“Oh, come in Bob, close that door behind you.”

Every time I stop and think about my former in-house career, I remember all the office visits I would make to my fellow drones. Were any of these visits upbeat? Were these folks grateful for their job? Happy with their surroundings? Their salary? Their last review? The schedule? The specials at the cafeteria? Fuck no!

They would narrow their beady little eyes and hiss you into their chamber so they could grind their misery into your temporal lobe. The mission: To disabuse you of any Utopian notions you might of had previously. Once they got you to close their door behind you, that is.

Oh the unfairness, the humiliation. “Christmas falls on a Saturday? Again?” Poor little things, I would think to myself. And what was my problem? Didn’t I get it? What am I high? Don’t I see all the unfairness in the system? Are you fucking unconscious, Bobby?” Must be.

To me, surviving in that maze of misery was like falling down a flight of stairs. if you tense up, you get hurt.

Some folks swore they had supervisors so diabolical they just missed being tried at Nuremberg. And found guilty. Same shit, different boss.

“What don’t you get, Bobby? You just drove around the country in your little fleet vehicle telling jokes while we got beatings until morale improved. I mean, you only sold the stuff.”

The implication was I really didn’t have a job there, I had an experiment. Yeah, they moved me back from Arizona to do a budget ditch. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Maybe they did. Care I?

I was shooting unauthorized video to improve my Cardiolite business. And it worked. To this day, I’m still not sure if they found value in what I was doing, or they just wanted to keep an eye on me. Again, W.G.A.F?

“Get out of my gulag, Bobby, until you come to your senses. Besides, there are spies everywhere and you just might be one”.

I was visibly shaken at times just from the intensity. I had one guy who could take the whole company down from top to bottom including relatives and spouses, while getting through the sports section behind his computer screen. He was good, that one.

Oh, I remember the wailing and gnashing of teeth and the egg timers on the desk. No matter what the uppers did to placate the inmates, it was met with scepticism and derision.Try peeing into a fan.

I need a job these days but could I do that again? Not so much.