I’m still learning how to be retired. It seems to be a process. You have to learn to not wake up, not “never wake-up,” that would be a mistake. But don’t want to wake up when the alarm clock used to beep, or buzz, or play music. You need to be able to sleep past that awful second. If you’re a normal person, like me, you will have a few nightmares about the raucous, broken, jarring sound that used to start the day.
In all fairness, I was never a very good employee. And I bounced around, a lot. It almost got to the point of an intervention, people wanted to help me find fulfillment, learn to be happy. I just liked getting new jobs, the excitement of starting over. Nobody understood. I remember people giving me advice.
“Work for a big company, there’s more opportunity, better benefits. Cream rises to the top, if you want to get ahead. It’s easier to fit in, kind of a moblike mentality, a herdlike solidarity. It’s a lot easier to hide, not be noticed, if that’s your thing, too.”
One friend, Ed, an older guy with a pale, almost invisible crew-cut and black plastic glass frames, and I couldn’t imagine him fitting in anywhere. He had a job as a shop steward for an electrical utility. And, when I saw him at a local diner, during his lunch break, everybody on his crew, looked to be a mimeographed copy of Ed.
“No, try to find a job with a small, privately owned company, where you can work for the owners. It creates stability, and provides a warm, welcoming, family atmosphere. None of that dog-eat-dog of the corporate world. Just the soft embrace of a closeknit group of people pulling together for the common good.” Jacob, another confidant, told me he worked for a small company that fixed roads, shoveled snow and did lawn maintenance. He knew everybody he worked with, by name, they were close-knit to the point of leaving a heavy, hanging animus, making everybody hostile and close to exchanging blows.
I heard various arguments over time, and they all made sense, and they all seemed short of any real substance. I just took whatever job I could get and fit in as best as I could.
There are rules and regulations no matter how big, or small, the company. It’s only a matter of scale. You have to learn how to take advantage of the situation.
I got a job in a 600,000 square foot warehouse. There were three rail-lines feeding into the center of the building. Around the outside of the building were dozens, maybe hundreds of overhead doors, for semi-trucks. A side street led to a private road that ran around the whole building. The tenant was a third-party warehouse company and the only customer in the facility was a breakfast cereal giant. Three shifts of warehousemen, 9 fulltime office people all devoted to the distribution of breakfast cereal. Further, it was one piece in a huge, international web of transportation facilities, including steam ships and railroad cars.
It was a complicated courtship. I filled out a long application, complete with math problems. Nothing too complicated, there were a few reproductions of boxes stacked on a pallet and you had to calculate how many it held, or how many were missing, basic things, but I used paper they left scattered around the long, narrow room. You can’t be too careful. A couple of weeks later, they called me in for an interview, and a week or so after that they called and asked me to go to a clinic, they had a contract with and take a drug test. I passed, and in two days they called and offered me a job. I would work in the scheduling office. I took calls and managed the outbound truckloads. I hadn’t ever done anything like that, so it sounded fun.
I had to fill out several forms, payroll deductions, retirement plan, all the detritus of modern employment. They gave me a three-ring binder, it was almost three inches thick. It was the employee handbook, and it had been written in some language that was similar to English, but had a lot more emphasis on defining situations. It came with a sheet of paper, that I had to sign, indicating that I had read the handbook. I signed it, but only read the first couple of pages, and didn’t really understand them.
During my first two weeks there were so many people moving in and out of the office making a hellish racket, and the phone seemed to ring without stopping. In my nervous, agitated state I turned to the demon caffeine, I drank coffee all day. Jittery, jumpy, constantly looking over my shoulder, I would walk around the building on my lunch break, just to escape the madness.
After a short adjustment and substituting a couple of bottles of water for some of the coffee in my daily routine, I settled into a comfortable neurosis. Being an office worker in a commercial warehouse full of forklift drivers put me on the outside looking in, but I had a reason for a change. I still took my lunchtime walks; it was the only place I could smoke.
One day I walked around the building, and there was a car, a small orange Nissan parked on the shoulder of the road. The driver was just sitting there, staring straight ahead. He looked to be lost in thought, monitoring some internal function, oblivious to the world. I had to walk out in the road slightly but other than that he wasn’t bothering me, so I returned the favor.
When I got back inside one of the warehouse people was telling the inventory control people about the little orange Nissan on the curve by the railroad tracks.
“Yeah, I saw it. He’s just sitting there.” I told them
“Did you ask him what he wanted?” Randall, the IOC (Inventory Operations Control) person asked me. He was a curious little man who constantly tried to ingratiate himself on everyone.
“No, I’m just an office guy. Not security.” I said.
He walked over to a file cabinet and got the employee handbook. He opened it to a page, about halfway through, and laid it down between us. His finger pointed to a line that said something to the effect that everybody was responsible for security.
“Hey, look at that. I’ll be danged, who knew?” I was impressed he could find it so quickly.
“Didn’t you read the manual?” He asked, an arched eyebrow and a slightly tilted head lent his appearance a serial effect, practiced and ready for deployment at a moment’s notice.
“No, I didn’t.” It never occurred to me to say I had. I couldn’t believe anybody had. It was huge and barely legible. Employees were filing in for their lunch break and the room was filling, and a small buzz was forming, moving from side to side.
“Didn’t they ask you to sign a form saying you had read and understood the manual?” Randall asked, taking a step forward, he was shorter than me, with his head tilted to the side, it made it hard to look into his eyes.
“Sure, they asked me to sign it, and I did. But I didn’t read it. That thing is huge, and almost impossible to understand.” Murmurs ran across the room, which had become full enough to be seem threatening. Everybody was looking at me, shocked that I would admit to signing the form without reading the manual.
“Everybody here read this awful thing?” I asked, sure there would be at least half of them who confessed they too, did not suffer through that awful thing.
People made small motions with their hands, warding off the evil that comes with being to slovenly to read the monstrous book, and not smart enough to admit the sloth. People backed away from me, as if they were afraid to turn away. I was all alone, in a crowd, that day. Persona non grata, an atheist at vespers. People would walk wide across the room to avoid me.
When I arrived the next morning, the general manager and the office manager were waiting for me and asked me to follow them into a small, private meeting room.
“Here you go, please sign your name here.” It was the form indicating a person had read the employee handbook.
I signed it, they thanked me, shook my hand and patted me on the back. I saw them add my form to a file cabinet, and time moved almost 18 hours backward, to a time when everybody thought I had read and understood the employee handbook.
There’s a lesson in there, somewhere, but I haven’t figured it out yet.
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Previously Published on Life, Explained
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