Immersion
because, physically, the building swallowed you up. True, it was capable of
holding 600 workers, or so, plus providing a cafeteria and a huge auditorium,
but it only had five or six windows, all of which were in the cafeteria. But so
photophobic were we—note that pronoun there—that we kept them covered with
translucent hurricane shutters, no matter what time of the year, or what chance
there could be of a hurricane.
It was more
than that. There was never a meeting in which the corporate “culture” wasn’t
trotted out, but it was a culture honored in word only. Don’t think, however,
that there wasn’t a true culture operating—one very much against the official,
expressed culture. It wasn’t about doing your work or producing something, it
was about going along with the herd, sending defensive emails, printing them,
and then producing them, if anyone attacking the herd happened to single you
out for the kill.
You ran,
ideally, as much inside the herd as possible, since obviously the people on the
outside, or—God forbid—the stragglers behind, were the logical victims to be
picked off. And it was also true—you didn’t want to be out front. So that meant
never, ever thinking outside the box, no matter how often it was urged on you.
This was a
lesson lost on me. At one point in some meeting, the quality assurance lady gave a talk in which she stressed
that fruits and vegetables must be rigorously kept away from meats, with their
potentially leaking cellophane packages. All of that dripping blood, you see,
is a perfect medium….
‘So why do
we have the shopping carts that we do?’ I was thinking.
“You see,
we have the basket on the right side of the cart in red, with pictures
of meat cuts and chicken and so on—so that we don’t have to translate into
Chinese or Korean or whatever for our foreign markets. And on the left
side, we have a green basket, with pictures of bananas and apples and oranges.
See? We’ll be an industry leader! We’ll save countless lives! We’ll reduce the
number of food poisoning incidents by 333%!”
“We’ll see,
Marc….”
That was
five years ago, and if you go, as I did last week, into Wal-Mart today? The
same stupid carts from the 1950’s, in which fruit and vegetables and meats can
fornicate as much as we people ever did in the sixties.
Even after
two-and-a-half years away from it, I still think of it, occasionally, and that
makes sense to me. But here’s my question—why was it that yesterday, I dreamed
of being chased down, and told that there was an important meeting, an urgent
meeting, a mandatory meeting, at which everybody but guess-who was? And when I
got to the meeting? The topic was poetry.
Yes,
poetry. And the good Human Resources ladies (my apologies to the other three
men in department) had done their best, which…
…wasn’t
very good.
One speaker
was awful, in fact. She was cowering behind a PowerPoint presentation with
mutilated, hideous slides that were unreadable and anyway swung about
unpredictably. Oh, and the speaker was mumbling into the microphone and
painfully nervous.
This
morning’s dream?
Elizabeth,
the woman who first hired me, has told me to go to Sam’s Club, where I am to
teach math. OK—do that, leave for lunch, get back, start to grade the tests
that I have given. Except that—being math—I have no idea what answer is right.
Elizabeth reappears and tells me that she’s sure I’ll have some pertinent
remarks about poetry.
I protest—I
know nothing about poetry. “Certainly, you do,” she returns. At this point I
wake up.
I wake up
wondering—has Wal-Mart decided to do to poetry what they did to the grocery
business, which was to trample it? Or am I to write poems about Wal-Mart?
Confession:
I have just made the attempt, and there isn’t much there.
It was a
time in my life when the poetic impulse, or any creative impulse, was
thoroughly squelched. Except that, in a curious way, it wasn’t. I am perhaps
the only person you’ll ever meet who designed and created an office-wide ESL
website in PowerPoint, complete with narrated lessons, quizzes, games. I
devised a word-of-the-day scheme that I remember, even now, as being quite beautiful.
And then, of course, there were all those batty but good ideas—like the new and
improved shopping cart—that somehow never got anywhere.
I am the
person least suited to corporate America, and after I got used to that
realization, I then realized: the ax would fall when it would fall, so really,
there wasn’t much sense worrying about it. I could have tried harder, I
suppose: tried to fit in more, gone to more meetings, learned to love the box.
But why bother?
Fear
and lethargy
Walked
hand in hand down
The
grey-clad aisle,
Past
the cubicles where
Bamboo
shoots pointed up
To
the florescent lights,
Where
workers slouched
Eyes
glazed, minds numbed
Their
hands caressing the mouse…
And
Crest snuggled, in
Three
thousand stores,
Six
inches to the left of
The
Colgate, though in fact
The
two had hated each other for years,
Despite
their wives having gone to
School
together….
And
their kids?
After
never having spoken,
They
developed a strange
Taste
for dope,
Which
could be satisfied,
After
hours
Underneath
the gondola,
That
metal rack that sails
Down
the aisles of
Big
box stores,
Propelled
by mustachioed black-haired
Blue
and white striped burly
Consumers,
ardent, burning
Maddened
to sample the new
16-ounce
Crest—24 hour cavity protection!
O
Sole Mio, sing the packages,
And
the waves recede,
All
passion spent.
Right!
Did it!
