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U-Haul family
Thursday, September 2 1999
In the parking lot behind the Mission Valley office building where I work lives a genuine American family. They're conventional in most respects: they're white and they have a few kids with "skeeter" haircuts and wide gappy smiles. The thing that's odd about them is that they live in a U-Haul trailer. People have pointed them out to me on several occasions, but nothing like the way Kevin the DBA did today as we were coming back from lunch. As a Database Administrator, you see, Kevin is usually at work on the weekends and late at night. He often sees what happens in officeland in the strangely casual period outside normal business hours. He went on to tell me as much of their story as he knew, gleaned mostly by his keen eye for the grotesque.
On most weekends and on most nights, Kevin says, the U-Haul is in the parking lot, its back is up, and the children are out in the parking lot doing what children do best: laughing and playing, tossing a softball or climbing trees. When anyone in the family needs to use the rest room, they simply use the one on the first floor of my office building. I often use that restroom myself; I like the fact that it's far away from the hustle and intrigue of the office and I can go in there with a printout of a Salon article and take a nice honest crap without distraction. But on a recent weekend I was in there when a group of kids came piling in, treating the place as if it was a room in their own house. I thought at first these kids belonged to Karin the over-involved membersupport girl (she works 100+ hour weeks and somehow also has three kids who are usually with her on the weekend, running Ritalin-free through the building in graphic testament to the fact that internet slaves should change jobs before reproducing). But it turned out that these kids were actually the children of the U-Haul family. And in a way I really was in their bathroom. Kevin told me that their father is actually gainfully employed as a technician for the building. A situation like this could only really happen in San Diego, a place where someone can live fairly comfortably in the windowless confines of a U-Haul trailer and where both the labour and housing markets are extremely tight. People have no difficulty finding jobs here, even good jobs. But finding a place to live in San Diego is nearly impossible for some people, especially those with dogs or poor credit.
As Kevin was telling me about the U-Haul family, I jokingly spliced in a piece from the Rosarito tales he was telling me yesterday. "Did you ever see them passing around a can of refried beans?" I asked. He burst into laughter, saying, "You get two points for that one!"
In the afternoon, I formally told my boss that I would not be going on a scheduled trip to Hawaii. My decision on this matter wasn't as easy as I'd imagined. There's considerable pressure in my workplace to go, most of it actually informal pressure from good friends such as Kevin and Eric, as well as the slightly more formal pressure of those in control of my immediate professional future. The Hawaii trip is supposed to be a reward for the amazing feat (accomplished by product & engineering) of actually launching most of the new functionality on our site before the beginning of our demographic's busy season. But there's a serious problem; no matter how I look at this trip, it seems like I'd end up having a miserable time.
For one thing, Kim would surely throw some sort of fit if I didn't bring her along (though it might be nice for once to have an adventure all by myself). But if I did bring Kim along, I'd have to buy her plane ticket and I'd have to pay for our hotel (the company's plan, you see, is to pack us four to a room, sans significant others, in Wikiki!). That would basically mean that I would be picking up the bulk of the tab for a Hawaii vacation, a vacation I don't particularly want in the most Schteveish part of the most Schteveish state of the union. And if, for some reason, Kim (say) ended up in prison and I was free to go with the company in the way they're planning, sleeping with three other co-worker guys in some hotel for four nights, I'd probably want to kill myself by the end, even if I was drunk and stoned the whole time, even if Kevin's expectations came true and I somehow managed to fuck a different Polynesian slutita every night.
Then, of course, there's always the possibility that the whole vacation will simply be hijacked by the Grand Pooh Bah and made into another company brainwashing, like what happened at the infamous Idyllwild company retreat of November 1998. So I'm not going. Instead I'd just like to have some real time to do my own thing for once in this last year of the millenium.
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