The week before last two completely unrelated things collided in my mind. I finished watching the first season of The Wire, an HBO series about drugs and crime and politics in Baltimore. It was created and written by a former crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun, who got fed up with the real story never making it to print and decided to take his talents to a television show, and it’s amazing, I think. Then, on Friday, I met a woman I used to work with for lunch. I have never liked this woman (it’s a long story, one that began with her not saying thank you when I forwarded calls to her that came to me because our extensions were very similar), and I don’t like her now. So why, I asked myself as I walked toward the restaurant, are we having lunch? Well because, it’s part of the game, and there is some dark impulse within me that drives me to continue playing, or at least observing.
First, the woman: She came to the agency where we used to work to manage a group that performed tasks that were so far above her head it was laughable. But, as she told me many times (then and now) she’s a leader and they’re the worker bees. Her words, not mine. She got fired in a pretty gross way, but it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving person. In her current job, she’s been demoted twice. And yet, for an hour and a half she talked of very little except the fact that she knows more than others, that she’s smarter than most and she’s worth more money. She hasn’t spoken to our former manager for years because our former manager, according to her, is unprincipled. At the same time, she thinks another former co-worker of ours (who has also since been fired) is lazy and a pretty crappy presenter. And yet she’s “gotten him in” for interviews all over the town “at all the right places.” In a rare display of direct honesty, I said, “So you think he’s sort of shitty but you’re comfortable recommending him for jobs?” Oh sure, she told me, because he has an excellent resume and he’s good at translating technical information to marketing people. Bullshit on both counts, I explained. I’ve looked at this joker’s resume many times, and the longest he’s held a job (besides the one he was just fired from) is 14 months. And I’ve seen his “translation” work. Kind of like her, he assumes that everyone works for him, so he used to send me the text for his presentations and ask me to “make it pretty” – an insulting thing to say to someone you’re asking to cover up the fact that you cannot write a cohesive and grammatically correct sentence. Well, she went on, he’s interviewing all over and the offers are rolling in. He just turned one down because it “only” paid $80,000 per year. You are kidding me, I said. Oh no, she replied, that’s almost $30,000 less than …
I did not throw up.
Her $100,000-plus friend also hates our former boss, the unprincipled one, I was told. Really? That’s interesting, because he had lunch with our former boss right after he was fired. Our former boss shared with me the exact same details of his firing that were shared over Friday’s lunch, details she could not have known had she not heard them from $100,000-plus. I kept that one to myself, believe it or not. She also hangs out with one of our more odious former co-workers, another do-nothing know-it-all, who, whaddaya know? brags to me every time we talk, as if it’s something to be proud of, about how he hangs out regularly with the guy who was friends with the woman I had lunch with but, as it turns out, was behind her very unceremonious firing. Not surprisingly, they haven’t spoken since. But Do-Nothing plays them both and lo and behold is on the receiving end of my lunchmate’s recommendations as well. I shut up about that one as well.
And our former boss is the one who is unprincipled? That’s always struck me as funny for some reason. She too was fired from the company where we used to work, and she is not without her faults (nor am I). But in the same way that people hate the police but expect them to be on the scene instantly when something happens, it’s amusing to me how twisted and treacherous all the back roads leading to our former boss’s lunch calendar are the moment someone is in need, even if that someone is Do-Nothing or $100,000-plus.
The lunch was both good and bad. Bad because I felt slightly nauseated when I was walking back to my house. Bad, because I thought, this is the sort of shit that makes earning a living so tasteless. Bad because I say yes to socializing with someone I do not like. Bad because every exchange with her leaves me confused about one central issue: does she want me to join her circle of smarmy duplicity or is she trying to taunt me by showing me the menu at a party to which I’ll never be invited? Are her snide little comments about “good little workers” and “when you’re at my level” (that’s one of her favorites) made as revenge for being friends with our former boss rather than her? Or is she so high on her own mythology that she thinks it’s true? That’s a common problem with a lot of these characters: they believe their own lies.
I got my answer from The Wire. The only difference in the instinct behind the behavior on that show and that of the corporate people I know is that at the office or the golf courses or the happy hours there are not usually drugs and guns. In both venues, to win, you destroy others, in the sneakiest way you can manage, because if you don’t you’ll be destroyed and lose. And apparently I am not the only one who compares my work world to the one portrayed on The Wire. In one of the episodes a fight with clubs and all breaks out in the courtyard when an unauthorized dealer sets up shop in the courtyard. Two of the cops are sitting in their squad car, watching, pondering why the gangs are so hard to shut down. That’s simple: their motivations are free of ambiguity and therefore way more powerful. As one of the cops says, “When they fuck up, they get beat. When we fuck up, we get a pension.”
