January 2008 Archives
January 9, 2008
Notes from Stupidland…
I wrote up nearly 50 pages of material explaining in detail every single pitiful aspect of my job. What follows are some transcriptions of the sloppy, barely literate notes my trainee took:
“To find WR in da shop, do they stock parts go to your #1 order processor type in your part # & under neath dat you WY C P-Loc = S 32” (instructions on how to find parts in our computer system; it makes as much sense to you as it does to me)
“It gives you the part # & descrption then you go into part # type # gives you vendor” (no idea; I don’t even know what “it” refers to)
“They are on top left bins (in front of me)” (in reference to some paperwork boilerplate)
“In da bak of office (by comp.) right side top of file cabinet you will find some manilla enevelopes w/writting on them inter-department delivery”
I should also note that everything I typed in boldface is highlighted in yellow, indiscriminately.
Do I really think she’s that stupid? Sort of. I think a lot of the incoherence comes from her not really taking notes — just trying to look like she was doing something. It’s anybody’s guess, though. She might think these are really good, sound coherent notes. Maybe the way her mind works, they will help her succeed. I’d just hate to be there on the day somebody moves the “top left bins” in front of her, or moves the “manilla enevelopes.”
The bulk of her notes, though, were mainly directions, names, phone numbers, dates, and times. I decided to be nice and not post them, but I’m not exactly surprised to find she was more interested in keeping track of her social life than in learning how to do the job. I quit now, so I can snicker at the thought of them forcing her to do a job she can’t. I’m not a bad teacher, even though I resented her being there in the first place. “My” new girl, the one before the current girl (of whom I refuse to claim ownership), didn’t do a horrible job, comparatively speaking. At the time, I thought she was an abomination, but now I’ve realized she was obnoxious, not as smart as she thought she was, and frustrating. I didn’t like her undermining what little authority I have, I didn’t like her sitting there with me all day (thus preventing me from fucking off, and also yap-yap-yapping in my ear).
I had many problems with “my” new girl, but during the week I had her doing things on her own, to my surprise…she made a couple of minor mistakes, but she didn’t fuck up nearly as much as I thought she would. It would appear that, when faced with a problem, without having me to rely on, she broke down and consulted my procedure manuals and did things right. The mistakes she made were mostly mixing up numbers, a problem the guides couldn’t help, anyway.
And then, after about a week on her own, she quit. I don’t know if she felt she couldn’t handle the job, if she thought it was too tedious when she was by herself, or if she got a new job. Most people don’t just up and quit a job because it’s boring; I’ve only had two jobs in my life that didn’t bore me out of my skull, and trust me, I’ve had more jobs than anyone on the planet. But I’ve never quit one because I was bored; I usually quit them because of the paranoid fantasy everyone has conspired to get me fired. Of course, usually I’m right. I actually caught a glimpse of her personal e-mail over her shoulder, and it looks like she had a few from Manpower, so I’ll assume she got a new job.
I was happy with her gone, but this new new girl is a nightmare. She takes every bad quality of “my” new girl and intensifies it by about 1000%; even worse, she’s related to not one but two people who work there, hired to perform a job whose storied history includes a guy who wasn’t even fired after literally not doing any work for three straight months (no, I’m not referring to myself). It’s clear they don’t care about the position, and it’s clear that she’ll never get fired, and it’s even clearer that she won’t quit.
So I quit. I knew I’d never get fired, but fuck this jobs. Shitty jobs are shitty jobs, and I needed the money and the insurance, but I don’t need an ulcer (and yes, I got one) for a job that is, at the end of the day, a complete waste of time. And a job I was slowly being fucked out of in the first place; they wouldn’t have fired me, but they were giving me what they felt was a promotion and I felt was a demotion. So that was it. Fuck those motherfuckers.
And now I can snicker as I imagine the new new girl lost in a sea of paperwork she doesn’t understand, opting to check her MySpace page every 30 seconds instead of trying to figure out how to do the job. Oh, also, I took back my procedure manuals. I deleted them from the computer. She has nothing to go on but the month of training I gave her, which would be more than sufficient if she wasn’t an imbecile. I took them partly out of spite, but mainly because I made them to help my boss in the likely event that I quit and he couldn’t replace me right away. But he fucked me, so I don’t owe him anything.
Oh, did I mention I made a scene? It was my most epic resignation ever. I usually just quietly sidle out one day, or give notice without elaboration. But that’s because most of my jobs don’t piss me the fuck off. I had grievances to air, and I wanted to air them in front of my coworkers so my boss couldn’t spin it that I got a new job and was just moving on. I tried to do it in front of the new new girl, but for the two weeks before I quit, I told her there was nothing to do and to go away; she was more than happy to oblige (did I mention we didn’t get along and I made her cry at least twice?), so she went off to help her aunt in the back and never returned to the warranty office. I didn’t complain, but she was off somewhere in the back when I quit, which was unfortunate.
Nonetheless, I explained in blunt, profanity-laden terms that I had been royally fucked and I can’t take it anymore. They stuck me in the warehouse for half-days (which would have been bumped to full days once the retard was fully trained), and — this is another reason I wanted to make my scene in front of at least a few coworkers — I wanted to let them know that I was shocked by how comically easy the job is. I’m in pretty bad shape, so I was kind of looking forward to doing some physical labor (so that as soon as I quit it for a better, cushier job, I’d get all fat again). Except…there is shockingly little physical labor. Everything small goes on a cart that is pushed from one end to the other. Everything large goes on a pallet that’s carried by a forklift. That’s it, unless it’s so tiny or light it can be carried by hand.
Now, I’m sure there are safety reasons for it, and the lazy ass in me doesn’t mind it, but fuck, I’ve worked in coffee shops with more grueling physical labor. And at least in a coffee shop you have to use your brain once in awhile. It’s a shitty job with asshole customers that becomes a mind-numbing routine after a month or two, but it requires more brainpower than looking at a part number and location on a sheet, finding the location, finding the number, putting it on a cart, and pushing the cart across a room. I had mastered the entire job in half an hour.
Did I feel like an asshole for insulting my coworkers’ livelihood? Fuck those motherfuckers. Most of them were glad to inform me that I wasn’t doing “real” work, so I was equally glad to inform them that their definition of “real work” is bullshit. It’s certainly different from the warehouse I worked in during high school. Besides which, most of them are either drunks and semi-legal immigrants (or both!) who either can’t do better or don’t want to do better. They want to drink on the job. They don’t know enough English to do more than read simple numbers. Either way, fuck ‘em.
I told my boss I didn’t appreciate being completely fucked over because I was nice enough to be honest and let him know I had no intention of staying at this job any longer than I had to. I also let my coworkers know about some secret gossip nobody was supposed to know about. Because fuck them. The new new girl is training for my job, but one of the reasons she went off with the aunt is because, at the point when she was fully trained for my job, she was supposed to learn this other job and then, eventually, do both. The aunt would then usurp the job of an old codger, who they would force into retirement. People like the old guy, which is why they didn’t ram it down his throat sooner. He can still do the job, albeit a little more slowly, so what the fuck? Answer: the aunt is my boss’s best friend/second-in-command’s sister. So they create a position that’s not open for her niece, then move the aunt to another closed position, ousting two more qualified employees in the process.
My boss clearly didn’t like hearing that. He tried to cut me off, but I wouldn’t let him. He tried to defend himself, at which point I told him to fuck himself. Then I stormed out, never to be heard from again…
…until ten minutes later, when I realized I hadn’t punched out. I called a coworker and had him do it for me, to spare the embarrassment of coming back. But I had planned that resignation for weeks, literally (I stayed on to get holiday pay). I had slowly made all of my personal effects disappear the preceding week, so I left a free man, and I left nothing behind.
Because fuck those motherfuckers. I may be unemployed (again), but I can laugh.
Posted by Stan at 3:42 PM | Permalink | Print-Friendly | Comments (0) | “I’m a Living Joke!” - Horror Stories from the Workplace
January 26, 2008
Slings & Arrows: The Complete Series (2003-2006)
Note: From late 2006 through the start of 2009, I volunteered to write content for and redesign a film-review website run by a former college professor. The arrangement didn’t end well, and as a result I removed my association from the site and decided to publish the reviews on my blog instead. Read about my misadventures with the site here.
That Shakespeare’s works are still performed with regularity—if not popularity—nearly 400 years after his death is a testament not just to the language or the structure; William Shakespeare changed the way people thought about the human condition, something nobody has done better. The Canadian television series Slings and Arrows spent three masterful but abbreviated seasons celebrating the Bard and reminding us of his cultural importance, both historically and contemporaneously.
It begins with a fairly unusual pilot, in which we are introduced to all the main characters through the perspective of Oliver Welles (Stephen Ouimette), the depressed artistic director of Canada’s most successful Shakespeare company, the New Burbage Festival. Through Oliver, we’re introduced to the central idea of the first season, that a production of Hamlet destroyed Oliver’s creativity, Ellen Fanshaw’s (Martha Burns) passion, and Geoffrey Tennant’s (Paul Gross) sanity. This trio was, at one time, a force to be reckoned with—the only reason New Burbage became synonymous with quality in the first place. Since, it’s become the kind of hacky theatre where more attention is paid to ostentatious sets than quality acting, where sheep-bleating sound effects substitute Shakespeare’s outdated-but-workable humor. Geoffrey’s the closest to being happy, running a tiny, financially strapped theatre in Montreal…that is, until police arrest him for squatting when they can’t pay the rent.
And then, at the end of the pilot…Oliver is run over by a ham truck after passing out, drunk, in the middle of an intersection.
The next five episodes combine black comedy with romance, high tragedy with demented wit—we’re gradually filled in on the backstory of Geoffrey, Oliver, and Ellen. What led to Geoffrey’s breakdown and the estrangement between the characters unfolds in such an interesting way, I don’t want to spoil it. Oliver returns in the form of a ghost that only Geoffrey can see, which begs the question for all three seasons: is Oliver really a ghost, or has Geoffrey not fully recovered from his breakdown?
In each season of Slings and Arrows, the New Burbage Festival works on a new play, and the backstage banter often parallels the themes—and in some cases, the stories—told in those plays. In the first-season story of Geoffrey, Ellen, and Oliver, the writers set out to answer the question of whether or not passion leads to glory or insanity. We get one answer in Hamlet itself (spoiler alert: it doesn’t lead to glory), but Slings and Arrows offers hope of redemption after the breakdown, while all Hamlet offers is death.
Meanwhile, they pave a storyline of treachery and behind-closed-doors machinations (reminiscent of the conspiracy to kill Hamlet’s father, though there’s actually a lot more Macbeth in this subplot) between Richard Smith-Jones (Mark McKinney), the frustrated business manager, and Holly Day (Jennifer Irwin), a conniving representative of New Burbage’s biggest sponsor. Holly wants to turn New Burbage into something like a Mamma Mia! theme park, keeping any actual Shakespeare content to a bare minimum. She teaches Richard the subtle art of manipulation, which he takes so far that the festival is nearly shut down.
All of this is balanced by two comic subplots: the romance between Jack Crew and his Ophelia understudy, Kate McNab (Rachel McAdams), and the introduction of Darren Nickles (Don McKellar) as a theatre director who hates theatre and wants to turn it into a combination of a Jerry Bruckheimer movie and performance art. The romance, in some ways, echoes the past romance between Geoffrey and Ellen. However, their conflict is a little different: while Kate worries Jack will ditch her the second he goes back to Hollywood, Jack has no confidence and fears Kate (and everyone else) looks down on him. His Brando-esque improvisations of the text have to be seen to be believed.
The second season isn’t quite as good as the first, but that’s sort of like saying, “Hamlet isn’t quite as good as Macbeth.” One of the more troublesome aspects is turning Geoffrey into a bit of an antagonist. Of course, we still want to root for him because Henry Breedlove (Geraint Wyn Davies) is an arrogant ham who refuses to follow Geoffrey’s direction, but the lengths Geoffrey goes to force Henry to follow his lead makes the whole story a little dicey.
This season also contains a couple of disappointing subplots. The first, following a young couple suffering through Darren’s cold, clinical direction of Romeo & Juliet (in which he has every actor dressed like a combination of a robot and a chess piece, staring blankly at the audience and delivering their lines in as flat a monotone as possible), simply doesn’t get as much development or complexity as the Jack Crew-Kate McNab story. It’s funny, but we never get to know these characters, so their victory in showing Darren the error of his ways feels like a minor diversion.
The second subplot finds Richard trusting an insane marketing guru (Colm Feore). Like the Romeo & Juliet subplot, it’s funny, but rather than being underdeveloped, there’s actually too much development. Colm Feore’s Sanjay is funny in small doses, and Richard’s misplaced trust is a much deserved comeuppance from his vindictive behavior in this first season, but Sanjay and his team are kind of given a one-note story. The beats of each appearance go like this: they show Richard a batshit insane concept, Richard gets pissed off, Sanjay uses his soothing voice and slippery con-man trickery to manipulate Richard (who’s as easily duped by Sanjay as he was by Holly Day). Going by pure laughs, it’s all very entertaining, and because the season is so short the repetition isn’t some sort of “jump-the-shark” moment. It’s just kind of wasteful, considering other subplots got less development in favor of this one.
Finally, we come to the third season, as depressing as the play it tackles—King Lear—and by far the darkest of the three. Like Lear, Geoffrey is stripped of everything in the pursuit of Charles Kingman’s (the late William Hutt) Lear. Kingman is an old man, dying of cancer and shooting up heroin to alleviate the pain. He’s an abusive old man, blaming everyone else for his mistakes, while Geoffrey just roles with it and lets Kingman do whatever he has to.
When it becomes clear that Kingman will never make it through a full performance, Geoffrey has to battle Richard, who spends the season with Darren Nickles, working on an awful musical (it’s like a hybrid of Rent and The Happy Hooker) that becomes a surprise hit. The whole story ends on a bittersweet note, but the truth of the drama and the lack of over-the-top subplots put this a few notches above the second season and a few notches below the first.
You might be thinking, “Well, I don’t like theatre/Shakespeare/Canada.” Fair enough, but let me tell you this isn’t a show about theatre—this is about life. It’s shown to us through the microcosmic theatre of both the theatre world and the plays of Shakespeare, but what great work of art doesn’t try to explore the basic problems of life through the individual stories of people? If you like hilarious, smartly written dramedies, you don’t have to know a thing about Shakespeare to fall in love with Slings and Arrows.
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January 18, 2008
He Was a Quiet Man (2007)
Note: From late 2006 through the start of 2009, I volunteered to write content for and redesign a film-review website run by a former college professor. The arrangement didn’t end well, and as a result I removed my association from the site and decided to publish the reviews on my blog instead. Read about my misadventures with the site here.
He Was a Quiet Man has one of the most interesting premises I’ve ever seen in a movie. It takes a cubicle drone, who is unhinged because he’s so lonely he talks to his fish (who talks back, but we’ll get to that), and allows him to fall in love…which makes him more unhinged. That is the journey Christian Slater’s Bob Maconel takes. It’s Slater’s finest performance, and an exceptional calling card to declare that he’s back, and he’s capable—and yes, he should reclaim his A-list status. The movie is good, but it doesn’t quite live up to the performance.
The setup for Bob’s love story is appropriately twisted. He’s a sad sack—no friends, no respect at work, apparently no family. His neighbors only talk to him when they want him to “do something about that lawn.” His only friend is a fish, who he thinks talk to him. It’s clear he doesn’t—even the fish admits that he sees everything Bob sees and nothing else. It allows us to learn about Bob’s subconscious without torturing us with long voiceovers.
But it’s clear Bob needs a hobby; unfortunately, he has one—toiling away on fake bombs. He has a ritual of loading a gun, assigning each bullet to an obnoxious coworker, except the last one—that one’s for him, if he ever had the guts to start shooting. Then comes the day when he drops the last bullet, and as he reaches under his cubicle to pick it up…somebody else starts shooting.
When he discovers the shooter has accidentally shot his crush, Vanessa (Elisha Cuthbert), Bob Maconel the potential shooter accidentally becomes Bob Maconel the hero. He’s rewarded with a new executive job, some respect at the office, extra money—but it’s not what he want. He saved Vanessa’s life, but she’s paralyzed from the neck down. He wants her, so when she asks him to finish the job, he has no idea what to do.
What follows is a love story as twisted an uncomfortable as its setting. He Was a Quiet Man toes the line between bleak (but mostly funny) corporate satire and uncomfortable, sad-sack drama. It’s like The Office with guns. Sometimes the tonal shifts are a little jarring, but it didn’t crush my suspension of disbelief. As Vanessa makes Bob realize his biggest problem is fear rather than loneliness, and he finally gets the confidence to do something about it, it leads him down a path that is as unfortunate as it is inevitable.
Both Christian Slater and Elisha Cuthbert give impressive performances. I’ve always been a fan of Slater, but when he resorted to working with Uwe Boll I felt like all was lost. It’s good to see him play a role worthy of his talents. Cuthbert, on the other hand, is someone I’ve only seen on 24, and while she did well with the rebellious-teen stuff in the first season, “adult Kim Bauer” was not her finest work. Based on her nuanced, tragic performance here, I’ll go ahead and blame that on 24’s weak writing. William H. Macy is underused but typically awesome as the slimy head of Bob’s company, a man who once had a fling with Vanessa (his former personal assistant). A supporting cast of mostly unknowns do a solid job of rounding out a corporate environment of shallow jackasses.
The ending gets a little overly existential and weird—in fact, so existential and weird that it kind of rips off Camus’s The Stranger—but writer/director Frank A. Cappello is on the right track. It’s not a perfect film, but it’s a good film. Cappello clearly has an interesting visual flair, but sometimes it’s a little too much flair. Certain sections feel a bit over-directed, with the swinging camera and quirky trick photography. It makes some scenes, like Bob and Vanessa’s awkward but hilarious karaoke experience, feel stagnant because the camera isn’t whooshing around all over the place. Even so, a director having the ability to exhibit such interesting work on what I assume is a modest budget gets points from me, even if he overdoes it.
He Was a Quiet Man has its flaws, but it’s an enjoyable experience well worth seeking out. I just wish it were getting a more publicized release so more people would get the chance to see it. Fortunately, it’s available on DVD, so you can find it for rent or purchase pretty much everywhere. Check it out.
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January 26, 2008
Chancer: Series 2 (1991)
Note: From late 2006 through the start of 2009, I volunteered to write content for and redesign a film-review website run by a former college professor. The arrangement didn’t end well, and as a result I removed my association from the site and decided to publish the reviews on my blog instead. Read about my misadventures with the site here.
In the second series of Chancer, the writers managed the impossible. They took two of their most irritating characters—Piers Garfield-Ward (Simon Shepherd) and Jimmy Blake (Leslie Phillips)—and made them nuanced, interesting, and funny. This was a necessary change, since none of the characters from last season’s Douglas Motors storyline return, but it’s a credit to both the writers and the actors who play them that the drastic changes to these characters felt believable.
The story resumes 10 months after last season’s cliffhanger finale, with Stephen Crane (now known by his true name, Derek Love, and played as always by Clive Owen) just about to have a “good behavior” parole hearing. Of course he gets out of prison, because if he didn’t there would be no story, but there’s very little fallout from last season’s various storylines. We have a few throughlines—like the decay of Klebers Bank, and Jo Franklyn (Susannah Harker) having a new baby in tow—but mostly the story focuses on how to save Piers’ family estate.
Like the first series, Chancer continues its deft combination of high-finance con games and soap opera dramatics. It’s mostly satisfying, though the “who is the baby daddy?” storyline is obvious from the get-go, and introducing Jimmy Blake’s daughter, Anna (Louise Lombard), as a love interest for Derek Love leads to some awkward stumbles toward the end.
In fact, while I enjoyed the series overall, the last two episodes had me groaning, as they introduced Anna’s stereotypically psychopathic ex-boyfriend as a dangerous foil (and played as cartoonishly as possible by Michael Kitchen), which meant leaving the finance stories as an afterthought. I probably would have had less of a problem with this had it been a 13-episode series like the first; with only seven precious hours to tell the full story, it felt like a big cheat to toss in some lazy histrionics in the home stretch.
Despite the flaws, when combined with the first series, Chancer is one of the most entertaining British shows ever made. It’s no surprise that his performance as Stephen Crane/Derek Love brought Clive Owen fame; it’s just surprising that it took almost another decade for him to gain international recognition.
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