They Control Your Image
We were called to the middle of the plant for an impromptu meeting. I was afraid it was going to devolve into another lecture on bathroom breaks. Management hates it when anybody poops on the clock. Despite there being more video surveillance cameras than a PornHub taxi trained on the bathroom entrance, Hydra employees still insist on voiding their bowels during the work shift while their machines stand neglected. I’d personally visited the bathroom’s handicap stall six times before first break. Some people don’t like watching Christopher Nolan films on their smart phones, but I’m okay with it.
This is what I’m thinking as I join my broke dick co-workers conglomerating near the center of the factory. The two hours spent hiding in the bathroom got away from me. Why did I still feel exhausted? Not too exhausted I couldn’t stand behind the chrome shop and write this column, mind you, just too tired to engage in any productive labor that could be construed as beneficial to this company that puts a few shekels in my pocket now and again.
But, no, we’re safe from the lectures for the moment, the vague threats that we’re somehow compromising the solvency of the entire company every time we sit down to piss and check our phones to see what’s popping on the Indeed app. The powers-that-be merely want us to gather around to take a picture together, likely for the website of the parent company out in Germany.
There’s about twenty of us milling about. And that’s just sad. I remember when there were forty of us. That was only three years ago. I remember when there were a hundred production employees spread between three shifts. That was back in 2008, and what I remember most about those times, was the difficulty of finding an empty stall whether you had to poop or not. Funny thing is, though the number of money makers on the floor has dwindled, the number of salaried office staff has remained the same.
Anyway, getting even a truncated amount of shop workers and machine operators to pose for a picture is akin to herding cats. If there’s no rewards dangling from management’s hands to focus our attentions, we’d just as soon you go fuck yourselves.
While the supervisor snapped the picture, most of the wage slaves either looked like they’re being lined up for execution or ducking their heads away from the camera as they were taught to do in the training for the witness protection program. I stand front and center, giving the two finger Jeep salute, looking dashing, really, head cocked just so, my cheeks sucked in, eyebrows arched, eyes afire with a malevolent glee, the sort of ocular inferno that only ignites after I’ve spent half the shift fucking around.
The supervisor snaps the picture. The boys trudge back to their machines. I duck back into the bathroom and check Indeed to see if the Tyson chicken processing plant is still hiring insect smooshers to control their horsefly population for eighteen grand a year. This seems like rewarding work, and I feel like a change in careers is in order.
I’ve scarcely had the chance to update my resume, shading toward making me a more viable candidate for insect annihilator, when we’re all called back to the center of the factory. Evidently, somebody, they don’t want to say whom, but you can be sure it’s the usual suspect, was posing in an especially stupefying fashion, and it really galled the powers-that-be since flashes of personality are strictly prohibited.
This is met with overwhelming anger from most of the workers since they’d rather be left alone with the solitude of their barely functioning machines.
“It was me, wasn’t it?” I ask.
“Yeah, it was you,” the supervisor says. “I got yelled at cause you were too posed. So just act normal.”
“That’s how I normally act around cameras. You know you guys only pay me to work here. I control my image and how I choose to convey this image…”
“Dude, just look at it like they’re paying you to look normal for just five fricking seconds. Please. I don’t want to hear any more bullshit from the front office. Please.”
I don’t know what normal is here. I knew what they wanted normal to be and I wasn’t having that shit. Complacent automatons stoically working sixty plus hours a week with no lives to speak of outside the factory walls. I’m incapable of that level of devotion to a paycheck, anymore, though I lost a lot of years during the process of finding my breaking point.
As we gather for round two, I know of at least two co-workers are on the verge of turning in their two week notices so they can go to work for Jeff Bezos, building rocket ships.
Standing there, arms at our sides like dollar bill zombies, the supervisor counts down from three and I say “all right, everyone, say ‘Blue Origin’.”
We laugh. At least the people who have yet allowed their last scintilla of hope to be obliterated by the dismal weight of gainful employment laughed. And the picture is ruined.
We don’t know it, yet, won’t know it until the supervisor returns from his brief sojourn to the front office where the powers-that-be take one look at the blurred faces of cackling morons and erupt on the supervisor. How hard is it to get these assholes to act right? Everyone’s moving or hiding their faces, except the Polish Hammer with his hands in his pocket and a big shit-eating grin on his face. I hate that guy. I thought you were working him sixty hours a week; why is he smiling?
So, I get pulled out of the bathroom for a third photo.
This time, nobody is smiling.
“See what happens when you gotta be extra,” Cracker McCracken says.
He can afford to be lippy with me because he actually knows what he’s doing around here. He knows what he’s doing so well that Blue Origin has agreed to hire him. He has his two weeks’ notice in his pocket.
Thing is, I have my two weeks’ notice in my pocket as well. It reads:
Cuntgratulations!
If you’re reading this, it means that I’ve finally got tired of your fucking bullshit, and I can no longer tolerate Hydra employment. Consider this my two-week notice. You may notice my last day is merely three days away. If the math doesn’t add up; it’s likely because I’m using Hydra math. I know this must come as a horrendous shock. I know you mistakenly believed I’d be more than happy to work sixty hour weeks for the rest of my goddam life. Allow me to disavow you of that utterly moronic conviction. Of course, if you’re feeling a little sour, by all means terminate my employment immediately. I really don’t want to be here a second longer.
God Bless!
Polish Hammer
“I like how you made it look like calligraphy,” Cracker says after reading my notice.
“It is calligraphy, you dumb bastard. I’ve been training with the pen and ink for years.”
“You gonna turn it in now that your novel, Mister Joe’s Pirates, is out?”
“Well, I’m still in the ‘woo, I just made twenty bucks’ period of my literary career. My bills demand I, not necessarily earn, but at least get paid a hundred times more than that per week in order to remain free from bankruptcy. No, I’m going to have to somehow convince Jeff Bezos I can half ass competently machine doodads and assemble rocket ships that won’t blow up until they at least reach the launch pad.”
“Well, you know, they’re hiring all over the place. If you don’t mind working twelve hour nights during the weekend shift…”
Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Rat now living in rural Alabama. He writes when his pen allows it. He’s a husband to a lovely wife and father to some fantastic kids. He collects pop culture ephemera. On most days he prefers Flash Gordon to Luke Skywalker and Neil Diamond to Elvis Presley.
THE POLISH HAMMER POETRY CORNER is a weekly column, posted each Tuesday morning.
