The Mad Shitter
Podkayne Fries
Unusual Suspects, does anyone know where Jaime was in 1989?
====================
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Installment 54 of the "Hell's Half-Acre Herald", dated March 19, 2001.
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"Attack of The Mad Shitter"
By Paul T. Riddell
Ah, the news in the business community keeps getting better and better.
The March 18 "New York Times" ran a little report in its "Week In
Review" section of some of the crass and thuggish layoff methods used by
dotcom companies in the last few weeks (one of the best: a company that
announced layoffs and then told employees to wait at their stations for
an E-mail message letting them know if they were staying or going),
right alongside the lamentations in the Business section about the
ongoing crash of the stock market. A few days before, Reuters ran a
report on a study that showed that employees near the bottom of the
company hierarchy were much more likely to seek retribution or revenge
against real or perceived slights than those near the top, thus helping
to explain everything from company virus attacks to office shootings.
(As refreshing as it was to see that someone seemed to care enough about
employee morale to commission this study, the basic response is still
"Well, duh." These guys and gals aren't pissing in the coffee pot just
for giggles.) Right now, the big worry is that a decrease in American
worker productivity will only aggravate the impending recession, and
never mind that this collapse is inevitable once the folks working
90-hour weeks with the promise of future benefits realize that they'll
never see those benefits. At this point, no rational person is going to
believe anything coming from a 22-year-old MBA about job security or
pension plans or stock options: if these scum weren't sharing when times
were good, why the hell should anyone trust them now?
Even considering that the stories about the tight US job market is a
blatant lie, the recent five-year boom was a nightmare for managers used
to alternating between King Log and King Stork. Ten years ago, it was
easy to keep employees in line with that old saw "You know, it's a
really bad job market out there, and I don't think you'll be able to
find anything better than what you have right now." Then, with the boom
in open positions in any number of companies, employees treated like
abused housewives didn't have to resort to the shotgun in the middle of
the night to escape the nightmare: they could just leave. (This is one
reason why I always detested the "Dilbert" comic strip: since everyone
has a story about having a stupid boss and lazy co-workers that compares
exactly to one "Dilbert" strip or another, the strip encourages those
suffering under lousy working conditions to suck it up and keep taking
it, because it's just as bad anywhere else.) Instead of working
together, management and employees at far too many companies are
adversaries, with management regularly breaking promises and then
screaming about how nobody has any loyalty because the abused finally
say "to hell with this" and walk out.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not advocating killing all managers in their
sleep and forming communes or anything silly like that. If anything,
the deaths of so many of the hippie communes during the Sixties proves
that ultimately someone has to take charge, if only to decide who washes
the dishes and who cleans out the outhouse and how often. Good bosses
are rare, and they're extremely valuable, so they should be cherished
and respected and protected from sharp objects coming at them.
Unfortunately, these good bosses usually have bosses above them who
shouldn't be trusted with used Q-Tips, and the good bosses are usually
replaced during a layoff cycle by dingbats fresh from business school
who haven't worked a real job in their lives. I understand it's because
the good bosses are too busy trying to get productivity by the use of
rewards for loyalty and improved production, not by creative application
of the whip.
I once took a journalism class taught by Bill Marvel, one of the only
good and true writers at the "Dallas Morning News", and he related that
graffiti was a valid communications medium used by those who felt that
they had no other venue for expressing themselves. In that way, office
rebellion is an act of expression, if only to let the rest of the office
or factory know "This has gone on far enough." Many intending to rebel
tend to pop off too early and in the wrong way: you don't shoot your
boss and everyone else in a three-county radius if you expect anyone to
listen to your complaints about the lousy quality of toilet paper in the
employee restroom. However, considering that nobody seems to want to
apply the Magna Carta upon CEOs and middle managers, the only option is
the strike for (relative) freedom. This may be exercised by nasty
comments written on restroom stalls; it may be exercised by "blue flu"
or by general refusals to put in "mandatory voluntary overtime". One
way or another, though, the more a company tries to stifle dissent, the
more it grows. Push someone too hard, and WHAMMO! a nice big writeup
at http://www.fuckedcompany.com that relates how the board of directors
blew a year's operating expenses on booze and hookers during a weeklong
holiday in Aspen while telling the grunts to recycle office supplies to
make them last longer.
Everyone has stories of subtle and not-so-subtle terrorism intended
against their managers or fellow workers in the search for a decent work
environment. I remember one manager for an insurance company who found
that her serfs spent their lunch breaks at their desks playing computer
solitaire because they didn't have enough time to go out and get lunch
anywhere else…and contacted the tech department to have all of the
built-in computer games removed from every computer in her department.
She then had the nerve to look surprised when someone climbed over the
fence in her gated community and slashed all four tires on her new BMW.
(I was not involved, nor do I know who was, nor do I have any interest
in computer games, but considering that this was a company that required
its employees to show up to the company picnic and then charged them $20
a head to attend, I understood the motivation.) Her predecessor was
such a petty tyrant that she held a mandatory meeting when she left the
company so she could bask in the perceived rush of sadness from the
grunts, but instead her announcement was greeted with an impromptu
rendition of "Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead". But by far, the most base,
most disgusting, and most honest rebellion against a toxic work
environment I've ever come across came from a fellow I only know as The
Mad Shitter.
Back a decade ago, I was working for Texas Instruments, back when TI was
still involved in the defense contracting business and before it sold
that big chunk to Raytheon. Although a firm supplier of Cold War
armaments for the self-appointed Forces of Good, TI also spent quite a
bit of time encouraging its managers to study the book _The Business
Philosophies of Josef Stalin_, leaving every midlevel manager protected
from assassination attempts by a good multilevel layer of professional
asskissers and stoolies. TI encouraged betrayal of one's co-workers and
friends at every level, and if upper management wasn't able to inflict
the right level of terror through flunkies standing at the front door of
offices and workshops to make sure that employees came back on time from
a 26-minute lunch (not 30 minutes: 26 minutes, and never mind that the
lunch area may have been a 12-minute walk from those areas), it
encouraged the mobilization of a vast volunteer secret police force that
tattled any comment, no matter how minor, back to a supervisor's ear in
a matter of minutes. Talking out loud about anything deemed improper,
from the lousy food in the cafeteria to the merits of joining a union,
guaranteed that the offender was sent to gulag. Before 1990, that gulag
was an inability to move up within the company, which just stimulated
more improper talk. After 1990, that gulag was the layoff, which
convinced the survivors to work harder and smarter if they didn't want
to be next.
And if you're wondering why anyone would want to suffer under those
conditions, remember that this was during the late Eighties, when Texas
was suffering from a major recession brought about by the drop in the
price of oil in 1985. By 1986, _any_ permanent job for those without a
college degree that didn't involve flipping burgers or bagging groceries
was treasured, and these were the days when blue-collar jobs were still
valued or at least respected. Compared to all of the nasty and foul
temporary jobs around, the promise of something approximating a decent
rate of pay combined with basic benefits was seen by many to be worth
any amount of discomfort, because that decent rate of pay was enough to
buy enough booze and weed to ease that discomfort and make getting up in
the morning a little more tolerable.
Not that Texas Instruments was willing to give a decent rate of pay: the
initials "TI" stood for "Tiny Income" among the workforce. (They stood
for "Training Academy" for the engineers, who took advantage of the
great training but left because of the miserable pay the moment their
contracts were done. This changed to "Totally Incompetent" in the
Nineties, when TI's layoffs regularly caught fresh engineers who had
started weeks or even days before. A long-running joke among the labor
pool was that they should get their resumes ready whenever the company
promoted new vice-presidents: without fail, the company would promote
anywhere between two and fourteen new vice-presidents to replace those
who cashed in their stock options and bailed out, and then lay off
another 6000 employees.) Every year, management would argue that TI paid
a median rate compared to other companies for the same general type of
work, conveniently leaving out that they were including companies based
in maquiladoros on the Mexican border so as to skew the statistics.
Shortly after making everyone feel that they should be proud to have a
job at all, someone would roll out some boneheaded new policy intended
to save a little bit of money but that completely destroyed whatever
morale remained. (One of the best was the new smoking policy in 1991,
which charged anyone using tobacco products an extra $10 per paycheck
for insurance purposes. A well-intentioned policy, to be sure, but any
former smoker or chewer who decided to quit had to be "clean" for a
minimum of six months, and any contact with tobacco automatically turned
a non-smoker into a smoker. How was this to be policed, one asks? By
encouraging fellow employees to tattle on each other, of course. The
only rebellion that seemed to work was a mass exodus from making
contributions to the United Way, which just made it easier to spot the
obvious troublemakers and lay them off.) The only policy that backfired
was the mandatory random drug testing policy that started in 1989:
intended to round up all of the pothead proles, it was quietly dropped,
according to rumor, because far too many members of upper management
were testing positive for cocaine for their firings to be explained away
as "leaving to pursue other opportunities."
In a novel, the author would create a grand hero to fight the forces of
oppression and incidentally make a name for himself in the process.
This would have worked at Texas Instruments if anyone with ambition or
options hadn't left as soon as inherently possible, and the rest were
happier complaining than doing something about the situation.
Petitioning the government for a redress of grievances didn't work,
either: the only petitions the boss of my department listened to were
petitions from those willing to get up at 5 ayem on a Saturday morning
for a good eighteen holes of golf, and anyone coming to him during
working hours with issues were either blown off or told in no uncertain
terms that making waves was a good way to lose employment. In a comic
book, we would have ended up with a strangely dressed but inherently
noble protector of the weak and helpless, determined to prove that
managers are a superstitious and cowardly lot. This was real life,
though, and people running through a factory wearing leotards and their
Pokemon Underoos on the outside get escorted outside by security or
popped in the ass with a taser and thrown into the back of a police car.
The stress was intolerable, and nature abhors a power vacuum, so TI
nature created an avenger for us. It created The Mad Shitter.
The first signs that we had a superhero in our midst happened sometime
in 1989, when one of the supervisors went to the supply mezzanine to
collect some three-ring binders. To explain, I was working in the
Non-Metallics Shop, a little area at the TI facility on Trinity Mills
Road in Carrollton that was dedicated to making the nose cones for the
Hostile Anti-Radar Missile (HARM for short) that TI was foisting upon
the Navy. The company was doing well at that time, but very little of
that wealth was trickling down to the people on the bottom, and we were
definitely the people on the bottom. The Non-Metallics Shop ran three
shifts for at least five to six days a week, and I was on the Second
Shift: 3 p.m. to 11:15. Most of management only operated during
daylight hours, and our supervisor at the time was usually in the
parking lot with his girlfriend in the back seat of his pimp-red Camaro
shortly after dark, so the environment wasn't quite as foul as it was
during the day. This time, though, the girlfriend was out of town, so
The Man was actually accomplishing a bit of work when he went up to the
second level of this gigantic shop space to get those binders. He got
his binders, but he also found a gigantic human turd on the mezzanine,
placed so that the first thing anyone saw as they came up the staircase
was a nice brown replica of the Hindenberg. He screamed and ran back
down, demanding an accounting of all of Second Shift, and waited for
someone to confess to this atrocity.
Naturally, nobody in their right mind was going to confess to taking a
crap on the mezzanine, so The Man bullied someone into cleaning it up
and dutifully reported it to _his_ boss, the Golfer. Quick
triangulation ascertained that the offending fecal matter could have
been plunked down at any time between 7:00 that morning and 7:00 that
evening, so everyone received a stern lecture on proper toiletry the
next day, with horrendous threats implied for those without proper bowel
or bladder control.
A month went by, and then the Mad Shitter struck again. And again. And
again. This time, he wasn't going for an obvious doody drop: he was
obviously hopped up on too many Judas Priest albums, because he was
Screaming For Vengeance. Considering the size of those dumps, he was
definitely doing some screaming: when security came in, they ascertained
that these were (a) human feces and (b) left where they were issued and
not made somewhere else and hauled in via wheelbarrow or forklift. They
started appearing in other places, suggesting both lookouts and access
to various equipment, as well as a particularly demented imagination.
Kong turds started showing up on the tops of light fixtures, on storage
racks, and in file cabinets. The Mad Shitter struck one of the locked
file cabinets intended to hold classified documents, tooting on an open
file folder, folding it quickly, and deftly shoving it through. He even
hit The Man's pimp-red Camaro, squeezing out a long but pungent trail
that looked and smelled like a dead water moccasin.
By this time, The Mad Shitter was a true folk hero to the masses: the
managers wanted him dead or at least unemployed, and every report of a
new atrocity just fueled speculation as to his identity. The Mad
Shitter obviously wasn't a woman: women were rara avii on a par with
promises of profit sharing that actually came through. He wasn't a
member of management, unless we had a really sick bastard who liked
blowing dirt. (One manager _was_ fond of sneaking up behind his charges,
farting, and running away, but he was quickly removed from suspicion.)
By the time the Mad Shitter somehow managed to break into the plant
manager's office, shit on both his desk and chair, and then get out
without leaving any traces of his identity other than that his blood
type was O-positive, we knew that we had our own blue-collar Bruce
Wayne, and anyone with an IQ above sixty was watched. Instead of
quelling the attacks, this just increased the strikes against anything
and everything in range, culminating in the great Fourth of July
Bombing.
The Golfer was not only mean but paranoid, and he had enough clout that
he actually had a real office instead of a cubicle with high walls like
the supervisors. It was composed of cheapo Henry Miller wall units
bolted together to make a monolith in one corner, but it was a real
office in a garbage dump scavenger sort of way. Under no circumstances
were any of the grunts allowed near that office unless they had
legitimate business with him, and that business almost always consisted
of lectures on Getting With The Program or scheduling for tee time on
Saturday. Every evening before he left, he'd get up from his desk,
close and lock the flimsy door that kept all of the proles away from His
Stuff, and wander home, comforted that no matter how miserable everyone
was, in no way could the Mad Shitter get in.
Well, July 4 fell on a Tuesday that year, so we had a four-day weekend.
The Golfer came back rested and relaxed, opened up his door, and had a
seizure. Sometime during that weekend, the Mad Shitter struck again.
However, apparently MS really had something for the Golfer, because the
Shitter had apparently overdosed on laxatives before going in. It was
all over the desk, the chairs, the file cabinets, the walls: the place
resembled the sets in "The Wild Bunch" if the film had been directed by
John Waters instead of Sam Peckinpah. (Or, for those who saw the film
adaptation of "Trainspotting", this spot was an easy candidate for The
Worst Toilet In Texas, if only someone had put a potty inside.) And did
I mention that the plant shut down its air conditioning over that
four-day weekend to save money? Or that the Non-Metallics Shop had one
air vent up in the roof that was too small for a human to crawl through,
but that let snow and bugs fall from the Great Outdoors?
Those faced with the horror of that stench once the Golfer opened his
office were also hit with a puzzle. The lock on the door was still
secured; the floor was concrete, so the Mad Shitter didn't climb up from
underneath. An investigation by Security ensued, and they discovered
fragments of the acoustic tile that passed for a ceiling atop the mess.
According to them, the Mad Shitter had somehow slung a rope from one of
the overhead I-beams holding up the ceiling, climbed down, removed at
least one of the acoustic plates, did his business, and climbed out, all
without anyone else spotting him. Whoever he was, he didn't do it over
the weekend, because all weekend visitors had been accounted for. This
wasn't some garden-level pooter running around. This guy was _good_.
Sadly, this was the last strike by the Mad Shitter, at least at the
Trinity Mills facility. Almost exactly a year later, the plant manager
announced that TI was shutting down the Trinity Mills plant, moving the
main factory equipment back to the plant from which it had sprung a
decade before and my department to the facility in McKinney. In all of
that time, although those smart enough to see the layoffs coming down
had left while they had the chance, nobody stood up and even whispered
about the identity of the Mad Shitter. Anyone who knew would have
disappeared the way Sakharov and Theremin did, so he escaped to crap
another day.
Well, it's been twelve years since the Mad Shitter first popped up, and
I still wonder if he's retired, or if he's still running around, his
nightsoil-smeared face and shit-eating grin mortifying idiot managers
everywhere. Either way, we could use someone like him to strike terror
into the hearts of evil, and evil is all we seem to be getting out of
business schools these days. Any retribution more subtle than his ways
won't get the point across, so it's time to get up atop the city and
turn on the ShitterSignal!
ADDENDA
As always, lots of extras on the agenda this time, mostly because I
haven't written a new installment in over two months. You know how it
goes.
To start, for those tired of dealing with the usual rancid selection and
attitude at the local Borders and Barnes & Chernobyl, the best option is
to go visit Mark Ziesing Booksellers at http://www.ziesingbooks.com, and
do it now. Mark's site underwent a major change in the last few weeks,
so head on out and check out the new design and layout. Oh, and buy
lots of books from him and his wife Cindy: I'm doing my best, but I'm
just one person, and I'm going to need a new house just to hold the
books I already have.
Secondly, I was hoping to be able to attend AggieCon this year at Texas
A&M University the weekend of March 23, but finances got in the way.
After the old car finally became too decrepit to move (when you realize
that you're paying ten times in repairs what the car is worth, it's time
to put a bullet in its brain), I had no choice but to pick up a new one,
and that wiped out the finances for the next year or so. This doesn't
mean that AggieCon won't be a blowout convention: go check it out at
http://aggiecon.tamu.edu/ and take the time to visit when the
bluebonnets and the redbud are in full bloom.
On New Media, the Dallas Video Festival ran this last weekend, and I ask
everyone who couldn't get to Dallas to check out the official Web site
at http://www.videofest.org and see what they have to offer. The Video
Fest is one of Dallas' unique cultural traditions (being one that
started here, instead of being copied and transplanted to wither in the
sun), and a weekend at the Video Fest beats all hell out of hanging out
with the drunken frat boys at the Greenville Avenue St. Patrick's Day
Parade. (As Alejandro Riera keeps asking, why does everyone in the
States keep blathering "Everyone's a bit Irish on St. Patrick's Day",
but you don't hear the same general sentiment on Martin Luther King Day
or Cinco de Mayo? Even Irish friends such as Paul Mears keep asking why
we make such a big deal about St. Patrick's Day in the US, seeing as how
the introduction of Christianity to Ireland isn't exactly something we
should be celebrating in the first place. Me, I just always have fun
watching all of the good Protestant kids all decked out in green, as
oblivious to the origin of that tradition as they are to the pagan
origin of the Jesus fish ornaments they put on the backs of their cars.)
And back to books, here's a little "Upcoming" update for those who are
interested. Not only are the usual additions to "Savant" and "Zealot"
coming this week (as well as a new major essay that should be in the new
"Science Fiction Chronicle" so hie thee hence to
http://www.dnapublications.com to see what else is going to be in that
issue), but I'm starting a series of book reviews for "Pop Matters"
(http://www.popmatters.com) for those who may be interested. Being
trapped in a town where literacy isn't exactly prized, I've been so
isolated from books that aren't available at the local grocery store
that I figured that this is a perfect opportunity to get back up to
speed with the more esoteric territories of the publishing industry.
And considering that both books and radio are going to go through an
interesting sea change in the next few years as the conglomerates that
bought up every media they could now realize they ate too much, I'm
heartily looking at finding treasure among the vomit. And isn't that
what makes life interesting?
The Hell's Half-Acre Herald is copyright 2001 Paul T. Riddell. This
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Web at http://www.hpoo.com. No, future, no future, no future for me...
--
Regards, Podkayne Fries
No one expects THE SPAMMISH INQUISITION!
WWS
Podkayne Fries wrote:
>
> Unusual Suspects, does anyone know where Jaime was in 1989?
>
> ====================
> "The Hell's Half-Acre Herald" - http://www.hpoo.com
<snip>
I love that guy. I worked for a company with a different
name at the same time, but I swear it must have had the
same managers because all of that brings so many bad
memories back. No mad shitters at my place, though.
Just a kind of low level obstructionism.
--
________________________________________________________WWS_____________
"Your type is exactly why I decry visiting this message board." - SJB51