Greed and the end of the middle class
Class Privilege July 17th, 2008The new cable channel PlanetGreen keeps reminding me I’m not a person. It goes like this: an expert on one of their shows says, “If everyone in America would do this, we’d save eleventy billion tons of resources/pollution” and then they do something that only one who owns her dwelling is empowered to do. Those who can’t do it – renters, most of whom would prefer to be owners but can’t afford it – are not part of “everyone.” We are “no one.” We aren’t people.
This is not hyperbole. I live in a country that can’t stop slapping itself on the back for a document that declared “all men are created equal” but quickly followed that up with documents explaining that when they said “men”, what they really had in mind was “white male property owners over 21.” We already know people of color didn’t count (well… ugh) and women didn’t count. Now I’m taking a fresh look at my country, this supposed revolutionary style of governing in which (now that we’ve ironed out that pesky 1700s thinking) everyone is free and equal, and realizing that people who don’t own anything are simply not valuable.
Even though we pay the mortgages of our landlords.
Even though we pay more in taxes than most homeowners.
Even though we work and struggle through school and support ourselves, just like those of you who can afford to own a home.
I think we should redefine “middle class” as not just an income level, but also as having sufficient income to own a modest home within 45 minutes of where you work (if you live further from work or rent by choice, that’s okay – you just have to be able to buy a home within 45 minutes of your job). If you don’t meet that criteria, you would be considered working class rather than middle class.
Overnight, the “working class” of the US would expand tremendously and the middle class would shrink.
It’s not that I want to deny people the right to feel good about themselves over a label – I’m not ashamed by whatever class someone wants to put me in. I just think as long as life forces us to look at things from a classist perspective, we should drop in on reality for a howdy-doo and admit the middle class has become insanely hard to break into in this country. It used to be easy – for white men and their families, at least - to be middle class and wanting to get rich; now, if you’re not born into the middle class or higher, it’s damned hard for an honest person to “break into” the middle class.
And the vast majority of middle classers are only there because of two incomes, where it used to take only one. When I was a kid in the 80s, middle class white wives didn’t need jobs to feed the kids or even put the kids into college. That’s why there were debates about whether it was “selfish” for them to get jobs for personal fulfillment instead of tending the kids for personal fulfillment. It wasn’t always about money.
Of course, even then we were all sliding collectively and individually into unsustainable debt.
In fact, we should return to the 1950s picture of “middle class” so we’re comparing apples to apples:
- Owned a home and a car…
- On what one breadwinner brought home…
- To take care of at least four people and a pet…
- And vacation at least once a year…
- With no debt aside from a modest mortgage and maybe car payments.
How many of you fall out of the middle class when we go back to that definition of it?
When they talk about the possibility that the 60 year economic boom the US has enjoyed since WWII is over, consider that it’s been disintegrating for a long time, and only debt has enabled us to keep the delusion that it was still here.
Sadly, there’s no reason it has to be this way. There were tons of ways we could have prevented all this, but we preferred to keep our heads in the sand and imagine everything was fine.
This is why it’s important – both as a country and as an individual – to live sustainably. I’m not talking about going green – putting in fluorescents instead of incandescents. I’m saying it doesn’t take a degree in economics to realize that when lots of cities in your country have reached the point where very few people can afford to live less than 45 minutes from their job – when the salaries are that out of whack with the nearby housing market – something is off-kilter. When salaries stay flat for 30 years, during which the cost of housing skyrockets, something’s wrong. When college degrees become a requirement instead of an advantage during a time when the cost for college is rapidly increasing ten-fold, you’ve missed something somewhere.
Grow up, America. Dump your illusions and realize: your system can be gamed like any other. That is every government’s vulnerability. And those of you who let this go unchecked for decades because you didn’t care about how hard your kids or grandkids will work to clean up the mess as long as you got yours, you don’t deserve a rescue from anybody. Whether you’re a business that’s gone belly-up and you’re whining to Congress to save you or an aging Baby Boomer who proudly engaged in “spending my kids’ inheritance” who now needs your already-struggling kids to pay for your nursing home: starve.
You could’ve been just a little less greedy and still had tons of wealth and freedom and stuff. But the problem is, it wasn’t the wealth and freedom and stuff you wanted, was it? You wanted to waste the world, you wanted to explore greed as its own reward, you wanted to satisfy your ego’s insatiable urge not only to have everything it wants but to deprive people of others so what you have looks even more amazing. Excess wasn’t the means to the end – it wasn’t the journey: it was the destination for you.
For that, yeah – you should starve. And good riddance.
July 17th, 2008 at 8:18 pm
You know, when I was a small child, my mother supported us on about $7500 a year. In the early 80s. For special occasions we might eat at Taco Bell or have a soda. When she remarried, my family thought of itself as poor, and we lived like you describe – only with 15 year old cars and nary a vacation in sight. And you know what? There was no money for college. I bought my own first car for $800 when I was 18 with money I saved myself, and to this day I live on my own money because my dad is still convinced he’s poor and my mother actually is.
I hear all the time about how rich we are, and I guess I am thankful that I’m not forced by circumstances to marry young and wear myself out with children and working in the fields, or throw myself on a dead husband’s pyre or watch my children starve to death.
But I sit here god-awful thankful for a treasure of a job that pays enough for me to just barely think I might be able to keep my head above water as long as I don’t miss any work and my roommate doesn’t decide to marry her boyfriend (and move out, financially speaking). I make more than she does even though she has a professional degree, and he owns a home but worries about money all the time because even though he owns a business he could lose everything if a few bad months came along.
But what really interests me is that it seems that no economy is able to function without oppression. Is that because if no one is at the bottom no one would know they were at the top? Because not enough people are ever satisfied? Because the human race is basically selfish? Does a civilisation require oppression to function? I had a Marxist professor who claimed there were functioning societies that lived by different ideals, more communitarian or socialist or whatever. Is it propaganda or sorry truth that says “The poor you will always have with you”?
July 17th, 2008 at 9:27 pm
That’s a damn good question.
I think there probably are some “primitive” cultures in which everyone contributes and everyone reaps, and there’s not so much arguing about whether each individual is getting precisely what it deserves. It’s a childhood argument, isn’t it? The whole “Mom, Billy got slightly more ice cream than I got! Make the world completely fair 100% of the time, Mom!” Practicality demands that you overlook some of that crap and focus on how well the whole community is doing.
And our community – despite how wealthy the US is, really – is not doing well. We’re happily wasting minds on minimum wage jobs because, hey, if they were born to poor people into an economy where no honest person can get graduate from working 80 hours a week just to make ends meet, we don’t care. We should – someone in that position could have the potential to cure cancer, and we’re squandering it to have the fight over the ice cream.
As long as we allow kids to be born unequally – with some having so much and others having so little (and I don’t just mean money) – we’re going to have oppression. The only way to change that – short of something really creepy, like removing them from parents and raising them in government issued pods – is to break down the limiting concept of the nuclear family… move from thinking of “parents who raise kids” to “communities who raise generations.” Then kids wouldn’t be stuck with the resources their parents have access to – the resources would be spread to all the kids in a generation, and they would all have a nearly equal chance of success.
July 18th, 2008 at 5:48 am
As a 41 year old Gen-Xer, I must say this article is spot on. When some crybaby Boomers on another blog asked why Gen-X and now the younger Gen-Y resents them so much, here is the response I posted:
People my age and younger have every right to be angry and blame the Boomers for the current economic mess this country is in. Boomers dominated the social and political scene of this country before my generation was even old enough to vote! Once we were old enough to vote, our votes didn’t count: we were hugely outnumbered by the Boomers. The votes and social influence of that “Me” generation brought us nothing but eviscerated social safety nets, a global Serengeti economy, a policy of blanket denial for miserly SSI benefits for the disabled, NAFTA, cuts in student aid, elimination of subsidized employment programs for the poor, and the elimination of subsidized housing and Medicaid-funded birth control. The Congress-critters and presidents who rode into power on Boomer votes brought us a job market that is a rat race to the bottom where the number of jobseekers vastly outnumbers the number of middle class jobs by 100 to 1.
The lovely George W. Bush job market and economy we now have began under the watch of a president whose claim to fame, other than being a racist and a B-rated actor, was telling Soviet Russia’s President Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down that wall.” The “Peace, Pot, and Microdot” body-painting, free sex, draft-card burning generation would never have launched a massive peace movement protesting the Vietnam War if it was only the poor, the “gang-bangers” and “trailer trash”, coming home in body bags or coming home missing limbs only to then have the government deny them benefits. What can you expect from the generation that swapped their ponytails for Armani suits, their urban hippie squats for upscale suburban homes, and their tofu for exclusive dining club memberships?
As a 41 year old Gen-Xer, I remember how the bootstraps got sliced by the Reagan Revolution. And it was not my generation who did it. We were out-gunned at the voting booth by the political sway of the Boomers who outnumbered us. I remember being young and poor and consistently told by financially secure, decently employed Boomers that I had no right to “whine” about my poverty and inability to get any chances for basic economic security, and that I was “worrying for nothing because I was only young”.
But when you have no health and dental care while you’re young, illness, injury, and cavities don’t wait to occur until you finally get lucky in getting a middle class job with health benefits and paid sick days. And when you can’t get a chance while you’re young – which many of my generation didn’t, chances for good jobs are a hell of a lot slimmer at the onset of middle age due to age discrimination. This is evidenced by many poor Gen-Xers who are STILL unable to secure decent employment entering our 40’s after getting crowded out for chances during our youth. Now that we’re approaching middle age, no one wants to hire us for the few remaining jobs left that haven’t been off-shored. As a result, most Gen-Xers are unable to afford home ownership, or the wherewithal to save any money for our own old age – which we face without even the safety net of social security. Many people my age foresaw this back in the 80’s, but our concerns as well as our votes were brushed aside by the “Me” generation that brought us Wall Street Gone Wild. We were outvoted. We were “whiners” who were constantly told that if we couldn’t get a chance, that was our own tough luck. The Boomers were doing well, so they didn’t care about those of us who had nothing and very little chance of ever getting to have anything.
The Boomers had security and good jobs with benefits, and retirement accounts to boot, while most of my generation wasn’t that fortunate and never will be that fortunate! Middle class Boomers didn’t care about the poor of MY generation who graduated from high school and entered the workforce in the 1980’s recession with a hell of a lot less opportunities than the Boomers and previous generations enjoyed. Boomer votes brought us cuts in Pell Grants courtesy of the Gramm-Rudman bill under Bush, Sr’s watch while a college education was becoming increasingly vital to getting jobs. Boomer votes precipitated the castration of workers’ rights starting with Reagan’s firing the air traffic controllers. Boomer political influence resulted in the elimination of CETA (a federally subsidized jobs program for the underprivileged of ALL ages) by Ronald Wilson Reagan – a Howdy Doody president (twice elected) on the backs of the poor who were demonized for no reason other than to lend credence to unbridled greed.
But the Boomers had theirs so they didn’t care. They could afford to save in 401(k)’s, while living the high life including fancy TV’s to watch shows like “Dynasty” that glorified America’s rich and shameless. Boomers arrogantly drove cars with bumper stickers that read “I’m spending my children’s inheritance”, and “Whoever dies with the most toys wins.”
This “Me” generation told poor Gen-Xers, who were totally on their own without parental support or opportunity while trying in vain to get a chance back in the 1980’s, that we should “stop whining”. We were called the slackers by the Boomers who had all the good jobs while we couldn’t get a break to save our lives. Greedy Boomers told us, while we struggled on ramen noodle diets and busting our humps without time off at unstable McJobs without security, that “no one owes us a job.” Pretty hypocritical considering that these same selfish Boomers expected us to do it all on our own without a fraction of the privileges and advantages that they themselves had.
Without enough good jobs for my generation, we were somehow still expected to be able to make it, and if we couldn’t, oh well too bad. We were told by the “Me” generation that we were responsible for making our own opportunity in life if there was a lack of job opportunities for us; even though opportunities were rapidly sinking like the Titanic due in no small measure to policies of avarice championed by Reagan (elected twice on Boomer votes) followed by another “Greed Is Good” president, George Herbert Walker Bush.
Now my generation is entering our middle age years a hell of a lot poorer with a hell of a lot less hope, economic security, and opportunity than any previous generation since World War II. And who the hell is going to take care of us after we’ve been cheated out of opportunities all our lives so we couldn’t get on our feet, let alone save money? Yet we, along with the younger Gen Y-ers aren’t supposed to be bitter and angry. It wasn’t our votes that elected America’s biggest Scrooges like Presidents Reagan, Poppy Bush, and now the Shrub; plus all the woman-hating, rich white male alpha dipshit Congressmen like Dick Armey and Newt Gingrich who brought us this mess by sticking it to the poor (especially to women) with welfare cuts while simultaneously limiting access to birth control, and then Balkanizing what’s left of a disappearing middle class with unfair “free trade” policies. Boomers are crying because think they’re “golden years” suck. Everything is always all about them. But they never cared about those of us who will probably be spending our old age starving and homeless out on the streets because there won’t even be social security to fall back on for those of us not lucky enough to have landed good jobs to be able to save anything to begin with.
July 18th, 2008 at 11:24 am
Beautifully said, Jacqueline. I’m a 35 year old Xer, and proud of it.
We were actually taught in high school in 1987, “You will be the first generation of Americans to do worse (financially) than your parents. Social security is projected to run out the very year you turn 65. And no one will want to hear you whine about it.”
That is fucking ridiculous. I know some Boomers who agree. You can’t trash something and expect someone else to pay for it. Well, you can, obviously, but if you do, you’re inviting someone to rain hell all over you.
My mom is a Boomer who very much agrees with me. She and I have always taken care of each other and we will to the end, come hell or high water (she never got to experience disposable wealth either, and refused to go vastly into debt to finance a high on the hog lifestyle). But my dad – who reneged on his promise to pay for college, then called me irresponsible when I dropped out to avoid accruing further debt that was simply not going to result in a proportionately higher income – had better make other arrangements if he needs help in his old age.
I hope other Gen-Xers will consider long and hard before assuming “the right thing” is to take care of a narcissistic parent who didn’t take care of them, just because of some blood relationship. We should take care of those Boomers who helped us and did their best, of course. But those who didn’t… good riddance.
July 18th, 2008 at 1:09 pm
My graduating high school class got taught the same thing, that we would be shortchanged and nobody would care. In my very first book “Classism For Dimwits” (I have since written and self-published two more books), I discuss in detail how the poor – mostly women and the disbled – of our generation got the shaft. I graduated high school in 1985. I had been struggling to fend for myself since orphaned at 13. The attitude I found from lots of middle class white male Baby Boomers 20 years ago was very sexist, condescending and patronizing; they thought all young women were just working for the “pin money”, not that we actually needed to support ourselves because we were out on our own!
Due to the Reagan-Bush Sr’s Gramm-Rudman Bill, I had to wait until I was old enough to be considered “independent” to be able to get enough student loans to pay for college after I became disabled at 24 and could no longer work in a labor-intensive job. I was also denied SSI, even though I still cannot stand for any period of time or do lots of bending and lifting.
After incurring unaffordable student loan debt and graduating college at age 34 in 2001, I found it had all been for nothing. I haven’t been able to get a job because of the gap in my work history, my medical problems, and my bad credit from years of being poor through no fault of my own (didn’t choose to become disabled) – and now being 41, age discrimination, too. I feel cheated. As a disabled 41 year old woman with what is now a 17 year gap in my work history, I have no way to get a job – let alone a good job to be able to repay my student loans and certainly no way to save for my old age. I might have, had the “Me” generation not eliminated all the safety nets while also electing morons who off-shored all the jobs.
Yet, the “I-Got-Mine-Fuck-You” crowd expects people who are exceedingly disadvantaged and poor to be able to make it totally on their own without any help or social programs. I think Social Security ought to be means-tested. Those able to afford two homes and who have 401(k)’s and other assets don’t need that precious safety net as badly as someone who never got a chance to get on their feet.
July 18th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
Disability adds a hellish wrinkle to any story of hard times – knowing the hard, scary times I’ve faced in the job market, I can’t fathom how people with disabilities cope. First of all, it’s usually more expensive to be someone with a disability than someone without; secondly, your options are even more limited than those of someone else at the same income level; and third, people can be surprisingly unwilling to compromise. Despite the irony that people who have chronic ailments and disabilities can be the most loyal, efficient employees because so few employers are willing to put up with a little absenteeism or make a few adjustments to work with them.
July 21st, 2008 at 11:58 pm
Well put, both BetaCandy and Jacqueline. I’m a bit too young to be considered Gen X (graduated high school in 1997), but I’ve had similar experiences. The amount of narcissism displayed by the Baby Boom Generation has been truly galling.
As someone else who’s disabled (kidney patient waiting for a transplant), I’m really irked by Boomers worrying that their retirements won’t be quite as comfortable as they’d like. While I was working, saving for retirement would have been a luxury.
July 22nd, 2008 at 7:37 am
It really is. I’m surrounded by GenYers who got college paid for by their folks and are buying houses in their mid-20’s, and Boomers who bought their first homes 30 years ago and never had to pay escalating rents since then. I feel like I’m so far behind.
And yet when I look at people my own age, most of us are struggling with college debt (what happened? at my high school, everyone in my class saw an older and/or younger sibling get college paid for, but for us it was like, “Fuck you, you’re on your own”) or debt from not being steadily employed, or debt from taking care of sick Boomers. None of us own houses yet, without which I don’t see how you can retire – if things continue as they’re going, rent will be $4k for a studio by 2038 and I’ll probably end up homeless while working full time, forget retirement!
Compared to others my age, I really am lucky. I’m debt free, saving for a house (probably out of state, given L.A. prices, which I’ll lease to renters while I continue to work here until I can afford to quit my job, whenever that is) and in good health. The fact that I work 80 hours a week between my “real job” and my internet stuff that’s meant to become portable income so I can move somewhere cheap without fear of joblessness galls me to no end – no human should ever need to do that just to earn a little bit of financial security – but I do have it better than a lot of people my age.
Sad. I’m not complaining so much as saying for how hard we work, we really ought to have what the other generations all seem to have. And if we don’t, and we’re told “times are changing, suck it up” then the Boomers and Yers can damn well suck it up when things don’t go their way.
July 22nd, 2008 at 12:42 pm
“And yet when I look at people my own age, most of us are struggling with college debt (what happened? at my high school, everyone in my class saw an older and/or younger sibling get college paid for, but for us it was like, “Fuck you, you’re on your own”) or debt from not being steadily employed, or debt from taking care of sick Boomers. None of us own houses yet, without which I don’t see how you can retire – if things continue as they’re going, rent will be $4k for a studio by 2038 and I’ll probably end up homeless while working full time, forget retirement!”
You’re expressing a lot of how I feel about my future and the future of my friends. I’m almost 30, still renting, about to lose my job in another month and am going more in-debt as I try to pay off my student loans. I wonder about the “American Dream” of owning my own house and blah blah…wonder if it will ever happen or if I want it to happen. I feel so far behind and yet I’m not the only one struggling. I don’t really have any incredible insight besides just saying that I’m glad that I’m not alone as a struggling working class woman trying to make ends meet.
July 22nd, 2008 at 1:18 pm
Good luck finding a more stable job (or whatever it is you need)!
This thread is making me feel less alone, too. I was raised to think that because I was smart, focused and had common sense, I would never be without a job, never be in debt, etc. unless I did bad selfish things for which I had only myself to blame and should be ashamed of myself.
Even though I know the reasons I wound up without a job and in debt were not my fault, I internalized a lot of that shame because the thinking was so ingrained.
And there’s nothing quite like idly flipping past Oprah, noticing that she’s talking about great money saving tips, and discovering everything she suggests cutting back on is stuff you’ve never ever once in your life indulged in. Christ.
July 22nd, 2008 at 3:18 pm
No BetaCandy, unfortunately you are not alone. You have about 30 million peers, an entire generation. And that is an outrage. We Gen-Xers got the short-shift. We got denied help to pay for college. We were also crowded out of the jobs by the Boomers when we were younger, before entering middle-age, or before becoming disabled. We had not yet suffered the rammifications of decades of poverty, poor nutrition, and lack of access to health/dental care – all which takes its toll over the years. As a result, most of us can’t make it now, let alone buy homes, invest in stocks, or save for our own old age. Pretty sad when America decides to discard an entire generation of 30 million after it could find the resources to coddle and spoil the Boomers.
The disabled have been consigned to America’s collective trash heep, even though everyone stands a 40% chance of becoming disabled if you’re between the ages of 18 and 60. Most of America’s homeless are among the ranks of the disabled, or are women – some with kids, some without.
The “bootstraps” (those things we were supposed to pull ourselves up by) were permanently slashed by Reagan and Bush, Sr. with cuts in Pell grants for college and trade schools, eliminated funding for subsidized housing for the poor, and Reagan’s blanket denial policy: Disabled Americans are denied even basic income support of a meager $600/mo SSI check.
Then Clinton came along and passed NAFTA and the Welfare Reform Act to appease House Scrooge Newt Gingrich, a rich white male alpha dipshit Boomer who wanted to punish women out of poverty. Clinton caved in and threw poor women and children under the bus for political gain. All of this happened at a time when we Gen-Xers were being denied any chances to get a shot for the good jobs because living wage jobs were rapidly disappearing due to off-shoring and NAFTA, while the remaining jobs went overwhelmingly to the Boomers who were a hell of alot more financially secure than we’ll ever be!
The employment prospects for those with disabilities are slim to none. All the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) did was kick poor people with medical problems off of SSI – even though there are no jobs for them because no one gives them a chance. The ADA should be called “The Americans Who Have Been Discarded Act.”
A disabled person only has a 4% chance of getting even a crappy minimum wage job – despite having a college education and skills to offer. That means the unemployment rate for the disabled is 96%. Yet, with cuts and denial of SSI income support, how do those with disabilities live? Look at the soup kitchens and “tent cities.”
Gen-Xers are still being denied good jobs because we’re no longer young; we’re middle aged. We never got the chance to get any experience at the good jobs when we were young, so now we’re “overqualified” while also lacking “experience.” We’re being shoved aside in the job market by the Boomers’ kids who are alot younger than many of us. Now, compare our situation to that of wealthy Boomer’s kids (alot – but not all – Gen-Yers/Millenials) whose influential Boomer parents actually bully employers to negotiate the best employment deals possible for their spoiled progeny – at the expense of what is right, what is reasonable, and what is fair.
When I walk into a bank and see a 23 year old bank president with a snotty, rude, and condescending attitude; and who is no more deserving of that job than any of us here, I want to scream. When I was in my 20’s back in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s (before becoming disabled), no one my age could get a good job, let alone a top job. Many of us still can’t get good jobs now!
The job market, society, and economy we have today, and have had since the mid-1980’s, is NOT a meritocracy by a longshot! It’s a nepotocracy.
What’s the solution? Disenfranchized Gen-Xers can’t “create their own jobs” by starting a business without money, or any way to get any money. Been there, done that.
I write books because it’s the ONE thing I CAN do.
But I struggle without any income, unless people buy any of the books I wrote, which most don’t/won’t because (1) my books are about social justice and nobody cares about the working class and the poor; and, (2) Lack of ability to be able to afford to market my books; and, (3) “Brick and mortar” bookstores won’t carry any self-published books on their shelves because self-published authors cannot afford to incur return costs of unsold inventory like the big guns in the publishing industry can.
The struggling author who has no money, no “important” job title and/or Ivy League degree, or who isn’t a celebrity like Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan can’t get a mainstream publisher to pick them up because of being a “nobody”.
When your opportunities for earning any money at all are limited due to age discrimination, socio-economic class discrimination ( a real biggie!), and discrimination against the disabled, you can’t support yourself let alone even buy a crappy home and “be responsible” for saving for your own old age.
Yet, we’re constantly told, “tough shit, you’re on your own” by all the snots that got theirs – while most of us got gypped out of any chance whatsoever to ever get ours. Yet, we’re not supposed to be the least bit bitter or angry about any of this. Go figure.
July 22nd, 2008 at 9:16 pm
Jacqueline, my dad was fond of saying people had to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. My mom’s response? “They’ve got to have boots first.” That’s a pithy one-liner that’s served me well over the years.
You really explain well how we’ve managed to miss every boat that was supposed to sail past us at some point.
The one thing I’ve found with GenYers in cushy positions exercising no responsibility whatsoever is that I can scare the piss out of them and whip them into a “yes ma’am” frenzy. That’s a special skill of mine, and it shouldn’t be required when you’re only asking someone do what their position entails.
The other day, a little puke at Burger King’s drive-thru window told my mother to back up her car. She did so, and he directed her when to stop. Then, several minutes later, he told her to pull forward. She asked what it was all about.
“Oh, we have time quotas we have to meet,” Puke explained. “If you were up here the whole time it took us to get the order together, we wouldn’t have met it.”
She sat there for several minutes, carefully checking her order and then pretending to look through her purse. He was pissed, poor thing.
I try to do things like that as well – just wreck their plans, get some sort of revenge. I consider it the teaching of object lessons.
And of course, I have to reiterate: there are lots of great Boomer and Y individuals. There are also lots of asshole Xers. It’s just the way our country arranges everything by demographic – from “what will we manufacture” to “who will run the country” – that causes us to see these divisive lines. The X generation is the smallest of the 20th century, and in a very real “majority rules (at the expense of the minority)” way, I think we ARE seen as disposable because there aren’t enough of us to merit being treated as human.
July 29th, 2008 at 2:45 pm
See, when we had to get our tımes down, the manager just paid one of the staff to drıve around and around. The guy got paıd to drivei we got our tımes downi everyone was happy.
Thıs getting customers to drıve back and forth makes no sense other than to piss the customer off. As a fıfteen year old İ got that.
July 30th, 2008 at 8:22 am
Well, but… has anyone ever heard of, oh, I don’t know… working faster? Isn’t that what the corporation is trying to achieve?
Or, if the corporation’s expectations were ridiculous, maybe if enough “peons” told them to shove it, they would eventually stop manufacturing these bullshit distractions that prevent the company’s actual work from getting done and probably have a side effect of scaring the shit out of people who really need that low income job that most of the employees can afford to lose.
The thing is, you know some other BK managers are not cheating the system. They’re in danger of getting fired, getting their restaurants closed (that happened to one BK here a few years ago), etc.
Cheating always has invisible collateral damage – someone always gets hurt.
July 30th, 2008 at 10:27 pm
I worked a customer service job in a call center, and on weekends I responded to e-mail inquiries. One day they pulled everyone responding to e-mails (which were backed up to 48 hours) and put them on the phones…. which were pretty much dead. For four hours, while the e-mails piled up far past our “garaunteed” 24-hour response time. Towards the end of the day, I found out that a higher-up was coming by the call center that day, and they wanted their phoen record to look as good as possible.
So they took people actually doing work, and had them do nothing because it looked more like doing work than actual work did. This was one of the many, many things that led to me leaving that company.