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raise
Tuesday, August 17 1999
The Grand Pooh Bah pulled me aside today when he caught me nestling into my cramped squatter's half-cubicle. I was thinking "Oh shit, he's become a reader!" but I was wrong. He wanted to tell me that he had personally ordered a raise for me. It was a 33% raise, which though impressive, didn't actually result in a salary anywhere near competitive with the kind I could demand with my current (though admittedly freshly-acquired) skill set.
In the aftermath of the Excel spreadsheet fiasco, I wouldn't be surprised if The Grand Pooh Bah felt compelled to have many such conversations with semi-disgruntled employees. He seemed uncomfortable and remote, like he'd rehearsed everything he was telling me from some sort of generic employee-handling script. Indeed, as he began talking to me, he seemed to be consulting a crumpled cheat sheet in his wallet.
For some of the supposedly-beneficial decisions that The Grand Pooh Bah explained, I noticed that he was assigning freshly, awkwardly personalized reasons that I knew had vastly more generalized justifications. But no matter, it's not really the money that counts in my life. It's more about being respected and appreciated. And for all the grief I endure in that godforsaken iSweatshop, I get precious little appreciation.
My "personal" relationship went through yet another near-fatal nosedive today, but unlike the single-engine JFK Jr. airplane, it righted itself a few hundred feet above impact. Kim and I ended up celebrating my raise at Hodad's, a funky burger joint down on Newport Avenue in Ocean Beach. Hodad's features a huge sign above the door reading "less than 9 billion served." Our long-haired waiter dude walked so nimbly on his prosthetic leg that I didn't even notice it until Kim pointed it out. He asked Kim several times if she wanted her extra burger "with everything," thereby demonstrating, Kim thought, that he was stoned. (Kim had ordered an extra burger because I refused to share mine with her and, though she had ordered a veggie burger, she wanted a bite of a beef burger as well.) The burgers themselves were monstrosities impossible to eat without creating a horrific mess requiring bales of napkins. Unlike in a McDonalds, we could (and did) order Sierra Nevada microbrews. We could have been barefoot and shirtless as well; on the wall amid hundreds of license plates was a sign reading "No Shirt, No Shoes, No Problem." And when someone didn't want his basket of onion rings, one of the waiters spontaneously gave them to us for free.
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