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sneaking into Griffith Park
Friday, September 30 2016
location: Cabin 11, Camp Hollywoodland, Los Angeles, California
There were pancakes for breakfast in the mess hall this morning, and then the third and final day of the retreat began. It was heavy in presentations from the various international representatives, one of whom had been flown in from the other side of the planet. The main person from Canada was absent, however, and this was used by her team as an opportunity for one of them to do a good portion of their presentation behind a mask they'd made from a photo of her face. It was probably the funniest thing that happened in the entire retreat.
Most of today's sessions were substantive and informative, and, as the employee with custody over the most data, gave me insights into other departments whose data I cannot see. In the afternoon, though, there was session on something called "radical candor," which I found, ironically, to produce nothing so much as a display of artifice and ass-kissing. We were asked (as cheeseball music played from a sound system) to place stickers on a scale-free two-dimensional continuum representing, in one dimension, the amount we care about a person/entity, and in another, how much we feel that person/entity demands or motivates us. We each had three stickers: one for our team, one for our supervisor, and one for other teams. As you might imagine, the stickers representing the supervisor all trended high into the care/demand quadrant, as nobody wanted to admit that his or her supervisor is giving him or her a free ride. As expected, the people I regarded as the biggest ass kissers tended to place their stickers highest in that quadrant. During the question and answer session that followed, I was feeling almost enough radical candor to ask a question designed to deflate the whole thing, but I caught myself and kept quiet.
Keeping quiet seemed like the best policy, since I was feeling somewhat embarrassed about most of the public speaking I'd done so far at the retreat (with the one exception being my extemporaneous discourse on my flushless urinal). This was the reason I didn't say anything at all at the final love bubble of the retreat, though I really did want to thank the head of human resources for the basket of flowers he'd anonymously sent back when Eleanor the Dog died. It was a rather intense love bubble as these things go, though occasionally it was hard to hear what was being said due to all the helicopters that kept flying overhead.
Afterwards, we all marched up to an amphitheater and posed on the bleachers for dozens of group photos and video clips, some of which were customized for major donors. As this was going on, a great number of ravens were wheeling overhead and landing in the pines on the slope above us. These were joined by an occasional turkey vulture, and it was such a marvelously robust display of nature that it became something of a distraction from the camera lens.
After we broke into smaller groups for department photos, the IT department gradually came up with a plan for tonight. We decided to all go to Mohawk Bend (an idea I did much to encourage). I was doing what I could to encourage detente with the head of one of the other departments with whom we'd had a contentious relationship, and strongly encouraged her to join us at Mohawk Bend when she suggested she might want to. This would be an opportunity not only for us to bury the hatchet, but also for ideas to be exchanged. She's about my age and had been having trouble (some of it seemingly generational) managing female Millennials in her department, and she wanted to tap Da's brain for ideas of how to improve things. IT is already celebrated in The Organization for overcoming its previous dysfunction (under the Meerkat administration) and becoming a competent, cohesive, fun-loving group that somehow gets things done and keeps the technical infrastructure chugging along mostly without hiccups.
Ca had had a stressful day, so he didn't join the rest of us when we caught an Uber for Mohawk Bend. Just before climbing into that, we fielded a question asked in broken English by a group of young East-Asian women about how best to drive up to the Hollywood sign.
At Mohawk Bend, we ordered a couple vegan pizzas and various adult beverages. Da tends to make an ostentatious point of his veganism in any situation where there's a chance the food might not be vegan. Mohawk Bend is not entirely vegan, but it's the most vegan-friendly non-vegan restaurant in this part of the multiverse. If the menu doesn't say otherwise, an item is vegan. Da is always referring to an app on his phone in order to ascertain whether or not a beer is perfectly vegan (an issue that does not concern me at all). He was busily querying that app when I discovered a beer on the beer list with the verbiage that it was not vegan. Even knowing these things, Da insisted on interrogating the waiter about a dip that seemed suspiciously dairyesque.
Eventually the woman who heads that other department (let's call her Linda) arrived, and soon thereafter Ni had to go to meet her husband at the airport (they'd be spending a few days together in Los Angeles). Da and Linda proceeded to have a long conversation about management techniques, and I'd occasionally chime in as I sipped my first, second, and most of a third Mongo Imperial IPA. [REDACTED] My main contributions were to say that a good manager (such as Da) doesn't have to be a slave driver to get us to work hard. If he makes a good work environment and values what we do, we do it gladly, without anyone cracking a whip. I also shared my opinion about how today's earlier "radical candor" exercise had mostly been an exercise in ass-kissing.
At the end of the evening, it was past midnight and we knew the gate to Griffith Park would be closed. Linda offered to let us crash at her place (which is near Mohawk Bend), but we had planes to catch tomorrow and we thought it best to somehow try to get back to Camp Hollywoodland. So then Linda offered to drive us there in her beat-up old Toyota Corolla . (It was great to see someone in such a high position in The Organization driving such a marginal car.) On the drive there, Linda queried Da about his love life (or lack thereof), and Da told a rambling multipart story about his three last girlfriends, a story that ended six long years ago. It was a surprisingly dull story considering one of the girlfriends pulled a knife on Da and another turned out to have a bit of methamphetamine habit. The story was nowhere near finished when we rolled up to the closed gate of Griffith Park on Canyon Drive. So we just sat there in the idling car while Da continued telling the tale.
Our presence soon attracted the attention of one of the neighborhood homeowners, who belligerently yelled at us to inform us that the park was closed. We shrugged him off and Da continued on with his story until eventually that same homeowner came walking up, shining a flashlight into our faces and giving his credentials as a member of the local neighborhood watch. I instinctively jumped out of the car and was about to assail the man with obscenities, but somehow I caught myself and avoided an incident that would've no-doubt been embarrassing for The Organization. It helped that the man had also de-escalated and was asking us if we were "the vegans" (a word he mispronounced). We assured him that we were indeed and that we would be calling for someone to come down and open the gate, and this seemed to satisfy him. As this was going on, one or two coyotes casually strolled across the road behind us.
There was a number posted on the gate that we were instructed to call if we needed assistance, so, what the hell, I called it. On the other end of the line was a no-nonsense voice who said he was with the Los Angeles Police Department. I politely said that I was with the group staying at Camp Hollywoodland and that we needed to be let in at the gate. "Los Angeles City parks close at 10:00pm" the voice instructed me without pity. "Ok," I said, "thank you!" I then turned to Da and said, "It looks like we're going to be climbing over that gate." With his veganism, waxed mustache, and interest in thrash metal, Da projects an image of being kind of extreme, but his actual internal personality set-point is fairly conservative. For example, he's the most easily-shocked on the IT team. He wasn't enthusiastic about climbing that gate, saying, "I don't want to get..." but then he trailed off. "There's nothing to get!" By this point Linda had experimentally climbed the gate herself and had nearly made it to the top. But she'd picked a bad part of it to do that on. I had no trouble getting over when I scaled at the hinges, using them as additional steps. Da is maybe 14 years younger than me, but he's also heavier, and he had a little trouble turning around once he got to the top. But he made it over without (as I feared for a moment he would) tearing his pants in half. We big goodbye to Linda through the fence and then started walking up the hill to the camp. By this point I was pretty pumped-up by our success at getting into the closed park, but now Da was expressing the kind of paranoid concerns that reminded me of my old pal Josh Furr (Da's Georgia accent helped fill-out the resemblance). Someone had told Da that crazy homeless people are known to camp out in the canyons, materializing periodically to murder innocent hikers. But no such murderers accosted us. We hiked up to the mess hall without encountering anyone along the way, except for the park employee who'd picked me at the gate up on Tuesday night. She must've recognized both of us, and it didn't apparently raise any flags that we were coming from a location below the mess hall.
As we hiked up toward the barracks, we saw a small group of our fellow employees sitting at a picnic table. One of them, the young woman who had so hilariously worn the mask of her boss to impersonate her during the Canadian update, called out, "Gus! Tell us more about your incredible urine-gathering invention!" She sounded somewhat intoxicated. So Da and I went over and joined them to exchange a little banter before turning in for the night. In the course of this banter, one of the people at the table said that he will always associate country music with slaughterhouses, as that is the music that typically plays over the scenes of death and carnage therein. This idea haunted me afterwards.
[REDACTED]
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