There Must Be a Name

A new project wallah started today. I drew the short straw and had to be her 'buddy'. (I am not making this up.)

While my look at home is strictly 'stuck in the 70s', this woman's look for work is lost in the '80s.

She is tall and thin and has a near-mullet hair-do - what's with that freaky little up-do thing in the middle of her head? And she is scarily tan.

No matter what else happens with her and me at Unnamed Co., I have to tell you, my heart went out to her today. So much so that I walked across the street to show her the cafeteria and actually sat down to eat lunch with her.

I rarely eat lunch with anyone. I pretend it's because I don't want to, but I've been asked to lunch exactly three times in the year I've been at Unnamed Co.

Trying to chat, I asked where she had worked before. Mighty Citadel! She got laid off from there. Then she went to Pharmaco. And she got laid off from there. The last place she went to, she left. I have a feeling that she fled.

It shows in her nervousness to do everything right. It shows in her lowered eyes, in her shaking hands.

I think of the title of a Harlan Ellison story. The subject matter doesn't fit, but the title does... "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs".

She's been beaten up. I know how she feels. I especially knew at three o'clock this morning.

Conversely, I know she is a strong woman. She has a wiry build and told me she's a runner, that running thirteen miles in a day is a day when she's slacking. That kind of grit and determination and discipline more than says something about her character.

I thought of all the cruel, idiotic, money-grubbing bastards who started eviscerating coporate America back in the early 1980s, the front wave of the baby boomers, scooping up all the cream, not giving a damn about the wreckage they left behind. Xman's brother was and is a prime example of this. He used to cut up companies like a butcher with a new blade. Now he's probably worth about $50 million and lives on fifty acres in Nantucket in the summer.

The gutting went on for twenty more years. There's not that much left to gut, but it doesn't matter. If there's a profit to be made, the human side of the equation simply never enters into it.

There has to be a name for what this woman feels, for what I felt at three o'clock this morning.

I know a couple of people who managed to never get laid off. I know a couple of men who never got over it, never. The last I heard of Dave, Cobol programmer extraordinaire, he was trying to scrimp by on Social Security and whatever he could make watching his neighbor's cat. Floyd who was once a project wallah ended up working in a parts department and when he left the dealership it was "through mutual agreement". He was of a generation where wives stayed at home and he had to ask his wife to go out and get a job. She did. He couldn't find another one that stuck.

What I do know are more than a couple of women who have been laid off more than once and are fighting hard not to let it taint them and ruin the rest of their lives.

I could have told you early this morning, it's not easy.