Bad day at the office


Bad day at the office 6

Bad day at the office 6

 

“Why should I let the toad work

Squat on my life?”

 

The opening couplet from Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Toads’ never fails to bring a smile of recognition to my face, as I suspect it does to millions of other readers stuck in jobs they hate, feeling their lives ebbing away like sand in an hour-glass. I was thinking about it today as I stared out the window in a meeting at Cash Cowboy Towers, trying to tune out the assertive ‘presentation’ voice of my boss Norman Shylock, who heads up our Online Marketing Bullshit Division. Shylock was taking us through his Q4 plans to advertise our new General Insurance offer in the digital space. Online, to you and me. Banner ads. Cheap and tacky ones. Nothing fancy like rich media, god forbid, with its hefty agency price tag. Mostly just four or five static frames apiece with OTT branding and a logo as big as the moon. The campaign, if that’s not stretching it, which had begun life as a suite of tightly-written humorous banners, skyscrapers and MPUs based around the theme of ‘shit happens’, had been metamorphosed into corporate wallpaper by Shylock and his boss Dick Holder, our Chief Marketing Officer. As usual Dick had personally ‘re-crafted’ the copy (i.e. dipped it in a cesspit of liquefied human turds), building in just about every tired insurance cliché and pun from the hackneyed handbook of crap copywriting. The ads blowed so hard that all my guys in the Studio now disowned ever having anything to do with them.

That’s how it goes at UK Cash Cowboys. Good creatives create great creative then corporate assholes like Dick suck all the life out of it, until it’s DOA. It pays the mortgage but slowly poisons the soul of any self-respecting copywriter. Most of our good ones walk out after six months. Zola, the latest to go, only lasted three. I came back to my desk after lunch last week and found a post-it note stuck to my screen saying “I resign, bye!” That was her resignation letter, in fluorescent pink, three inches square. Kinda classy exit, I thought. Fucked up Dick’s and Shylock’s day no end, which made it doubly awesome as far as I was concerned. Go Zola.

As Shylock fired up his deck on the wall monitor, taking the meeting through every frame of every ad, I opened my notebook and began writing a poem. I often do this in office meetings at UKCC. It helps block out the asphyxiating sense of claustrophobia I feel as life ticks by in a room of eager-to-impress corporate toadies trotting out mindless business prattle about the square root of jack shit. In fact I think some of my best poetry has begun its life in these daily planning and production meetings. The company thinks it owns my ass because it pushes me around from 9 to 5, but these secret little victories are my way of giving it the finger behind its back. Big time. Up yours Cleopatra LeGrande, and your tawdry little sweat shop of rip-off financial products that go by the name of UK Cash Cowboys. Eat my shorts.

The trick to writing fiction on the company’s time is to glance up every couple of minutes to make it look as if you’re taking notes. Ask the occasional question so they think you’re listening to the alien business-jarg gushing from their oh so earnest mouths. Pretty soon I had the bare bones of a five-verse lament on the theme of how work sucks. When I was done I scribbled the title across the top, ‘Bad day at the office 6’. In case you’re wondering, it shares the same title with 5 other poems. It’s a real fun place to work, here at the Cowboys. Here it is, anyway. It’s still pretty rough, but I think there’s something I could work on:

 

Bad day at the office 6

 

Is this it? Is this all there is?

All life has to offer?

9 to 5, Monday to Friday

From sixteen to sixty-five?

 

Ordered around by a bunch of jerks

Who can’t get an erection

Unless they’re squashing someone’s face

Under their corporate jackboot?

 

Being stuck in the wrong job, is like

Being stuck in the wrong relationship

A waste of a life

And you only get the one of those

 

God really screwed up when he made this species

Every other creature in nature is free

We’re the only ones

Who have voluntarily enslaved ourselves

 

Human beings are supposed to be

Earth’s most advanced life-form

Come and work at UK Cash Cowboys for a few days

And tell me you believe that

 

Okay, it needs work, and it’s a bit negative I’ll confess. Yes I know I’m supposed to offer an uplifting alternative like telling your boss where to shove his job and walking out and becoming a free spirit, but I wanted to keep it real. Reality for most people means they can’t afford to chuck their livelihoods because capitalism has them by the balls.

This thought brought to mind another famous poem of Philip Larkin’s, called ‘This Be The Verse’. It’s the one everybody knows. The one which opens with the immortal line, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad”. The poem laments how each generation is doomed to repeat the mistakes of their forebears. The final verse, ostensibly a rejection of parenthood – perhaps of life itself – can also be read as a rejection of the rat race and the sense of emasculation that comes from having to conform to societal norms like working the 9 to 5, getting a mortgage, raising a family etc. It’s the trade-off we all make to fit in, the tab society makes us pay to afford the lifestyles we crave, even though it enslaves us, robbing us of the time to enjoy them.

 

“Man hands on misery to man

It deepens like a coastal shelf

Get out as early as you can

And don’t have any kids yourself”

 

I suspect Larkin would never have written that last line about ‘kids’ if he’d had any. I used to think like that until my own son came along. The experience was like a light being switched on in my life, and I discovered a new level of love I never even knew existed. Nothing could even come close to the happiness my son has brought into my life. I suspect most parents feel the same. You’d die for your kids, you really would. They add to your life, not take away from it. Your children become the most important thing in your world, the reason you keep going when times get tough. Which I guess is Larkin’s point, because kids also bring responsibilities. You need a house they can call home, there are bills to pay, mouths to feed. Hence we all end up breaking rocks for psychotic corporate despots like Cleopatra LeGrande, at chain-gangs like UK Cash Cowboys. To get to heaven you have to go through hell.

Anyhow, I’d say that pretty much sums up where I’m at in the job satisfaction stakes right now. Screwed. To get the whole lowdown on how awful it is to work at a slave-labour joint like the Cowboys you’d need to read a few of the stories and poems in my collected fiction, Sex on the Brain. As a taster, here’s the opening page or two from ‘The Blonde Bombshell’, a short story about meeting Marilyn Monroe which begins with a few reflections about life at the Cowboys. Hope you enjoy it. If you do you can catch the whole story and many more like it in Sex on the Brain, at Amazon or Smashwords.

 

Excerpt from ‘The Blonde Bombshell’ by Frank Bukowski

“Dick’s the name. Dick Draper. Campaign Manager, UK Cash Cowboys. When I tell people I work in advertising their reaction is always the same. That must be fun. Sure, I say, if it wasn’t for all the corporate fuckwits with egos the size of their salaries who think they’re advertising geniuses. Take my boss Dick Holder, the Chief Marketing Officer. Yeah, another Dick. UK Cash Cowboys is full of dicks. Corporate dicks. Dick Holder is the Chief Dick. Oh sorry, Chief Marketing Dick. I use the term advisedly. He personally wrote one of our company straplines: Saddled with debt? Call UK Cash Cowboys. Genius. Really he’s an accountant who sucked the CEO’s dick until she gave him the Marketing function. That’s right, Cleopatra LeGrande, our CEO. She’s a woman, and she has a dick. Go figure. Two dicks. Her own dick, and Dick Holder. Two-Dicks LeGrande. She’s got more dicks than a man.

Dick Holder’s critique of an ad usually goes something like this.

1. How big’s the logo? The logo is our penis. Small ones suck.

2. Are our telephone number and URL large enough to be read by the legally blind, from outer space?

3. Are we making any outrageously extravagant product claims? If not, why not?

Getting a handle on Dick yet? The guy’s a walking ego, just like LeGrande. He’s a corporate cliché in a suit, she’s a cyborg. Dick wouldn’t know a decent ad if it climbed inside his pin-stripe pants and blew a tune on his custard cannon. His average day is like one big Morris dance of spreadsheets, decks, matrixes, committee meetings, compliance meetings, crisis meets, fire-storming, conf calls, shrink tanks, drainstorms, blame-storms, table-bang sessions, envelope-pushes, grey-sky meetings, meetings to discuss the agendas of future meetings, meetings to review the minutes of previous meetings. That’s why the UK economy is so fucked. Too many dicks. Nothing ever gets done. They’re too busy having meetings. Nobody can make a decision any more. Nobody dare. Send an email instead. Sit on the fence. Get a second opinion. Run it by a think tank. Put it out to research. Get the buy-in of key stakeholders. What does the CEO think? Set up a meeting. Better still, a committee!

Me and my marketing buddy Frank Bukowski often play bullshit bingo in these jolly gatherings, see who can check off the most ‘Holderisms’. A Holderism is complete and utter corporate bollocks. Dick Holder talks it all the time. Here’s my list from yesterday’s grey-sky. Rain-check… understand the deliverables… prioritise categories… I’m in a place where… co-ordinate our team-driven mindshare… test the paradigm shift… is it backwards-compatible… let’s put it into research… due diligence… accountability is paramount… the need to monetize… can we operationalize it… ducks in a row… the bottom line…

Yeah, advertising is fun all right. So funny I want to kill myself.

It’s easy to lose a sense of life’s purpose when you work for people like Dick and Two-Dicks LeGrande, at a dump like UK Cash Cowboys. When all you seem to do is drag your ass out of bed, go to work, take it up the chocolate starfish all day then limp home to sleep. Week in, week out, year after year. Especially in the north where winter rations the daylight to a few measly hours. The nine to five. And you do it every day until you retire. Then you die. Simples. No wonder old people go insane.

Nietzsche had this theory that madness is rare in individuals, but in groups, in cities, nations and political systems, it is the rule. He should come and work at UK Cash Cowboys for a week. My own personal sanity regime involves swimming. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday lunchtime I escape down the local pool. It’s not much, but it stops me taking out a shotgun licence. I put in twenty, sometimes thirty lengths, working my arms, legs, lungs, every muscle I got. If you get the breathing right you slip into this rhythm. It’s like, an almost meditative experience. Ying yang. Bing bong. Elemental shit. As far away from my desk as the moon. I sometimes think swimming pools would be almost spiritual places if it wasn’t for the women. It only takes two or three good looking ones in there and I go back to work more fucked up than I left.

I took up the cycling last spring. My friend Peggy gave me a mountain bike he won in a competition. He got a phone call from outer space. They said he’d won a prize. It might be a Caribbean cruise. A mountain bike. Or a nickel plated corkscrew. All he had to do was call the number and stay on the line pushing buttons and answering questions for fifteen years and they’d tell him which prize. It was too bad for Peggy. He got the mountain bike. Dick, he says, take the frickin thing, what am I gonna do with a mountain bike, I’ve only got one leg.

It’s not hard to get hooked on cycling. All that fresh air and exercise. Okay, it’s not swimming, but it whacks pounding the treadmill in a sweaty gym surrounded by all those lycra-clad thighs and boobs. Not to mention all the ripped guys with their Buzz Lightyear chins and Popeye the Sailor vests, making their moves in front of the mirrors. Cracking their pub minder necks. Bulging with rivers of steroids through inch-high veins, oiled and glistening like something from a porno film. Cycling don’t got none of that shit. It’s just you and the road. The sun on your face. The rain reminding you you’re alive. A crow wending across the horizon. A fox emerging from a wood at dusk. Ointment for the soul, my friend. Whoever said the city was an asphalt jungle sure got that right. My last girlfriend had this theory over my fucked upness. She put my big sex drive down to this connection I have with the animals. She’s like, when you fuck me, it’s like you turn into this dog. And I’m like, and? She looked it up in a book, said it was some weird shit called atavism. This buzz you get from being around nature, like some witchdoctor shaman deal. Apparently it goes back to our ancient ancestors. Cave time. When they didn’t got no cars or churches or microwave ovens. No income tax returns to fill in. No printer cartridges to change. No barbed wire. No anthrax or Zyclon B. All they did was eat and drink and have sex pretty much non-stop. I feel a strong connection coming through from that world. It’s like, how did we fuck that one up?

So, I was out on my early morning cycle ride. I was running late. I’d overslept and was peddling like a maniac through the village of Docking. I had fifty minutes to get back home, shower and drive in to work. Suddenly there she was, standing in the gravel driveway of this house, talking to a neighbour over the fence. You couldn’t miss her. She was like a traffic light. Her breasts lifted her tee shirt six inches from her body. The kind of breasts that stopped traffic. She had on these riding britches that looked so tight they had to be sewn on. When she turned in my direction I was like, no fucking way.

You know that saying that goes, ‘she looked just like so and so’? Well this lady didn’t look like nobody. She wasn’t even anyone’s identical twin sister. She WAS Marilyn Monroe. Oh hi, she said, in that trademark babydoll voice as I rode past, giving me the famous Hollywood smile.

If you’d like to read the rest of ‘The Blonde Bombshell’, or any of the other stories or poems from Sex on the Brain, you can pick up a copy for hardly more than the price of a coffee at Amazon or Smashwords.

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Bad day at the office 5

Bad day at the office 5 - picture of a rook

My rook, the opposite of Churchill’s Black Dog

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here’s a poem I wrote a few weeks back, in March, about a low-point I reached at work. Hopefully it’s self-explanatory.

 

The Bully
 

The doctor signed me off sick last month
With work-related stress
I was being bullied by my boss
I’d had some kind of breakdown
 

Don’t get me wrong
Just me and him in the car park
One on one
I’d have liked nothing better
Than to take him down a peg or two
Exposing the little Hitler
For the puffed-up corporate lickspittle he was
But that’s the whole point
Bullies never pick on those
They know can fight back
He knew I needed to keep the job
I had bills to pay
Food to put on the table
Just like everyone else
I couldn’t do a damn thing
 

It was death by a thousand emails
By a million shitty little tasks
Every day, on top of my day job
In his quest to humiliate me
And break me, piece by piece
To prove to his own bosses
What a hard driving son of a bitch he was
Using the ladder of my broken mind
To progress his career up the company
 

Being bullied is like catching a horrible disease
It takes over your life
From the moment you wake
Till you fall asleep at night
There’s no safe haven where he can’t find you
Even when he’s not there
He’s bullying you in your thoughts
That’s when things start to get really black
When there’s nothing else
Except the bully
 

For half a year I sucked it up
Refusing to let the jerk beat me
Until last month, when something snapped
A thousand miles down, at the very core of my being
I was driving in to work
When I pulled over to the side of the road
And burst into tears
I had come to the end of the line
 

I went to my doctor the following day
My story tumbled out like spilled ink
God bless that man, he sent me home
He listened, and believed what I had to say
I was no longer alone
It felt like a huge weight lifting from my shoulders
 

For three days I sat zombie-like, staring at the walls
Didn’t change my clothes, bathe, or eat
Til the tension began to slowly unwind
From the tightly coiled spring of my body
 

That was a month ago
Lately I’ve started going for long walks
Picking up pieces of my soul along the way
Sticking them together
With the band-aids of daffodils
The cries of rooks milling
Round their sky villages
It’s March
Spring is shooting out the earth like a rocket
Everywhere waking up what had seemed dead
 

Today, walking down a sunken lane
I came across a rook in the road
With a broken wing
As I approached, it hopped to the left
And scrabbled up the bank
Crippled as it was
Its life instinct clinging on
Maybe the wing would mend
Or maybe it would starve, or become some fox’s supper
But while there was still a chance
It hung on
 

I emailed an official complaint
To our HR department
I’ve decided to stand up and fight
And expose this bully for the slimeball he is
Even if it costs me my job
He’s in with senior management, you see
They always are
That’s how come they think they’re invulnerable
Well, this one’s got a wake-up call coming
And if I ever meet him down some dark alley
On some distant day in the future
Or in hell, on my turf
He’s gonna wish he’d never heard the name
Frank Bukowski

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Bad day at the office 4 1

Hitler featured image

My boss at UK Cash Cowboys

My boss Norman Shylock is making my life hell. No newsflash there. The ass-wipe casts a shadow over my life like some ogre in a Goya etching. It’s not helped by his long downcast face, dead-fish eyes and stick-out ears. Shrek on steroids, uglier on the inside than out. Shylock’s face is the last thing I think about when I go to bed at night. He haunts all my dreams. I often wake from them soaked in sweat in the middle of the night, clutching a bloody knife or a smoking shotgun. He’s the first thing I think about when I wake in the morning, tossing and turning at some ungodly hour. The caricature I’m describing here fits the classic definition of a toxic workplace bully. The kind of monster whose CV is a case study in ruining people’s lives. Did I tell you about his nauseating new catch-phrase, ‘good buddy’, with which he punctuates every sentence? If he says it once more I swear I’m going to punch it right back down his flabby slack-jawed, spittle-flecked mouth.

How bad is it? It’s this bad. Every morning when I walk into the office I glance over in the direction of his desk to see if his deformed head is poking up from behind his monitor. If I don’t see it, for that oh-so-precious fleeting moment in my day, my heart skips a little beat at the prospect of a rare happy seven and a half hours in the office. I utter a silent prayer that Shylock has been called to our London headquarters, or up to our northern regional office. Sadly, as I near his chair I notice his coat draped over the back, his loathsome flaccid briefcase slumped against the wall, and my heart plumbs back to the darkest depths of a Marianas Trench. It’s going to be another shit day. The ordeal begins immediately when I switch on my computer and log on to the company email, dreading the monster’s name appearing in my inbox. My line manager. Norman Shylock. If I don’t see it bolded anywhere I’m like, yesss! giving a little fist-pump inside. I wish. Most days begin with six or seven emails from the oberleutnantfuhrer. They lie in wait like crocs in the shallows of a placid lake, ready to leap up and devour me. Every one contains instructions to perform some shitty pointless task, some wanky process to complete, a control to pass, a form to fill out, in triplicate. All PDQ, with drop-dead urgent deadlines, or my ass is on the line. He words them in sly ways that contain little traps for me to stumble into, obstacles to trip me up, hoops to jump through. Such is my life at UK Cash Cowboys, the friendly smiling face of UK finance. One big fucking happy family to the world.

I kind of knew it was coming, since the day I appealed the wanky end-of-year performance rating he gave me last December. He’d basically made up a bunch of bullshit about my ‘attitude’ at work. The lying shit. And when I put in the appeal to HR in the New Year, Shylock went ape, like the big corporate bullying twat he is. He fired off a snotty broadside to the HR Appeal Manager – two full sides of A4 on which he’d vomited a dung-pile of vitriolic abuse that misrepresented everything I’d ever done or said over the past year, twisted every conversation we’d ever had to portray me in the worst possible light. The wanker used every trick in the Shit Manager’s Handbook to try and blacken my name, so he wouldn’t look a jerk in front of his boss if my appeal succeeded.

How it goes at UK Cash Cowboys is like this. You turn up, do your job, and are grateful for all the shit they make you eat throughout the year. They’re into managing their overheads down as a company. Year on year. My salary is an overhead. The way they keep that down is by turning my performance on its head and claiming I’m crap at my job. Which I’m not. That’s why they employ shits like Shylock. Fixers. Corporate bruisers whose only purpose in life is to beat up staff so often and make their lives so shit, that when the company cuts their pay it almost feels like good news.

The end of year performance appraisals at UK Cash Cowboys are when jerks like Shylock really come into their own. It’s when he really rolls up his sleeves, cracks his knuckles and goes to work. His sole purpose in life, from what I can gather, is to make everyone in my team at the Cowboys feel a complete waste of oxygen as a human being. So worthless we feel grateful for receiving no bonus or pay review for the sixth year in a row. That’s how it works, and always has. Nobody EVER, but ever steps out of line, or speaks up. They daren’t, for fear their name will go straight in the book as a trouble-maker. They’ll get marked down for ‘corrective treatment’, a ‘personal development plan’, some ‘one on one coaching’. Out will come the thumb screws, the slow steady water torture of aggressive micro-management, the sneaky man-traps they’ll set every day, the work they’ll pile on, teeing you up for failure, so they can strap you to a desk and butt-fuck you even harder at the end of the following year. And most of all, nobody EVER appeals their lousy appraisal rating, on pain of death. An appeal goes up to HR, it goes up to senior management, and causes a whole shit-heap of aggravation and administrative pain that they aren’t used to. Don’t even go there.

Look, don’t get me wrong, mostly I suck up all this corporate bullshit and just get on with my job, anything for a quiet life. I’m no trouble maker, even though most days work feels like I’m climbing out a trench and advancing into no-man’s land. It comes with the territory, right? Work is a perpetual war with an army of bullying middle managers whose only purpose is to keep the company’s foot on your neck, work you to the bone, suppress your pay and make sure you don’t step out of line. And when you’re all used up, to sack you. Workplace bullies. Little men who amount to nothing outside, who get put in positions of power and think the way to prove they’re somebody is to fuck everybody over underneath them, proving us inefficient and lazy and a failure, even if we aren’t. But hey, life sucks, get over it, most people say. So mostly you just hawl it up and take home your pay. Like everyone else I have a mortgage to pay, steam to put on the table, gas in the tank. Life may not be perfect but I’m not being nailed to a cross. Well, not literally. I’m sure Shylock’s working on it.

But this year, it was different. Shylock stepped over a line. He tried to put a big black mark on my largely glowing 15-year performance track record at UK Cash Cowboys. ‘THIS GUY IS A LIGHTWEIGHT AND A TROUBLEMAKER WHO IS CRAP AT HIS JOB’, is what he’d written at the end of my appraisal, in as many words. He also gave me the lowest rating he possibly could. Basically, he was fucking with me. He was saying, I’m in charge here good buddy, and don’t you fucking forget it.

Okay, flap-ears, I thought. Bring it fucking on. I didn’t pick this argument but if you’re going to make it personal, you’re fucking with the wrong guy. As it happens I grew up in a tough working class town where if somebody hits you, you hit them back, and ask questions later. Shylock was humping the wrong dude. Like a lot of corporate schmucks Norman’s problem is, all he’s ever known or been is a manager. Outside of work he doesn’t know shit, he’s invisible. A nobody with no special talents or gifts and a big fat zero of a personality. But in the workplace he thinks he’s Robert Mugabe. He thinks he’s Saddam Hussein. The boss who gets to dick people around just because he can. He also thinks, deluded fuck that he is, that pain is just a one way process. Pain comes down from above, and never goes up the other way. So he thinks. Well, fuck that, good buddy.

My first week back after Christmas, I worked over until 2am every night, going through a year’s worth of emails to find evidence that disproved all the bullshit allegations he’d made against me in my appraisal. Five thousand emails. That’s a lot. Most nights I staggered from the office around 2am, drove home half asleep and got to bed around three, to be up again for work at seven. You see, people like me, I guess, we can be quite passive on the surface, but push us too far and we’re like a dog with a bone. My Appeal meeting was set for the Friday at the end of that week. At the meeting I slam-dunked a two-inch thick dossier on the desk in front of the Appeals Manager, systematically destroying, line by line, all the lies Norman Shylock had made up about me, proving I’d completed all the tasks he said I hadn’t, and I hadn’t done the bad shit he said I had.

Everybody knows at UK Cash Cowboys that appeals aren’t supposed to happen. And they never succeed. Normally one manager gets on the line to another, they have a cosy chat with the Appeals Manager, whose own boss lets him know in no uncertain terms that he should ‘make the problem go away’. Well, fuck normal. I was going to send some pain back the other way. My demolition of every shred of Shylock’s bullshit gave the Appeals Manager nowhere else to go. He had no alternative but to find in my favour, unless the company wanted to find itself in an employee tribunal or court of law. Which, of course, would result in a whole heap of negative shit smeared all over their precious shiny brand in public. Even stupid assholes like Shylock and his boss Dick Holder, our so-called ‘Chief Marketing Bullshit Officer’, knew that wasn’t going to be much help in growing the business. So Shylock was made to suck it up and look a dick in front of Dick. What a pair of dicks. Dick had set the dick an objective to fuck me over, and he’d fucked up. The dick.

The Monday after my Appeal meeting, Shylock called me into his office. “Okay Bukowski,” he said, like he was sorry. “Twenty fourteen is going to be our busiest year ever. Dick Holder says we need to draw a line under this and move on, good buddy. He’s worried about the shitload of work we have to deliver this year. For the sake of the whole team, we need to work together on this. Deal?” He stretched a hand across the table.  “Fine,” I said, shaking his mitt. It felt cold and clammy, like grasping the week-old corpse of a decomposing salmon. Shylock nodded gravely, like one of those dogs in the back of a car, his dead eyes sending rays of hatred over the desk. And I knew there and then, that the deal was this. Norman Shylock wasn’t going to draw a line under anything. He was going to make it his sole mission in 2014, numero uno, right at the top of his personal objectives, to personally destroy me. He was going to make my daily working life as close to living hell as he could. Welcome to UK Cash Cowboys, good buddy.

photo credit: x-ray delta one via photopin cc

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