A Working Stiff's Manifesto (7 page)

The woman starts to protest and the girl cuts her off. “I gotta have the money. Rules are rules.”

Rules are indeed rules, but the people who make them are often mad with greed. And cable is a God-given right of every American, something to which we should all be entitled. The premium channels are for the rich, TNT and USA for the rest of us. But NO cable at all? Come on, have a heart.

Back when I was in high school, nobody had cable, everybody watched network TV. Now every house on every street pays an average of eighteen dollars a month to watch
History of the World, Part One
seven times a month. This is millions upon millions of dollars flowing into someone's bank account. Where do these millions go? They sure as hell don't go to programming. I get twenty-four-hour-a-day free cable, and that means episodes of
Columbo
and
Hawaii Five-O
, which I didn't think were good even when I was a kid. Cable has taken our money and recycled yesterday's garbage and fed it back to us.

So what's the harm in planting a splitter, or acquiring a descrambler box? With a descrambler you can watch the late night porn channels and look at some silicone-breasted nymph sprawl around on a bed without paying eight dollars for the privilege. Who has the patience for more than five minutes of that anyway? By the time I've heard her tell me she likes swimming in the sea and doesn't like rude people, I've usually been ready for more of Steve McGarrett catching the one-dimensional killer du jour. If Time-Warner wanted twelve dollars a month, they'd get it. If they want the equivalent of a car payment, they'll get nothing and like it.

The tragedy of a career in cable theft, however, is that unlike some criminal ventures, such as drug-dealing and prostitution, cable theft has no repeat customers. Soon, the well is dry. Everyone in my neighborhood is snuggled up watching Comedy Central and Nickolodeon, and I have to reenter the work force.

I get a job cooking in a restaurant.

W
OULDN'T
W
E
A
LL
B
E
H
APPIER
S
OMEWHERE
E
LSE
?

The irony of
the restaurant industry is that no restaurants ever open up in areas of high unemployment, the logic being that these areas are economically depressed and the local populace doesn't have the disposable income to spend on luxuries like eating out. This means that anywhere there are people who really need restaurant jobs, the restaurants are fleeing like crazy, only to open in areas where nobody wants to work in them. The result is that every successful restaurant is staffed solely with employees who would rather be somewhere else.

While this might be true of most businesses, restaurant people don't make any bones about it. “I'm getting a real job next week,” one of the waitresses tells me on my first day. “As soon as I graduate, I'm getting a real job,” the cook who trains me says. There's an unspoken understanding among the employees that their jobs are not real, partly because they were so easy to get and partly because restaurant work doesn't command respect. So employees are always on the lookout for something better, no matter how much money they're making.

Restaurants combat this the same way most corporations combat eroding morale: by offering meaningless job titles and fake benefits. But in the restaurant industry, eroding morale is a given, so they don't waste too much time with it. “We offer full medical after ninety days,” the bleary-eyed manager tells me during my orientation. Then he adds, “And our home office deducts the expense from your paycheck.” He makes it sound like the home office staff is doing me a favor, saving me the trouble of subtracting my own money from my check. I check the “Insurance declined” space on the form.

“You also qualify to be a shift leader after ninety days,” he tells me, and I would decline that too, if there was an option. Shift leaders are the corporate restaurant world's answer to prison trustees. For an extra fifty cents an hour, you become responsible for everything, basically performing management functions for cook's pay. This frees the managers up to do the more important things, like wander around and look stressed, or sit at a table and wait for the night to end so they can start in on the hard liquor when there's no one around.

“Let's get to work,” he tells me.

The restaurant is one of those springing up everywhere, the defining characteristic being crap nailed to the walls. Sometime in the early eighties, someone somewhere decided that people felt more comfortable eating with a refinished canoe paddle nailed to the wall behind them. Busted brass lamps and blacksmith's tools soon followed, and now every corporate restaurant in the United States sports a wealth of garage sale refuse secured to the walls; secured very well, I might add, so drunk people can't pry it off.

The food in these places is bland but palatable, and the restaurant where I have just been hired is no exception. There is a page in the handbook for every step of every process in the preparation of every menu item. It isn't cooking that I'm doing here as much as production. I'm essentially a factory worker. One of the managers is a cooking school grad who was fired up with new ideas when he was hired six months ago, and has now resigned himself to slapping burgers into molds with a look of disgust. “I'm going to get a real job,” he tells me as he shows me how to use the burger mold. “I've applied at Payne Walker.”

“Isn't that a slaughterhouse?”

“It's meat cutting. You get to use a skill.”

I've worked in actual factories, and the workers are happier than the people here. The people here are not allowed to admit that they are involved in a production line, and the managers are in charge of the collective denial. We read weekly bulletins sent to us from corporate headquarters that tell us how well we are doing, how we are pleasing “guests” (the new word for customers), how we must keep smiling, even in the kitchen where the guests can't see us. Scowls are picked up by the waitstaff, who then scowl at the guests, who leave and don't come back; and then the restaurant is closed and we're all looking for jobs. So if we like being employed, we'd better smile. That's the logic.

It looks good on paper, but the philosophy fails to take into account the complexity and perversity of human nature. Directives to grin have the opposite effect on me. Smiles come from somewhere else. The end result is waitstaff and floor personnel gripped with a forced neurotic enthusiasm, which they substitute for actual pleasantness. This manifests itself in unnecessarily loud speech, so everyone walks around and screams at each other, and the guests.

“HOW ARE YOU TODAY, DAVID?” a perky female manager asks me at the beginning of my second day. Enthusiasm comes from the top, so the managers have to be the perkiest of us all.

“My name's Iain,” I tell her quietly.

She pumps me on the shoulder and wanders off. Later in the day, after a busy lunch shift, she comes back behind the cook line and looks at us, clearly worried.

“WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH YOU GUYS?” she asks. The other cook, an older Nigerian named Jacques who has worked here for years, stares at her. I'm trying to learn a new menu and to get the ingredients right in a salad I'm making.

“We busy,” says Jacques. I nod in agreement.

“EVERYBODY'S BUSY,” she yells. “COME ON, KICK IT IN GEAR!”

I'm convinced this is just silliness, and I'll get used to it, and I spend the next few days making an effort to learn the menu and get things right. The work is hard, but Jacques is a good teacher and easy to work with. I mind my own business, show up on time, and do everything the handbook tells me is required. At the end of the week, the manager, Marci, calls me into the office for “counseling.”

“You don't seem happy here,” she tells me. She isn't screaming now. She's looking at me intensely, as if daring me to say the wrong thing, and a hundred wrong things occur to me. What's happiness got to do with it? That would be wrong. Fuck you. That would be wrong too.

“I'm fine,” I say.

“You don't seem fine.”

What am I supposed to say to that? I'm here. I was on time and sober. What do they want? I stare at her, convinced if I say anything, it'll come out wrong.

“What do you have to say?”

“Nothing, really.”

“Would you be happier somewhere else?”

“No,” I lie. Wouldn't we all be happier somewhere else? Isn't that a mainstay of the human condition? I don't think it was a philosophical question.

She shrugs her shoulders and throws up her hands, as if to say, “What am I going to do with you?” Something else is going on here, I figure, as it always is. I've done a fine job, I'm an experienced and reliable cook, but they always want something more than just what the classified ad tells you. They want a good ass-kissing. I might be capable of it, if it wasn't demanded from me.

“I'll give you another week,” she tells me as she turns away, ending the meeting. I leave quietly.

“What was that about?” Jacques asks.

“She thinks I have a bad attitude.”

Jacques laughs. “She not been fucked in a year.”

A week goes by, and Marci never talks to me again. My attitude is no different, but the restaurant is so understaffed that even she has the common sense not to fire me just to prove she can. Restaurants are sprouting up in the area like weeds. Fourteen corporate restaurants have opened in the past six months, and with each one needing about sixty employees, that's 840 people who can get jobs. Restaurants fight aggressively for staff, offering bounties to employees who bring in friends, running larger and larger newspaper ads, even offering sign-on bonuses. It's an employee's market, and I'm riding the wave.

The work is hard, but the people I work with are hard workers. All of them have another job, and many go straight from one job to the other five or six days a week. This makes for a seventy-hour work week with no overtime, having to be on your feet the whole time. They never complain. The common refrain is, “You get used to it.”

I've worked seventy-hour weeks, often for months on end, but I'd never say I got used to it. My body was fighting for rest the whole time. But if you want your own apartment, or an insured car, or legal cable, it's now a necessity. What single job can provide one individual with a comfortable lifestyle? So by the time these guys have paid for all the things they want, they never have time to use them because they're always at one restaurant or another, throwing burgers on a grill.

I prefer to keep my time off and just get by.

Robb, the manager who dreams of one day working in a slaughterhouse, is intrigued by the fact that I have a college degree. “You could go into management with that,” he tells me. “You're underutilized.”

“What's so great about management?”

“More money, for starters. Look at you. You're wasting yourself.”

I hear that a lot, but the options aren't all that intriguing. In order to not waste myself, I have to have a career in management and work a minimum of sixty hours a week doing essentially the same things I'm doing now. If you factor in twenty hours of overtime, it doesn't pay more, it just offers more work. In fact, it pays about a dollar an hour less.

“You'd get benefits,” he adds excitedly. “And sick days.”

This is a man who desperately wants to get rid of his job and is trying to convince me how attractive it is. “You don't like your job,” I point out.

“It's not for me. But it'd be perfect for you.”

Is he trying to groom me to replace him? He's a straightforward fellow, not one to have a hidden agenda. I think he just wants the best for me.

“I'll think about it,” I say, and he rolls his eyes at my stubbornness.

I'm taking home over $300 a week here, no stress. When I'm done, I go. There's no possibility of them transferring me to another store, like they do with managers. Most importantly, I can mind my own business, and don't have to wander around making sure everyone is grinning.

The next week, Ken, the general manager, stops me as I'm punching out to go home. “I hear you're interested in management,” he says.

“Not really.” I don't relish the extra work, but there's a security in management, the idea that you're working toward some kind of career goal, a hope of advancement. These are things that I've been thinking about as I get older. As a manager, you're under some kind of umbrella, protected.

“We're looking for managers,” he tells me. “Why don't I give you the module book and let you look it over.”

I take the module book, the manager's training manual, which has the whole sixty-day process outlined in extreme detail. I already know the kitchen, which is the hardest part. As part of the training, I also have to bartend and host, and wait tables for a shift or two, all things I have done before. It seems easy enough, but I'm not sure I want to deal with the hours required.

Then the area director comes in to see me one afternoon as I am closing down the line for a lunch shift. He shakes my hand and smiles heartily.

“I hear you're going to be one of our new managers,” he says.

These people must be desperate. I've never really expressed a desire to anyone, yet word is traveling up the chain that I'm driven and ambitious, looking to climb the corporate ladder, all because I failed to say no to the prospect of a promotion. It's too late to back out now, so I do what I usually do when questioned about jobs I don't really want. I ask for an impossible amount of money.

“Thirty-two thousand a year?” the area director says. He smiles. I smile. I know John is making twenty-six, and that this is probably out of the question. I'm making nine dollars an hour now, so he knows I can survive on a lot less. I figure he'll make me an insulting counteroffer and I can go back to cooking.