Draft Email #78: This week

Note: I was working at Mugshots in Manayunk, PA, while still living in my parent’s house in Jersey. I had only gotten back from Hawaii the month before and EVERYTHING was in flux. It took something like 90 minutes each way to get to work, and the money was awful. My manager was a douche, too. I’d been writing a bunch around that time, and new I had some sort of record of the occassion.

Hence, the draft email. The first part is my own self-interested ramblings; the second half I wanted to send to my boss (who was an awesome lady, by the way) but never did. It’s probably better that I never hit send, but I got such a kick out of seeing it again that I though I’d share. Diatribe starts after the jump.

…I quit my job.

And remembered the way she smiles at babies and makes them so happy. And how she likes to make people uncomfortable with her confidence. And the things she said that always tossed me off my game, like: “I can get anything I want,” and “Sometimes I have trouble seeing past people’s asymmetry,” and me being the most asymmetrical person we both know.

She called, you’ll be surprised to know, to tell me the news of her life, that she had picked up work at the arboretum, wielding chainsaws, she said, and how today a piece of her work was being exhibited in a show, the Pope-a-Dot dress (whose name I helped conjure though she’ll not ever remember it that way), and to read me my horoscope, whose advice I think I abandoned when I stopped finding the bullshit funny and quit a job I might otherwise have loved.

This is the only way I know how, in hindsight, to live and love as hard as I want. And I think she feels the same way, so here we are. And though I like being loved at as much as the next guy, I’d rather live with the want because that’s where my best work comes from, and it’s destined to be true anyhow, and I feel like I’ve got a leg-up when I can say no to things that feel really very good.

Too high falootin?

We both suffer from that sort of confidence, you know. The feeling you get from setting a good damn example.

I will never find out if Miriam tried to stop by Mugshots to say hello, or if Tequina (sic) ever realized her dreams of moving to NYC and becoming something, or if Gwen was able to turn that little kid’s life around and let him see something other than hurt. I won’t be in a position to let Kristin’s restless (reckless?) energy realize something amazing, or bear witness to Mugshots’ First Open-Mic Night, starring that guy who writes stories for Video Games, or give Josie another scratch behind the ears.

I won’t see any more bizarre spectacles on the platform at Manayunk Station after missing my train by two minutes and being stuck there for another 70. No more Peter Pan boots, no cheap beers in red plastic cups, no more girls doing the tourist route, no more of the regulars, the girl with the crisp, short hair and tight butt who for some reason wears heels with everything.

None of the conductors/ticket-punchers with their casual conversation and willingness to forgive the fares of big women with loose skin.

“You got a ticket, girl?”
“Mmhmm…” She fishes half-heartedly in her purse. “Somewhere.”
“I don’t remember selling you one.”
“Oh, it’s back there I think,” she says, tipping her head in the direction of the seat she just vacated.
“I can’t let you ride with no ticket, now…” he says in his gentlest voice, the way he might speak to a child who hadn’t learned the rules just yet.
“Oh you better throw me off then,” she says, smiling. “You’ve got to toss me off this thing. Throw me out here.”
The train slows as it approaches the platform at Market St. East, and he gets the joke, turning himself sideways to let her through without paying a cent.
“Off you go,” he says.

***

The thing that kills me is that he was happy to see me quit, happy to let me do the ugly part of his job for him. He wanted to fire me but hadn’t the balls (or the reasons, really) to get it done, so he passively suggested that I was a lazy, good-for-nothing employee, a kid with a bad attitude and no heart for the job, until, sufficiently insulted, I gave him his way out: “It sounds to me like I’m not who you’re looking for and I disagree with just about everything you’ve said. So…I don’t really want to keep working here.”

“Thanks for being honest,” he said.

Blow it out your ass, dude. I wasn’t honest, not in the least. If I had been I’d have stopped him at the beginning of his insult-list, said “You’re the only reason I hate to show up every day. I feel like you’re a bully, the way you vulture around the place trying to find reasons to yell at me. I think your managerial style blows, I think you mumble because you’re not confident about the stupid shit you say, and I won’t hold your hand while you try to lame-ass your job.”

But I said none of that, instead I held his hand yet again, the same way I had in the interview, the same way I had in every moment of our work together:

“Paddy, what would you like me to do?”

Shall I help you along? Shall I stop you in your discomfort and just fire myself? Do I already know more about you and what you want/need in your life than you’ve ever been able to admit to yourself. Will this all come as too great a surprise to you? Will it seem unreasonable or untrue because you’ve not given yourself the opportunity to see yourself so clearly?

You ass, what the hell were you really looking for? What was it that I threatened? I can tell you why it was so difficult from my end, but that won’t help anyone, really. And I can see, to a certain extent, why you didn’t like me:

I didn’t share your doom-and-gloom philosophy of life and business. I was neither pessimistic nor cynical about people and their abilities. I was not angry, nor was I sexist, and even if I thought I was smarter than a great number of the people I encountered on a daily basis, I gave them room to teach me something new.

You hateful man, you. How dare you try to beat me down that way. How dare you make this a you v. me affair when this shit should have been family from the get-go, everyone helping as best they could for the better of the team.

You’re right, I didn’t want to stay late that day. But maybe that’s ’cause it was 1.30 in the afternoon, a half-hour ’til the end of my shift, when you bothered to ask if I could stay to close the place (i.e. be stuck with your mean ass for another 4 hours, you who made it a competition to close the place). Fucking, dick. Maybe if you’d asked at another point in the day (I’d been there since 8.30 that morning, after all), maybe if you’d made it seem like a better place to hang.

But you didn’t have that in you, you didn’t like me from the start, and you didn’t give any of us the sort of felixibility one needs in a job like that. Give me room to make mistakes, you cunt-licker. I’ve been here 3 fucking weeks; what more can you expect?

And don’t you dare cite me today for something that occured three days ago.

“So you admit that you wore sandals right?” he asks, laughing even as he says it. And I want to laugh too, but I know it won’t change anything, because even if he sees the joke he still takes it all very seriously, this piece of paper that will eventually become a part of my permanent record. This piece of the mounting “evidence” against me, all signed in his scratchy, drunken hand, this wannabe poet, this alcoholic who became a vegan because it gave him reason to feel superior to nearly everyone he met without having to lift a goddamn finger to become a better human.

And now I haven’t got anything but anger inside me, and a feeling of loss, and a lousy last-impression, which may ultimately be worse than a poor first one.

And I want to write to Jill, to apologize for doing such a shitty thing to her (because I try to live a life that does the most good and the least harm) but I don’t know if it will fall on deaf ears. I want to tell her that I’m so sorry for all of it, for hurting her and her business above all, because my problem was never with her, or the expectations she had for her employees. I want to thank her for working so hard on my behalf, for offering to help me find a place, for sharing that beer with me as the Phillies took their first division title in 14 years, for being kind to me re: sandals, for being a genuinely decent human who runs a genuinely awesome business.

I want to tell her that I meant her no harm, nor any disrespect, and if I thought I had it in me I would have slogged out those final days like a champ. Only I really hated to go to work when he was there, and any opportunities I got to work without his passive-agressive managing were welcomed with open arms. I want to apologize for fulfilling the worst expectations anyone had for me, and for fulfilling the prediction that this dude made about me and practically forced me into. I want to offer peace, because I believe in it, and because at the end of the day I try to dedicate myself to this above all, and to honesty.

I want to apologize for not being more honest, in the end, even to Paddy who made it hard to say anything, the way he clumsily handled his authority, the way he couldn’t shoot straight while looking you dead in the eye. The way he conducted interviews like he was the one on the spot.

And don’t get me wrong, I can’t demonize the guy and have it be true, for no one is the caricature that we paint of them. And I know he worked his ass off, and showed up everyday, and did things that I never even got to learn about in my less-than-a-month tenure, and I know, also, that a certain amount of ball-busting is a necessary part of the job, and it oftentimes makes the difference between an effectual manager and an ineffectual one, but at the end of the day I felt like I was holding his hand in a lot of regards, and I felt like he was being pickier than he had license to be, and I disagreed with his characterization of me as an employee with a bad attitude and a lazy streak and so on, ad nauseum.

Mumbling managers, they’re lacking a certain something, what is it? A confidence in the order they’re about to lay out?

He told Amara on her second day that he wanted her to be more proactive. On her second goddamn day!

I was talking to my dad about this yesterday and I likened the demands of a new job to opening an unfamiliar refrigerator for the first time and finding that you can’t make heads-or-tails of the arrangement. You can’t find shit, and all you see are colors and shapes in an unfamiliar pattern, and until you learn the logic of the thing and spend your says going back and seeing how it operates you can’t know where to look to find things, and it takes bit for the thing to become second-nature to you.

And I consider myself a pretty adept learner when it comes to this sort of thing, having had a ton of experience walking into jobs and having to get the routine down quickly, and make the general operation second-nature to me, and learning what short cuts exist, and how to shave off seconds, and the sorts of behaviors that turn a clumsy first week into a quicker second week into a seamless third. I didn’t think I’d done that lousy a job, to be honest, and I really don’t know if I had the time to make it all as second-nature as it could have become. I was still learning the logic of the place, for Christ’s sake.

And at the end of the day I gave myself permission to leave under the shittiest of circumstances ’cause I wasn’t living or dying with the place; I would have done anything for the individuals that worked there but I wasn’t living or dying with it yet because I didn’t see the incentive, because if it came down to me or him (and it was seeming more and more like that was the choice) I knew he wasn’t going anywhere. So I left, and it made him happy and me sad and I don’t know how else to characterize any of it.

I felt bullied, in the end. I felt like my weaknesses were always called on first, that my strengths weren’t indulged, and that there wasn’t any curiosity coming from his side. And you know the thing that most kills me? I know that all of this could have been changed with effort on my part. If I’d been more willing to hold the guys hand and coax information out of him and ask him to clearly enunciate the things he wanted, it could have been helped. Only I didn’t want to do all that; I didn’t want to manage my manager, if you know what I mean.

And I don’t know why I was singled out. I can think of plenty of reasons but they would all seem a bit ridiculous standing alone. Things are rarely so stark, you know. But I felt singled out. I felt like I was under the gun at all times. I felt threatened. I felt like showing up at work sucked. And goddamn, I’ve honeslty never felt that way about a job before, certainly not one whose employees 10 to 1 were some of the nicest people I’ve ever encountered.

This, at least, I can credit him with: he hires decent people, and I include myself in this.

So I guess I don’t really have anything of substance to offer here, and no answers, and no real mitigation for the way things went.

I only wish to express my frustration and my sincere regret, and my certainty that despite all the ugliness I’ve learned something here. I want to make it clear that I respect the hell out of you and what you do and how you run your ship. I want to make it clear that I love the way you run your business, how you’re always on duty, how you encourage your customers to get to know their baristas and vice versa.

And I’d like to apologize, of course, for anything that I misunderstood in the end. If I gave Paddy an unfair shake because he was simply being the bad cop to your good cop, if he was only the bottom rung in a chain of complaints, and I had only myself to blame.

But I don’t think I’m a bad worker.

I certainly won’t take abuse for $7 an hour. And ultimately, I don’t know if any of this was anyone’s fault one way or the other. Maybe it was just a product of the sort of labeling that we engage in when we organize our labor as a pyramid. Maybe Paddy and I identified too strongly with the roles we’d been assigned ala Stanley Zimbardo and the Stanford Prison Experiment. Maybe if the place had arranged its workforce like the cats at Gore Industries, where no one gets a corner office, where there are no real bosses, where the accounting deparment sits side-by-side with marketing, and if there are separate buildings it’s only because they’ve gotten larger than a hundred-fifty people, and that’s where tribes start to lose their efficiency.

Sorry, Jill. I don’t know if I’ve misunderstood all of this. And I don’t know if this letter is being received by friendly eyes. It was just a lousy experience in the end, and I’m doing my damndest not to remember it that way, and I guess that’s what I want to pass on the most. If there’s to be a last-impression, I’d rather it come like this.