the inmate's journal : the corporation xix : hr & the law ii

Goodness, madness, dreaming.  This is my equation.  This is my trinity.  This our iPod and song.

 

But how do institutions fit into all this lovely knowledge I’m pleasantly sharing with you this dark and sunny afternoon?  Are institutions good or evil?  Are they mad or sane?  Do they dream … and if they dream, do they dream well?

 

Well … this is the age of democracy.  Let’s take a poll.

 

Do you think—

 

                  A             Institutions have nothing to do with the new.

                  B              Institutions have everything to do with the new.

 

Hibernate your laptop if you think A; reinstall Windows if you think B.

 

Let’s wait for the results.

 

Ticktalk, buzztalk, buzzbuzz, pissbuzz, singpiss, gulptalk, talkfuck, fucktick, talksick, sickschlock.

 

Good.

 

There you have it … the Undecideds win as usual.^[1] 

 

Now I know you can’t help wondering (though it irritates you immensely) what I think.  Am I an Undecided too?  Do I think nothing … or everything?  Ok, if you insist …

 

… I have 3 thoughts—

 

1.     Whoever invented anti-diarrhea pills is a god.

2.     The humans in Mexico City are either lumpy or gorgeous.

3.     Should I have another bean enchilada?

 

Oops, sorry, wrong notebook.

 

I have 17 thoughts, but I’m only going to tell you 4 of them—

 

1.     Institutions, like people, like to think they walk the wire, but they don’t.

2.     To make the evil and themselves think they walk the wire, institutions make creativity one of their values, a little sleight of hand that fools the foolish.

3.     Institutions are the children—or more truly the distant descendants—of those who walk the wire.

4.     Human Resources is the false prophet of dreams and goodness in the corporation and, as with all false prophets, is haplessly evil.

 

In this section, I’m going to work for Human Resources, work against Human Resources, get into dreams, get into trouble, get into …

 

***

 

Maeby Might was from a long line of matriarchs, not the strident kind destined for high-decibel battles against the raucous superciliousness of cocks, but the subtle, I’m-going-to-make-you-think-I’m-a-bimbo-but-I’m-not, what’s-this-hiding-behind-my-smile, keen-students-of-testosterone kind—who breathe testosterone and study it and, with the aid of expensive products from France, ponder in the bathtub what its nature is … its strategic weak points … its manifestations and subterfuges … and how to get as much as possible from it for the least possible cost.

 

But what obstacles existed for a woman as she rowed down testosterone’s river in a small boat!  Sharp rocks of power, torrid rapids of lust, bleak shallows of truculent bureaucracy, biting birds of bitterness, missiles of misogyny, shipwrecks of the truthful … what did she have as survival tools?  She had her breasts—the possibility of their exposure and eruption a weapon more formidable than any man has ever invented, perhaps even the impetus for his inventions.  Not just these mighty mammories and that hot lower patience, but a competent mask collection and a cool embrace of imperfection’s endless march.

 

She was New Bank’s Chief Policy Officer (CPO) and worked for Erikk Richard Michael Haze, who had trained at the School of Crocodiles near a clump of Kola trees at a crook in the Lualaba River.  He hadn’t fully opened his eyes since he had been promoted to Chief Reptilian Officer (CRO) eight years prior, relying primarily on his sense of smell to make decisions.  The laws of New Bank—its gargantuan tenets and commandments, its voluminous policies and infinite procedures, its Kafkaesque labyrinths and Borgesian mirrors—were his domain.  He never left them; not only did he not want to, but he didn’t know how.

 

He was a lawyer, horrible and patient and hard, full of stone and smoke.  He had read the 10 Commandments and found them wanting, the Sermon on the Mount, and laughed.  He counseled Mr. Blood on all manner of great and necessary matters—of making obscurity seem touching and touching seem ethical and ethical seem profitable and profitable seem beneficent and beneficent seem powerful and powerful seem truthful and truthful seem obscure … and the law is a circle and it’s paved with words. 

 

I had had two encounters with him prior to my meeting Maeby.  The first was in a two-hour meeting to discuss a proposal from a California consultant on segmenting New Bank’s customers according to whether they were “mother,” “father,” “baby,” or “alien” customers.  Polite debate raged among the 20 attendees for an hour and fifty-five minutes while Erikk Haze was in his usual repose, seeming to sleep, his long legs stretched out from his chair, his flowing grey hair rustling in the breeze of the conversation, his body angled and relaxed, his eyebrows a gush of Mephistophelean insights.  As the meeting’s facilitator was about to wrap things up with an incomprehensible conclusion, Erikk Haze opened his eyes to a slit and said, Could someone explain to me the meaning of all this.

 

The second was when I was granted five minutes with him to discuss Project Lazarus and New Bank’s evolution to a world of talk.  He let me talk for four minutes and fifty-five seconds, stretched on his senior executive chair like a hirsute mannequin, then said with eyes still closed, Talk is the law, Jude. Talk is my domain, and dismissed me.

^[1] Detailed analyses will be available in the upcoming academic section, replete with methodological methodologies and interminable footnotes.

 

the inmate's journal : the corporation xviii : hr & the law

All humans dream, but all dream differently.

 

A woman in Cincinnati dreams of being assistant vice-president of unsalted rippled potato chips at Frito-Lays.  A youth in Corner Brook of the plump redhead demurely passing him the ketchup for his deep-fried halibut.  A cancerous retiree in Paterson dreams schizophrenically of health and death, a humiliated middle manager in Calais of middling revenge, a poet in Adelaide of a new kind of rose.  The gods dream too—Aphrodite of the couch’s kisses, Zeus of rape and mayhem, Yahweh of land and laws, Iya of human feasts.  Whether in Heaven, Earth, or Hell, dreams rule.

 

There are themes, of course.  Power, pleasure, peace.  Glory, comfort, forgetting.  But one common thread ties our dreams together and it’s this:  we dream of what doesn’t exist—either in the world or in our lives.  If by whatever cause—chance, birth, sex, race, bribery, talent—we obtain what we’ve dreamt of, our dreams begin to shift and the unknown once again takes hopeful shape in that elusive land.

 

Dreams belong not just to individuals, but to families, nations, and, of course, to institutions.  Officially, the institution’s dream is contained in its vision statement—

 

To be the preeminent earplug manufacturer consultant

in East-south-east Kansas.

 

To be the world’s leading tombstone liquidation facilitator

for the under-40 diseased market.

 

To be Indonesia’s market leader

in Roman Catholic guerilla electronics.

 

To be perceived as a possible contender in the

off-pink sugarfree bubblegum comic industry.

 

But what’s official is only interesting to those who are tedious and, as Mr. Wilde taught us, the tedious are evil and should be religiously avoided if you wish to maintain a healthy soul.  If you are one of the tedious—and research shows that 87.4% of you are—you obviously cannot avoid yourself and thus should repeat the following prayer each night before you go to sleep:

 

Dear Spirits of Wit and Animation—

 

I repent of being so boring, although those who are interesting tell me repentance will make no difference to anything.  I wish I had been born with fascinating thoughts but I know I wasn’t.  I pray that I will at least have the grace to keep my mouth shut as much as possible and, if I lack restraint—which my kind is regrettably inclined to do—I ask that I will have the strength to cut out my tongue, thereby saving the world from mediocrity which it has far too much of already.  But as cutting out my tongue would be an interesting act, I know that I am wholly incapable of it and would even be incapable of praying that I would cut out my tongue if it weren’t for this prayer that was put in my brain, a brain that is only obsessed with thoughts that have been thought a billion times already in exactly the ways I think them.  In conclusion, Spirits, I know that the only good I am capable of is going to sleep and giving myself over to dreams which, being what I am not, are full of interesting things.  I pray, though, in conclusion, that I will not tell my dreams to anybody as, being a boring person, I will make even the most interesting things wholly tedious but I’ll think they’re interesting because that’s how deeply boring I am.

 

Amen.

 

The evil and boring dream of what everybody else dreams, things individual and possible and transient—money, more money, fame, more fame, being adored, being more adored.  The moderately evil dream of the acceptable and common impossible things—peace on earth, health on earth, justice on earth, cleanliness on earth.  But the good dream of what is considered neither possible nor common nor acceptable.

 

The good dream of what is mad … mad, because it’s never been dreamt before.  Not the sort of thing where the evil say, Yes, yes, that’s true, I’ve never thought of that, how interesting … but where the evil look away and avoid speaking to the good dreamer and mumble into their porridge the past and present cost of gas.

 

The new is risked when visions are foisted upon the good and they begin walking that mad wire pitched over the soul’s abyss.  The new is created when the wire is traversed … no matter what happens to the highwire walker … if he gets mangled, if he falls, if he’s eaten … that just makes for more interesting biography.  What matters is that something new has entered human life … and once the mad wire walker is dead, once we’ve got rid of him—his obsessions and peculiarities—the rest of us are free to consume the lovely little tidbits he has made for us from the factory of himself.  This is why the mad are good:  they provide the greatest possible benefit (lots of pleasure for lots of people) at the least possible cost (the destruction of only one person:  themselves).  The mad are unselfish:  generously bestowing delightful gifts on humanity with no thought of their well-being, reputation, security, or even life.  Revise your definitions of the good, oh evil reader.  So dedicated to comfort and consumption and propriety.  The little old woman baking muffins next door while she watches Seinfeld reruns, dreams of winning the lottery … you call her good because her lawn is mown and she asks you how your children are; Christmas carols are played at the lowest possible decibels and stop on December 28.  The crazy man who rents her basement … you call him evil because he mutters to himself on the sidewalk and is seen going out at 3:00am with an unacceptable backpack and crosses to the other side when he sees you coming.

 

But he is writing 200 pages that will change the world.

the inmate's journal : the corporation xvii : marketing vi

I lived in this professional limbo for eight months, gradually losing identity, beginning to assume that my spectral existence would continue and I’d wander as a wraith among the skyscrapers until humanity had annihilated itself and only machines were left to tell the tale.  During this time, Mae left the Division and I found out she was actually a doctoral student at Colombia writing her thesis on sexual politics and the culture of cool in the banking industry.  She wasn’t an MBA turnover reduction specialist at all … just another sneaky academic doing undercover research.  I got this email from her—

 

Oct 30 10:21am

to             Jude Peer, Senior Consultant, Communication, Marketing Division, New Bank

from         mumori@gmail.com

subject     New Bank Research

 

Jude,

 

You’ve probably heard why I was at New Bank and I wanted to write you to let you know I hope you’re not mad at me.  I hope you know I didn’t go to bed with you just for research purposes, but I really liked it and I got quite fond of you.  Anyway, I got lots of useful data so I wanted to thank you because you were particularly useful.  I’ll send you a copy of my thesis when I’m done.

 

Cheers,

 

Mae

 

Who to trust, why, and when … are questions central to modern angst.  They add fireworks to our imaginative life, generate endless lunches, and fuel the economy.  We develop unlikely formulas to figure out how much to divulge, how much to believe, and who to go to bed with.  The strange thing is, though, that untrustworthy people can help us as much as trustworthy people can harm us.  Ferdinand lies to me and tries to stab me in the back, but his lie and stabbing backfire and he gets demoted instead; Mariana goes out of her way to make me look good in the eyes of the powerful … instead … bloodshed, mayhem, incest, murder, genocide, apocalypse, night.

 

When I drop a rock on my foot and can’t walk properly for a week, I know it’s because I dropped the rock on my foot.  Causation in purely physical things is often easy.  But to transfer this easy causation into the psychological realm is impossible, though we try to do it all the time.  Francis is honest, noble, generous … he’ll stagnate.  Julianna is conniving, stingy, and deceitful … she’ll get promoted.  Arthur’s honest, noble, generous … he’ll get promoted.  Audrey’s conniving, stingy, and deceitful … she’ll get shafted.  But … come on! … where’s the person who knows this?  We tell ourselves stories that A leads to B to make life seem orderly … but A leads to C and A leads to W and A leads to 48 and A leads to A and A leads to death and A leads to Santiago and A leads to alcoholism and who knows where A leads and who really knows?

 

Nard had decided not to fire me because he thought it would be greater torture to ostracize me, assuming that depriving me of blab and status would be akin to starvation, not being capable of imagining that the world wasn’t comprised entirely of MBAs.  Eventually he forgot about me—each day, after all, there are more distractions, more breasts, more numbers, more greed and envy—and I became just a drop in the ocean of his budget.  Maybe I could have sat there till I died; lots of people do … collecting their pay, sitting in ennui, four limbs in a tomb.  But I was getting bored … and a woman called … and I was seeing visions … and the same old carousel and you’ve probably heard it all before but maybe not and I’m going to tell you anyway or I’m going to tell you something because I’ve learned how to blab and I’ve learned how to lie and I’ve learned that you don’t care as long as you’re entertained.

the inmate's journal : the corporation xvi : marketing v

Meanwhile, the RIMS Project was getting ready to present to Nard and Mae used her wiles to convince the team I should be the presenter.  After the losers in Operations and the admin assistants in Marketing spent a few sleepless weeks doing all the work, the presentation was ready and I was told to show up at Nard’s door at 3:00pm on the 13^th. 

 

Sissy was smiling sweetly and counting her breasts to make sure they both were still there as I approached.  Sexual grunts and coos mingled with the radio, new financial services lit the waiting room with hope, joy erupted from Nard’s office—

oh nard oh nard do me use me fill me love me nard nardy nar nar ard ard ard nar nar …

 

Coffee?  Sissy said.

 

No thanks.

 

Jude.

 

Yes.

 

You’re presenting RIMS to E.L.

 

Yes.

 

You realize you’re going to have a difficult time.

 

Is Mr. Nard not receptive today?

 

You could say that.

 

She paused to admire her cleavage.

 

Have you seen the email?

 

There were 14 billion emails a second in Marketing.

 

The one from Ms. Mori.

 

There were 171 emails a minute from Ms. Mori.

 

Come Jude.  She took my hand and guided me to her monitor, nuzzling her genetically modified breasts into me and telling me to read—

 

may 13 2:51pm

to             Jude Peer, Senior Consultant, Communication, Marketing Division, New Bank

from         Mae Utne Mori, Senior Relationship Manager, Marketing Division, New Bank cc  Marketing Division, New Bank

 

subject     segmentation strategy

 

oh jude, I just came from nard blabbing about segmentation strategy he’s so gross and all I could see was your hot hot shaft.  i so want to lie against you, and kiss you, and feel your heat. i know you'd protest, but i'd unbutton your shirt, and lift up my camisole so that my breasts could rub against your chest so happily, while i kissed you so joyfully. How could i ever taste something as wonderful as your cock, even if you aren't completely willing--you know i love to taste it so. it would make me moan so if you parted my thighs, and wet your finger against my ready cunt. you would make me scream if you put your glorious cock inside me--fuck me, jude. you know i want your silky cum inside me, on me... I'm so hot for you... mae

 

She’s accidentally copied it to the whole Division Jude.  You know E.L.’s always wanted her—he’s as jealous as hell.  RIMS doesn’t stand a chance.  Neither do you.

 

Crises in our careers occur for many different reasons, sometimes unexpectedly, sometimes for Oedipal miscalculations, sometimes because the gods are bored, sometimes because someone doesn’t like our deodorant.  For an MBA, this particular crisis would be a career opportunity … everything was a career opportunity for an MBA:  there could be increased tribal warfare, strategic cudgel politics, resume leapfrog, great pitch and battle … but I wasn’t an MBA.  I did a decent job of imitating their bedroom antics, of playing their blabby games—survival after all is mainly about pretending—but for me, it wasn’t an opportunity for advancement, but an opportunity to run away.  Lief’s sister was right … fighting is so much work; it’s smarter just to slip out and not care that nobody cares.  Running away is a tactic that’s underrated.  True, it burns bridges and isn’t in the manuals, but it’s the path of least resistance and, frankly, it’s more fun.  So I walked away from Nard and the screams, his 38DD sidekick, the cornucopia of products, back to the sudden irrelevance of my office … for there’s nothing more damaging to your career than possessing something your boss wants but can’t get … except perhaps not caring.

 

One of the chief delights of being a middle manager in a large institution is how you are, from time to time, given the opportunity to do nothing at all for months and months.  Most do not take advantage of this unusual gift—whether due to guilt or fear, I don’t know.  I, however, wasn’t one of those types troubled by conscience about playing Robin Hood for myself, and I contentedly accepted my six-figure salary while arriving in my office at 10:30, expensing my 3-hour lunches, and leaving at 4:00.  The privates, corporals, and captains in the massive global professional armies feel important through the continual carpet bombing of emails, voicemails, texts, and meetings they’re subject to.  But if you do as I did and allow yourself to become professionally homeless for a time, the calls and emails stop.  No one invites you to meetings or drinks.  And you realize that all those wonderful ego-bursts—of feeling needed, of your continuous necessity to tomorrow—have nothing to do with you.  You’re as dispensable as a fly.

the inmate's journal : the corporation xv : marketing iv

While the militarists gave birth to email to expedite blowing up the world and while the technologists nurtured it because it was a new geeky toy, the masses have claimed it as their own because it’s what they do … blab.  It’s what they love to do … blab.  It’s what they’re best at … blabbing.  In short, Project Lazarus had been a huge success—talk was everywhere, it was growing, and increasingly no one could live more than half a second without it.  Email and texting were the best because they were a direct connection between the endless verbal flatulence of the brain and the gluttonous ears of the world.  Who doesn’t love brain-farting?  Who doesn’t want to share her every very special smell?  The great thing about Marketing was that all the smells smelled of sex, all the sex smelled of money:  genitals and profits were the same.

 

Come on now, productive puritans, noble citizens … you’re surely not thinking that sex in the workplace is unproductive?  There’s nothing more productive!  You’re surely not thinking that a corporation’s objectives are more fully met when marketing managers blab about customer retention and loyalty programs and market share?  There’s nothing more unproductive!  Fellow baboons … it’s the network that binds us, it’s the relationships that comprise the network, it’s the sex that’s the relationship.  You want some happy Hallmark ideology instead—go back to the priests and believe their celibate words, go forward to the academics:  believe their utopian ideologies … but for reality, go to Marketing and talk the walk and talk the talk and walk the fuck and fuck the talk.

 

I have a theory I’d like to share with you, beautiful and urinating readers—a theory so novel and shocking it woke me up one night in Acapulco and hasn’t let me sleep since.  It’s a theory the academics haven’t thought of, the priests refuse to think of, and the business executives don’t have time to think of.  It’s a theory that relates religion and business … in grand galactical ways that pave grand galactical freeways in the brain that we can drive in grand galactical fashion and feel adventurous—grandly, galactically.  Which, let’s admit it, is our favorite feeling.

 

My theory’s this:  marketing professionals are the new mystics.

 

Let me defend:  mysticism, as all you well-read educated readers know, is about two things:  1) experience as the basis of knowledge and reality; 2) emptying oneself entirely to find fullness.  I’ll admit these concepts are a bit mind-boggling, especially if you’re sitting in Cancun sipping a lime margarita, but put down your drink, put down your remote, and stay with me for a second.  We can do this together, I know we can.

 

In all my life, in all my mingling with all sorts of people—nutty people, sexy people, boring people, pompous people—I have never met such empty people as Marketing people.  They have skin and faces and clothes like the rest of us … but peel these away and just below the surface—pure nothingness.  Yet what do they create from this bottomless void?  Infinite product—fellow consumers!—infinite product—a world teeming with Mickey Mouse dental floss, child-friendly airbags, peach-mango Twinkies, and all-expenses-paid-package-Aztec-temple-touring vacations.  Everything from nothing!  The world in a grain of void!  Like the mystics of old who devoted their lives to finding God, these modern mystics devote their lives to finding the modern God—Things!  But unlike the mystics of old, who were selfish and smelly, thinking only of their own enlightenment, these new mystics are unselfish; they smell like golden beaches, look like Angelina, think only of our enlightenment—the collective human bath in the infinite plenitude of stuff.  This is religion to live for; these are mystics to invite for a beer.

 

Good—now that I’ve got that out of my system, you academics can write your books saying what I’ve just said in 600 pages; you priests can call me an infidel (but sweetly, as this is the age of sweet), and maybe I can get some sleep.  But as for you … you’re going to go back with me to Ms. Mori’s, whose apartment I went to of course; it was expected.  To refuse the sexual advance of a female Marketing professional was to give oneself over to death by gossip which, in a world where talk is currency, blood, and religion, is worse than death by crucifixion.  Not that I didn’t want her—MBA females specialize in unhinged lusciousness.  Not that I objected to her loopiness, her habit of beginning 10 conversational threads at once and not finishing any of them, an attribute that was often an asset in the bedroom.  No, it was that some voice in my spleen advised against it and, as my mother always used to say—Trust your spleen.

 

But if we all did everything our mothers used to say, life would be boring.

 

I love you, Mae said at the door.

 

You’re mad, we just met.

 

My uncle was a little mad.  He used to dress up sheep in the bathroom and pretend to baptize them.

 

Were you ever baptized?

 

By my uncle?

 

Is he ordained?

 

Not as a sheep.

 

Anyway, you can’t love in this place, you’ll get demoted.

 

Oh Jude, you understand so little.

 

And she tied me up, stripped to The Spice Girls, and didn’t let me go until 7:00 the next morning.  Every few hours during the day I’d get a lustful email from her, reliving in multi-adjectival detail every falling bra strap, every parted panty, every bondaged scream; anticipating in rushing gushing prose more falling bra straps, more parted panties, more bondaged screams.  This—coupled with all the announcements about who was coming into the Division, who was leaving, who was getting promoted; all the meetings about why there were so many meetings; all the lunches, all the coffees, all the trysts—kept me so busy I was perpetually sleep deprived and finally understood why Marketing people work harder than anyone in the world.