A Working Stiff's Manifesto (20 page)

“I don't care,” he says.

I have no requirements for my new job except that it be free of bullshit. I don't want to hear about how all my dreams are about to come true, how I can be a millionaire in six weeks. I'd rather just hear that I get to work near a coffee-maker, or I get paid breaks.

“English degree?” the man says, looking quizzically at my résumé. I'm going all out here, actually printing up a résumé. Résumé, the French term for “page full of bullshit,” which glorifies three or four of the last forty-five jobs I've had and ignores the others. The few that I glorify are the ones where there are references who've agreed to lie for me, or that have gone out of business, or are in Alaska. No one will call Alaska to check a reference, I've learned. Don't ask me why.

I'm in the local office of the country's largest bug-spraying company, looking across a desk at a fat, wrinkled man staring at my résumé. The tiny office stinks of cigarette smoke, and there is ash on the cheap tiled floor. Behind him, the only decoration on the faded yellow wall is a single small plaque, honoring him as salesman of the year. It's a decade old. He lights another cigarette.

“Yes,” I nod proudly. Or maybe not. I'm nodding anyway.

“I find that English graduates don't do well in this field,” he tells me. “They tend to be too analytical.”

That's great. Not only is my degree useless, it's a liability. A big part of this job is sales, as I'm not only supposed to spray, but I'm also supposed to convince the home owners to buy more and more pesticide. The idea is that I show up to give them a free squirt or two, then “find” hundreds of problems with their house, which more pesticide would solve. People can get rich doing this, I've just learned. There was a pre-interview introductory video that showed me how the top salesman last year made over $100,000.

My English degree is clearly a problem for him. He's actually making a face. I'm an experienced enough bullshitter that I could start waffling away, telling him all the things he wants to hear about how I could totally commit myself to convincing even the poorest home owner to spend thousands covering their house with poison, how I could be a loyal company man. But I sit quietly. I know he's right. I should never have come here, I should never have put on this suit and sat with the others watching the video. Hire one of them, I should tell him.

But he goes on. “We don't provide company cars your first year,” he tells me, “and there's a lot of driving. Do you have a reliable car?”

My car is about done. I'm lucky it got me to the interview. “Sure,” I say. He doesn't want me, I don't want him, but neither one of us wants to admit it. The interview was over the minute he picked up my résumé, the minute I saw his dried out little body, wasted by years of cigarette smoke and poison-spraying, sitting behind his broken down desk in his faded excuse for an office, his reward for two decades of service. It reminds me of a holding cell. But we drag it out. He asks me a few more questions. I answer them. The phone rings, and he talks on it for a while as I look around his office. Maybe one day all this can be mine. Then he describes the job for a few more minutes.

“Thank you for coming in,” he says finally, mercifully.

“Thank you very much.”

“I'll call you.”

“I'll wait by the phone.”

I'm at a company that wants to hire people to install ATMs. There is a list of requirements for the job about a page long. Must have experience with computer installation, clean driver's license, clean credit, clean police record, clean urine. I don't have any of these things, but I figure neither does anyone else who answers an ad for a nine-dollar-an-hour job. They give me an application to fill out, and it's so long and asks so much personal information that I can't imagine anyone reads the answers. Most companies that make claims of thoroughness, I know, are less picky than the ones that don't. They hope the claims alone will keep the riffraff from applying.

This might be different, though. If I'm handling hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe somebody
is
actually doing a background check. I look around the room and see a lot of clean-cut fresh faces, people with spotless backgrounds and pure hearts eager to earn survival money. I don't fit in here. I'm not pure enough. I walk out with my three-page application still unfinished and toss it in the trash by the door.

Big John at the moving company likes me. He wants me to start now, today. Most moving companies do. His eagerness makes me wary. He, too, it turns out, is an English graduate, and he wants to talk Shakespeare during the interview. Didn't I just love
As You Like It
? I nod vigorously. I'm not sure I remember which one that was. No matter, I'm sure he doesn't either. Perhaps at work we can discuss the finer points of Milton's
Paradise Lost
while struggling to get a sofa bed down the stairs.

Big John sees management possibilities for me. “After a while, we could have you supervise a crew,” he tells me. “I only have two trucks right now, but I'm looking into getting a long-distance operation going. I need someone reliable to manage that.” I nod politely. Why not? He seems like a nice fellow, clean cut, honest, obviously a hard worker. You wouldn't get into this business unless you were a hard worker. His rosy view of my future with his company is a flattering change from the last few interviews.

“I have a crew working on the other side of town right now,” he tells me. “They could use some help.” I'm not wearing a suit, I've given up on that, but even in slacks and a nice shirt, I'm hardly dressed for the rough and sweaty job of moving. I wasn't expecting to go to work a half hour after I walked into the office.

“Actually, I have a few errands I have to run this afternoon,” I lie. My suspicions are deepening. I'm being flattered because he needs help today, immediately. He's got a warm body in his office who
might
want to work for him and he's not letting me out of here without a fight. I thought
I
was the one looking for something, and the tables have been turned on me. He looks at me, pleading.

“I've got two guys doing a fourteen-hour job,” he says. “I could sure use your help.”

“I'll try to wrap the errands up,” I tell him tiredly. “And I have to go home and change.”

Say what you like about hauling sofa beds down stairs in a North Carolina summer, it is free of bullshit. No one is telling me to smile and say, “Have a nice day.” No one who is moving is having a nice day. When the job is over, there is some degree of satisfaction and the customers are usually grateful.

The management possibilities I heard so much about at the interview are a long way off, I soon discover. “In a few years, I'm getting another truck,” Big John tells me one afternoon as we sit, dripping with sweat, on a customer's stairway. So now it's a few years. At the interview, it sounded like I was being promoted tomorrow because of the magical power of my English degree. Besides, there are half a dozen guys who work for this service, and there's no reason I should be the first in line for a supervisor's job. He's got his warm body, I've been here a few weeks, and I get less valuable every day. Moving is a summer sport; half the people who move do so between June and September, and September is creeping up on us. Soon Big John will be able to let half of us go. So the question isn't who is getting the supervisor position, which doesn't really exist, it's who's going to be collecting unemployment.

I know that him telling me this is just the bonding experience of two men who have just carried a brutally heavy object down three flights of stairs. I don't mind. I don't think I have two years of this in my future. It's not the physical punishment that drains me, it's the drudgery of every day being the same. A sofa bed. A bookcase. An armoire. Another sofa bed. And on and on. There's no skill to it that I haven't learned by my second week.

“Yeah,” he repeats. “That'll be good, a second truck. With an ICC license, we could go long distance too. We need to get you a CDL, a tractor license.”

“Sure, sounds good.” I've heard this before, somewhere.

“Yeah.” He stares off wistfully into the blazing sun as he swigs his water, imagining his fleet of trucks with “Big John's Moving” on the side, pulling into a giant, fenced-off yard. “I'll get all you guys licenses.” Then he adds quickly, “Some time next year.”

Some time next year. That's too long to wait. Aside from making me a liability at sales and a lot of other professions, a four-year university English degree has made me impatient at the few jobs I can get. It's filled me with a sense of entitlement. This makes it difficult to lug other people's crap around for any period of time while waiting for a promotion which, incidentally, I don't really want.

So to half the world I'm unemployable, and I'm not interested in the other half. They should have mentioned something about that at commencement, when they were telling us that we were the future of the world, the bright shining blah blah blah. Actually, I never made it to commencement because I already knew I'd been fucked by my third year and didn't feel like chasing bad money with good by renting a $100 gown and frying my ass off in the sun when I could be lying by a pool. The point is, by the end of my junior year, when job fairs were coming to the school to recruit graduates, I didn't see a single ad bearing the legend “English Degree Required.”

There are plenty of ways to look at it. It's not so bad. I'm in the richest country in the world; even being broke here is better than being middle class in Peru or Angola. I could be a peasant in Senegal. That's it, that's the phrase they should tell you when they hand you an English degree at commencement, or a limp paycheck for pouring your energy into a meaningless, unsatisfying job for a faceless corporation. “Here you go. Congratulations. Hey, you could be a peasant in Senegal.”

It's not the money. The real problem is with the expendability of us all. One human is as good as the next. Loyalty and effort are not rewarded. It's all about the bottom line, a phrase as loathsome to any worker as lay off or forced retirement. Granted, we've come a long way since they built the Hoover Dam, or since people died building the railways, but the corporate attitude toward the people who get things done is still the same. And the pendulum is swinging back the other way. The people who make the promises are so removed that they don't even realize anymore that the promises are meaningless. Stock shares in your company after five years? Great, thanks. But we both know that, statistically speaking, in five years, I'll be so long gone you wouldn't remember my face.

I watch football games and see endless commercials about retirement plans and investment portfolios, and I look around at the other people in the bar. Who are these commercials for? Not for anyone here. A long-term investment for these guys is next week's Monday Night Football—the Steelers and seven. These commercials used to be for beer and chips. I'm part of a demographic that is slipping off the radar.

I could write a book about this shit. So could a million others.

I grab the Sunday classifieds, get a cup of coffee, and sit down by the phone.