've never done it before. Truck unloading is old hat.

“You stuff envelopes.”

“In an office?”

“Yes.”

“With a coffee-maker?” It's always been a dream of mine to work near a coffee-maker.

The girl sighs. “I'm going to send you to the hotel.” I guess I'm not the envelope-stuffing type. So I'm given a slip of paper and sent down to the Ramada Inn, where some fellow is putting on an art show and needs help unloading his truck. This is all rush-rush, because the people who call the agency for help usually do so at the last minute, when someone calls in sick. So I get down there and ask for the guy in charge of the art show, whose name happens to be Art.

Art is a merry, balding fellow who has been unloading a twenty-four-foot truck by himself since six o'clock that morning, and is just delighted to see me. That's always nice. And, it turns out, the work isn't difficult. The paintings, which are manufactured prints, are fairly light, and we just have to carry hundreds of them into a huge showroom and “set them up,” which means laying them out on folding card tables. This has to be finished by 11:30, when the art show starts, and we've got about two hours to finish up an hour's worth of work.

Art is affable and easy to work with, and for the first time in years, I'm actually enjoying being at work. He enjoys his job, which is driving around the country in a rental truck selling prints at shows like this one. It's his own business, and business has been good lately. His wife usually comes along, he explains, but she got held back a day at the last place and he's making do without her for a few days.

“She doesn't trust me around the ladies,” he tells me with a wink. “Time to have some fun.”

I laugh. Just a harmless joke from a guy who's been married a while.

Or so I think. The employment agency sends along three attractive young women to help with the selling, and within an hour, Art has hit on every one of them. I've been given a staple gun to adjust the frames for people who request it, and I sit in the back and listen to them talk about him.

“It's a shame, isn't it, his wife passing away suddenly like that,” one of the girls tells me. I nod sympathetically. I see him engaged in rapt conversation with a pretty young woman who has come to look at some paintings. She laughs flirtatiously, writes something down on a piece of paper, and hands it to him, then leaves with a baby in a stroller, and three paintings, which I carry to her car.

“It's a shame isn't it?” she tells me as I'm walking with her through the parking lot. “The Special Forces just getting rid of him like that.”

“That's the government for you.”

I spend the day hooking frames together, chatting with people, and wandering around the hotel. This is the easiest day of work I've had in a while, and at eight in the evening, Art comes up to me and asks if I can work tomorrow.

“Fine with me, if the agency says so.”

“I've already asked them. They said yes.”

“Fine with me, then.”

“I've decided to stay here for a second day. So we won't have to load everything back in the truck. You can just take a room at the hotel here, if you like, on me.”

“I only live about six miles away.”

“This'll save you gas money.” He laughs. I shrug. We lock everything up, and as I'm going to my room, the woman who had the baby stroller shows up looking for Art. She's put on some makeup and a nice revealing skirt. I tell her where to find him, then retire to my room to watch cable. I've worked twelve hours, made nearly $100, and haven't really done anything. I could get used to this.

“You're a good worker,” Art tells me the next day while I'm punching a frame together. “I need somebody like you full time. I'm looking to expand.”

“Don't you go on the road?”

“I need a partner,” he tells me. “For a two-thousand-dollar investment, you could get your own truck. You could operate one area while I take another.”

This seems like easy and enjoyable work, but I'm skeptical about the $2,000.

“I paid $4,000 for the franchise,” he explains. “You could have half. I'll get everything ready for you. Look, do you know how much money I made yesterday? Thirty-two hundred dollars! That's your investment back in one day!”

“I'll think about it.” Art wanders off to chat with a pair of college girls looking for a print for their dorm room. They don't hand him any phone numbers, but they do walk off with armloads of prints. Nobody can say no to this man.

One of the girls who has shown up to sell tells me, “Art just offered me a partnership. He thinks I do really good work.”