Years ago, I was a scriptwriter at a software company on the West Bank of New Orleans. My job was to craft stories around math-related concepts. For instance, if the section’s topic were “subtraction,” I’d write something about a group of kids at a zoo counting spider monkeys. Real cutting-edge stuff.
Early on, I was told that we had a contract with some California schools, so we had to meet ethnic and cultural diversity standards. This way, kids could see Caucasoid Johnny interacting with other characters like Carlos, Mei-Li, Raghib, Black Vulcan, and Apache Chief.
One February morning, I sat down at my desk and fired up my mini-tower Dell. An indifferent gray dialog box popped up and said “network access unavailable” or something equally pleasant. In the adult world, network failures are snow days. The downside: the Internet wasn’t working, either. In the adult world, Internet failures are snow days with bronchitis.
I loved my job: I worked with fun, creative people, I could set my own hours, work at my own pace. I was 25 and my grad school career was winding down. I was months away from getting my MFA in creative writing. You can tell who the home-stretch liberal arts grad students are by the woeful and trapped look in their eyes: they’re weary of school but deathly terrified of the cubicle-pocked world outside of academia; they know that their next station in life is Adjunct City, an existence almost as promising as regional manager for Heavenly Ham in downtown Jerusalem.
I was running on vapors. As a student teacher of English 101, I had read so many variations of papers on “A&P” and excerpts from Huck Finn that I felt like a boxed wine oenologist. I could detect their subtle variations, but they were all shit. Essays in English 101 aren’t about work finding meaning or universal truth: they’re about thesis statements and perfunctory concluding paragraphs. Had the papers been wine, I could’ve at least have gotten a decent buzz.
My dual-existence as a professional educational scriptwriter and grad student was a unique one: new age yuppie-in-training by day, Great American Novel writer by night. My career wasn’t going to be about staying up late weeknights grading papers, working on Sunday nights to prep for Monday morning classes. I was working for a progressive company, rafting comfortably along a lovely stream of steadily flowing cash; as a liberal arts grad student, such an existence is as rare as a McCain-Palin bumper sticker in a Whole Foods parking lot.
That February morning at the software company, word began to trickle down the hallway: no one had network access, and a sudden, companywide meeting was scheduled for 9am. My inability to see a layoff coming was almost as myopic as when my mother, a lifelong Wham! fan, was shocked when George Michael came out of the closet.
Thirty minutes after our company-wide meeting, only half of the company remained. I was one of the unlucky half. If you’ve ever been part of a layoff, you know the feeling: a Jonestown-esque pall of suckitude with the crushing feeling not all that dissimilar from getting dumped. Except you’re getting dumped by a significant other who pays you to do stuff.
The past year has made me think of my time at that software company often—well, at least that one day, that glorious, fucktastic day. I’ve been lucky enough to get a job and hold it as companies like Lehman, Merrill, GM, Chrysler, Circuit Goddamned City, and tons of others have engaged in a peristaltic meltdown that could best be replicated if Miss Teen USA South Carolina were asked to give an extemporaneous speech on quantum gravity.
I’ve seen friends lose jobs, good people lose jobs. Parents with kids, parents with kids with kids, and even that jackass Paul, who never understood that no, it’s not okay to talk loudly in the hallway to me about who you think is the best Flash artist of all-time, even when I go to the bathroom, because once urine enters the picture, it’s your time to leave, you jackass.
There’s really not much consolation in getting laid-off, really—I mean, outside of the drinking. It’s a perfect storm of misfortune and crap. Like that photo of Ron Goldman you see on the news whenever the whole OJ thing comes up. You know, the one where he’s wearing that massive four-inch headband? Ron Goldman never had aspirations to get knifed to death by a retired NFL All-Pro. He also no aspirations to be remembered as a guy who look likes the backup drummer for Autograph, a fate no one wants. Not even the backup drummer for Autograph.
I really did like the people I worked with…we were young, starry-eyed, hopeful, and generally cheery people. Our dewy-eyed optimism had us chasing rainbows, only to realize those pretty colors were from looking at light refracted through the dotcom bubble. We paid in Flooz, played with eToys, lit out for the Territory in GeoCities.
I remember my time there with bittersweet fondness. I got to work with genuinely cool people in a genuinely cool place. If that company had been my slightly-older-uncle, it most certainly would’ve been the one to buy beer for my high school parties.
The stories from English 101 classes told us watershed moments are about taking a stand, balling up our stockboy smocks and telling our bosses to suck it, because we’re standing up for sun-kissed shoulders and nubbled pink swimsuit tops, whether they notice us or not. The typical thesis statement when I got papers on “A&P” were “Life lessons are hard when you’re fifteen,” a statement whose depth is akin to Toby Keith telling me that 9/11 makes him sad.
But maybe if I’d kept grading, kept reading, I would have gotten to that one paper, one that surely would’ve been written by a non-traditional student taking a new swing at life. Maybe that student would’ve told me that rarely do we get to downsize ourselves. And maybe they would’ve told me that most times, it’s Old Man Lengel who downsizes us.
