corporate slut corporate slut

Things got broken. But it wasn't my doing.

Tuesday morning they laid off my manager. Which seemed kind of odd protocol, given that nobody had laid me off, and my manager was the only one who even knew what I did. As Anthony carried boxes to his car, Joe looked at me and I looked at Joe and we both kind of said "now what?" and I was wondering, but now who's going to fire me? And I said, "Joe, will you fire me?"

But then Joe got laid off too. I went round to find him for lunch and the tell-tale boxes had appeared in front of his cube. Uh-oh. I went back to my own cube to hide.

But I swear to god, I never saw Joe smile so much in the whole 6 months I've known him as the day they finally laid him off. Freedom!… Over the next couple hours you could actually feel his personality start to grow back.

And I too started looking forward to breaking free of this hideous corporate hell. No, not even hell, it lacks hell's fire and it lacks hell's edge. This is corporate fucking purgatory. Stale and bland and beige. It drains you of life, but then just spits it all out on the sidewalk…wasted…nobody is even getting fat off your blood.

But still, nobody fired me. I gathered it must be because I'm a contractor, and seeing as how Anthony's boss got fired before he bothered to process my contract extension, it was due to expire at the end of the week anyway. So be it. I'll just hang out for the next four days and then I'll get some summer vacation too.

So the next day I went in to work late, intending to leisurely copy my files, print off my writing samples, and pack up my shit…only to find a note on my chair from the new VP asking me to give him a call so we could "sit down and talk about the future direction of the Web Group." What the fuck? Does this company even still have a "Web Group"? And what do you want to talk to me for? I'm just a lowly contractor without anyone to report to.

So I gave him a call, and he popped by and introduced himself and started in on the requisite spiel about difficult decisions and sorry nobody came by to talk to me yesterday and plans going forward for those that are still here, and I had to interrupt him to ask "um, am I still here, or am I not still here?" Which of course he didn't have a simple answer for. Rather, it went something like "uh, how much do you know about the globalization stuff that Anthony was working on..." and you can only guess where that was going. I wanted to burst out laughing, but I kind of had a headache. And then: "and do you happen to know what stage the Support section redesign is at?"

I kind of grimaced, and said "look, I really don't know much about any of that stuff -- I sat in on a few meetings, but…" and, strangely, he brightened and said "that's fine, because nobody else knows anything!" And I thought, oh my god, would you please just fire me?! Please don't make me do this…

I am a corporate slut.

But it is at least a little liberating to acknowledge this sad truth for what it is.

In my remaining time I've been vying for a copywriting position. It's a senior copywriter they're after, but I'm saying, "hey, I know I don't have direct marketing experience, and I don't have concepting experience, and I don't have 10 years of experience doing anything, but what the hell -- I'm cheap!" If I'm lucky they'll try me out for a month, because it will take at least that long to hire a senior copywriter anyway.

This place makes me feel so dirty.

But c'mon, at least I'm using them too…

  ¶ 8/28/2003 05:10:00 PM