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be nasty, not good
Tuesday, December 7 1999
In the morning I was running kind of late and I found myself walking kind of disruptively into the weekly company meeting. It was in full-bore pep-talk mode by this point, with the Grand Pooh Bah giving the glorious introduction for our field-marketing general-at-arms, a plump little former knife salesman with a history of building armies of motivated young workers. I'll call the guy "Reginald."
The first thing Reginald did before he began talking was to pass out a sheet listing his "Marketing Rules of Engagement." Among its bullet points included "Have character. Don't be a character" and "Complacency is the cancer of success." The list ended with a quote about Bill Gates that summed up what Reginald felt we had to be, "He's relentless. Darwinian. Success is defined as flattening the competition, not creating excellence."
I wonder what it's like to have lived a life and die knowing that what you did was not create anything new or interesting, but killed off all the other people who might have? This is the air I inhale now on a daily basis. Such poisonous propaganda seeps into my every pore. If I come out of this experience without being transformed, I will have passed an incredible test.
Reginald ended his talk by presenting our company with a gift statue of a man carving himself out of a block of rock. It's Fascist enough just the way it is, but he went on to add that he wanted to see each of us touching it every morning to get some of it's "power."
After all that was over, the Grand Pooh Bah II (the hired-gun we keep on staff to impress investors) gave a Mr. Rogers-style talk about the need to respect one another. He concluded this by announcing we'd all be attending mandatory sexual harrassment sensitivity training in a week or two. Under the influence of an uptight new staff attourney, you see, our company has become extra-jumpy about litigation and is now busy stomping out every conceivable legal hot spot.
It's kind of amusing listening to my colleagues complaining about the unpleasant parking situation they're encountering downtown. The bulk of them must park their vehicles in a remote parking structure and then ride the trolley back to the office. The indignity of being forced to rely on public transportation, what with its delays and exposure to homeless people, is almost too much for some of these high-powered future-IPO-millionaires to endure. It's just one of several egalitarianizing effects of a large city's downtown.
The ride home was treacherous. I took the Pacific Highway back towards Point Loma and found the cars zipping by me fast, plentiful and somewhat belligerant after a hard day's work in the nation's finest city.
I stopped on the way home to pick up a six pack of microbrew. Microbrew is one way God tells you that you're make too much money.
Kim was watching a silly little tantric comedy video she'd ordered from the legendary pornographic performance artist Annie Sprinkle. You realize why she's called "Annie Sprinkle" the moment you see her drenching onlookers with her endless copious orgasms.
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