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San Diego sausage party
Friday, May 14 1999
continued workplace funk
I was concerned today to find the funk from yesterday was still there. If anything, it was actually a little worse. I was paying unusually close attention to the clock and wishing the day would just get itself over with. That's not a good attitude for me; it means I'm finding my work uninspiring and dull. Perhaps it's just me and my emotions, which have sagged for whatever reason. But they haven't sagged in vacuum. They are definitely influenced by my environment. Whether this has any basis in fact or not, I'm growing paranoid that my colleagues don't want me working on their projects because I'm viewed as some sort of trouble maker. My paranoia wasn't helped at noon when, at the Engineers' usual Friday lunch spot at a nearby strip mall, my boss, "the Director of Web Development" happened by and I was the only one drinking a beer. (Eric the Web Developer usually gets one too, but for some reason today he abstained.) By the way, there was something very wrong with the cheese on the pizza I had for lunch today. It was especially greasy in my mouth, sort of like mutton. I sure hope the guys staffing that place aren't jacking off into the cheese. Whether or not this matters, I suspect they're all gay.
Kevin and me as school boys sneaking around
At the end of work, Kevin and I found ourselves sneaking back across the parking lot and back into the building from an errand. Kevin's boss Paymon was in the parking lot at the time, but we managed to avoid him somehow, distracted as he was by a hot chick. Somehow, though, we re-encountered Paymon once we'd snuck up the back stairwell. He jokingly asked as we'd been doing tequila shots and I jokingly said we had.
The weekly motivational ritual known as "Energy" was happening by this time, but we had to somehow avoid it if we were going to carry through on our plans to split early. It bears mentioning at this point that the entire company is governed by little more than guilt and insecurity. There are virtually no rules of any consequence and people can be fired at any time for any reason or no reason at all. In such a climate, us engineers have the most freedom since, at least until recently, we've been viewed as precious resource. But we still get bitched at and complained to and there's always people trying to twist our arms to make us do things that even a bright eight year old would recognize as cynical motivational ploys. The most jarring thing that can happen along this line is for Karin (the overly-zealous member support girl) to scream at you when she sees you sneaking out. When that happens, you're busted and there is no escape. Consequently, all who work at my company know the strategies for avoiding being seen from various parts of the building. As Kevin pointed out later, it's rather like that one car ad that's been running lately which features a guy trying to sneak out of work early, encountering and defeating numerous James Bondesque booby traps and blockades along the way. (In the end the hero of the ad climbs into his car and drives away, free. We can all relate to this ad; it captures tension between the employer's desire to enslave and employee's desire to be free that exists on some level in all workplaces.)
Once Kevin and I had gathered our stuff, slipped around through the back hallway to the unguarded front and then down the back stairs, and out into the parking lot, we climbed into Kevin's SUV and headed out to Ocean Beach.
On an errand to buy beer, I decided we should take Sophie along for a walk. I immediately sensed how ridiculous we looked: two grown men walking a cute little doggie. I've already dealt with people assuming Kevin and me are a gay couple without the dog. So I remarked to Kevin, "Sophie's not really much of a man's dog, you know?" Some white trash guys hanging out in an old 70s model car overheard my remarks and found some sort of hostile humour in it, saying, "Yeah, your dog is a pussy dog!" and laughing belligerently. "I'm going to have to get in a fight if they're still there when we come back," Kevin said ominously. But on the way back, the only comments towards Sophie came from happy pedestrians. "That's the difference between people who smoke pot and people who smoke crack," Kevin said.
sausage party central
Aaron, the "class clown" of our workplace, was having an after-work party tonight at his place in Mission Valley. I'd been skipping out on so many work-related social functions that I felt somehow obligated to go to this one. Given my druthers, I'll pick the social functions that seem most spontaneous and heart-felt, not those that reek of motivational social-choreography. Aaron's party was the reason Kevin and I drove back to Ocean Beach; our intention was to pick up Kim and then return to Mission Valley to attend. But when Kim came home, she didn't seem all that eager to go. Indeed, she was pulling one of her insecure trips on me, coming up with a convoluted theory that had me bringing Kevin home as a means to avoid intimacy with her. I promised to be on my best behaviour, to not ignore her and to not get too fucked up, and she grudgingly agreed to go.
After following particularly horrendous driving instructions, we found ourselves in the Mission Valley gated community where Aaron hangs his hat. There wasn't a whole lot going on at Aaron's party. Al and Sherms were seated at a table in front of black greasy plates. Their faces and hands were covered with barbecue sauce and they looked like they'd just exceeded their USDA recommended daily allowance for beef. There were plenty more beef ribs in the oven, and pork ribs as well. Bloated though they might have been, Al and Sherms were in a jolly mood, talking about what had happened at "Energy" and wondering why Kevin and I had played hooky. Someone asked master-of-ceremonies Aaron, (a fairly generic-looking plump little Jewish lad) why he hadn't been his usual loud-mouthed comic self at this particular installment of "Energy." He replied that he'd received an email from his boss (Glenn, one of at least two VPs of Marketing) saying he should quit being such a class clown and instead focus on closing at least two deals by the end of May or else he'll be out of a job.
There were about a half dozen others present, all of them men. Character-wise, the most interesting of these people was Aaron's pimp-daddy wanna-be roommate. He's a shady-looking would-be social leader, complete with a little track of beard like a stroke of magic marker down each cheek. One of the first things he tried to establish when he had a chance was which of us colleagues had the most power at our workplace. Since I was the only one there with a girlfriend ("a good choice" as he enviously confided to me), he assumed I was the one in command. For me, such self-deception was great comedy, and I did nothing to persuade him any differently. Nor did I attempt to correct him when he went around divining our ages, saying Kim was 22 and I was 25 and wasn't it impressive how good he was at guessing ages. He was bending over backwards to prove how worldly he was, making constant references to what music is hot in Europe. He had an annoying habit of playing CDs and quizzing us to see if we knew what the songs were.
When a group of us followed him upstairs to his "fuck pad" (as some called it) to smoke pot, he made us do it in the bathroom in front of a vent. He claimed he wanted to sell the condo and didn't want it to smell like marijuana smoke. For want of proper lighting paraphernalia, we found ourselves lighting the bong with a candle. Inevitably a little wax found its way into the bowl. After a particularly set of noxious wax-flavoured bong hits, Kim and I were concerned that we'd permanently damaged our lungs.
The featured presentation of the evening was some edited video that Aaron and the pimp-daddy roommate had shot at Club Montage in downtown San Diego. The video featured Aaron roaming the crowded dance floor, mike in hand, asking various people, girls mostly, about anything that came to his mind. He asked one girl what her favourite sexual position was and she said "me on top, because that's when I come." At another point in the videotape, Aaron walked right into the women's room, asking the girls what they were milling around for, to which one replied "we're standing in line to beat your ass." It was funny, I suppose, but only in a sort of Schtevish way, if you know what I mean.
One of the new guys at work named Scott got involved in a long conversation with Kim. It was the closest Kim has ever gotten to making me jealous, which was kind of refreshing in its own weird way. Kim liked him, she said, because he was sort of effeminate, intellectual and a good listener. He wasn't the sort likely to make naïvely rash generalizations or sexually brutish weirdness. It turned out that he was originally from somewhere near New Orleans, so Kim and he actually have a lot in common. He's 34 years old and rather resembles the hero in the first Terminator movie.
Others came and went. There was even another girl there for awhile, Antonella, who worked at my company for about two months back in the winter. Other than that, it was serious sausage party.
As with all sausage parties, this one's energy was eventually siphoned off by a videogame console. The game was a car race, played on a big screen teevee, with force-feedback controls. I proved absolutely inept at it, spending most of my time making donuts on the shoulder of the track with my indestructible virtual car, but the other boys seemed to have a hoot.
Sherms and Al tried to put a stop to the game playing, but they had no luck. Later on, the pimp daddy housemate proclaimed that we were all going to Club Montage, but his plans fell apart when no one expressed any interest in going.
Somehow the bulk of the party ended up relocating to our house in Ocean Beach. It was Kim's idea, but the others elaborated on it, making it into a barbecue on the beach. That part never panned out, though. We ended up watching A Night at the Roxbury on videotape, smoking some pot, and drinking some beers.
I found A Night at the Roxbury to be a hilarious movie, a sort of Studio 54 from the loser's perspective. Here you have a couple of Beavis and Buttheads out cruising in the club scene, so socially-inept that they feel the need to bludgeon their dates with pickup lines when it's long past time to be stickin' it in.
aspects of Al's sellout
After the movie, Al was going on and on about the greatness of the community we've built with our company. He betrayed not a shred of cynicism as he talked about the upcoming Elizabeth Dole cybercast. Indeed, he even said he could "understand" the position of marketing in wanting to so tightly-script the event, even to the point of passing out lists of things to say and things not to say. To Kim and me what Al was talking sounded like sellout talk. Not just garden-variety sellout talk, mind you, but a comic parody of sellout talk. But it's important for us to understand why Al is so quick to compromise his principles in this affair. He'll be the one interviewing Elizabeth Dole after the cybercast. That's a big step up for a boy fresh from the farms of southern Indiana. In this new media world, he's risen almost arbitrarily from workplace nobody to media player. As Elizabeth Dole's career brushes against his, it's understandable that he would be overwhelmed. He's in no position to complain about the stifling conditions of his servitude.
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