DAWN OF THE DORK

This is not my first experience of getting unceremoniously bounced from the law firm of Hamburger Frankfurter Pretzel Wingnut & Goofball LLP despite having a perfect work record. I was brought in as a coder to work on the Endrun Corp. case, so named because the company’s whole game plan was played out-of-bounds. The supervisor on that project was a Gay Caballero named Cristobal Chrystalballs, and he loathed the sight of me for not being metrosexual enough.

Prior to entering the legal services field I had been in manufacturing, and I actually knew how to do useful things besides run my mouth. In addition, I am reasonably literate, which right away distinguishes me from 99% of the legal support workforce. Every thing about me sent this little butterball of an attorney, Chrystalballs, into a tailspin.

At least I had an excuse for finding myself among these misbegotten losers. Mostly all the manufacturing jobs had moved to the orient, and I was scrambling to survive in a brave new world of sexless, unskilled drones. In these offices, if you demonstrate any notable qualities at all, you are a marked man, and unfortunately all the hundreds and thousands of hours of tedium during the project, combined with the unbearably dysfunctional personalities, created a fusion reaction of cruel humor in my mind that resulted in hot blasts of meanness from my mouth which took the form of nasty jokes. So sue me! The jokes were actually rather innocuous, but the idea that somebody in the place had the wit to create them at all drove the little munchkins working there into a frenzy.

Naturally a line formed outside Cristobal Chrystalballs’ cubicle of little goofs eager to curry such favor as was possible with this impossible creep of a man by conveying to him such little gems as I had composed about him during those long hours of unrelenting misery.

“200motels said that you served in the Navy as a rear admiral.”
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“He said that you played tight end in college football, but that your end wasn’t so tight anymore.”

“He told me that you cried when you left home because you didn’t want to leave your brothers behind.”

It’s all true. I said all those things. But it had become really tiring having this guy giving me little squinty glances of annoyance and disfavor, as though I had been a particularly odious insect that had somehow gotten into his collection of gay videos, when actually I was doing a fine job.

Nevertheless, Cristobal Chrystalballs kept me working on the project because I was reliable and executed high quality work. The bottom line was that he needed the work done.

Of all the inconsequential twits employed in that office, probably the least memorable was a nominally female functionary named Juniper Dorkman. She was a real hick from somewhere in the heartland, and her style, which she considered to be infinitely cool, would have been laughable if it had been parodied in a 1950’s black-and-white teenage sockhop movie along the lines of “Grease.” She thought she was a lioness, but she was a hampsteress. Her relentlessly lame persona of a Riverdale High School hall monitor was living proof that even the biggest moron can function in the New York office culture.

The most notable aspect about her, as she was quick to point out, was her all-black wardrobe, like she was some kind of Paladin in a budget western like “The Man From Schmucky River.” “I always wear black,” she was fond of redundantly reminding you while she cracked her gum. Kind of like Zorro, y’know what I mean? Even during the dog days of August, when everybody was stifling in unimaginable heat, she would show up with her freaking pirate suit. The way her ill-fitting pants suits fell on her shapeless physique, combined with her goofy walk, made her look like Charlie Chaplin without his moustache.

With her dopey wardrobe and her hick attitude, she brought to mind a particularly uninspired high school dramatic society presentation of “Rebel Without a Cause” performed for the inmates of the local state mental hospital. If I were casting her, I think she would be perfect for the part of a waitress, and not in a high-end place, either. Put a tray of water glasses in her hand and she would be perfect as a server in a Greek diner in Astoria. I guarantee you; Juniper Dorkman knew her way around a tray of cokes and grilled cheese sandwiches before popping up as a staff attorney at a white shoe law firm.

Cristobal Chrystalballs eventually laid me off and soon left himself to take a job for Governor McGreevey of New Jersey, as a public toilet inspector for the Turnpike Authority, nice work if you can get it. I spent the next few years at other unsatisfying work assignments interspersed by long periods of enforced leisure until, with my benefits running out, I found myself obliged to return for another go-round at Hamburger Frankfurter Pretzel etc. I sure wasn’t anticipating a happy work experience, but when I arrived there I was confronted by the coding department’s new supervisor, none other than Juniper Dorkman, who had gone to night school and achieved her JD, which made me rub my eyes in amazement because I fully knew that she was illiterate. OK, illiterate in the sense that she could read a little, but she couldn’t write a line. I once saw a page of handwritten prose that she had composed and it was so dreadful that it resembled a third grader’s homework that the dog had declined to tear up.

Her god is Spell Check. Illiterates are very crafty about hiding their disability and they put an enormous amount of effort into dissimulating it, so much effort, in fact, that if they put an equivalent effort into remedial English they would probably all be Shakespeares.

In the event, all the years I had been kicking around at unhappy work assignments, jerked around at the whim of various nut-job employers and idiot colleagues, Juniper had held on in the coding department, an assignment that everybody else in that law firm had disdained for its long hours and the responsibility for getting decent production out of coders, who are an extremely low form of life with excruciatingly poor work habits and an inflated sense of entitlement, and worked her way up to supervisor with JD status.

And, boy, was she letting everybody know it! She had her hooks into that place big-time, and for the first time in her life she was more than just an insignificant twerp.

Juniper, who had not chosen to allow me back in her department and was forced to endure my presence, adhered to the fiction that I was just another beginning coder. That was fundamentally OK with me, as I didn’t have much use for her either. But she couldn’t resist letting me know that she was now my boss, and that’s where the contradictions started to develop like an insult or an irritant to an organism. After a few months of being on the receiving side of her bogus self-important attitude, she really started to grate on me.

One day I e-mailed a question to the woman who was running the project, and five minutes later Juniper came over to me, red as a beet, and started loudly berating me about the department’s “chain of command,” as though she was General Macarthur.

I like idiots. They can be very amusing as long as they’re harmless. When invested with authority, however, they become quite unbearable. In the case of Juniper Dorkman, the triumphalist aspect of her personality had come to define her, like Bush with the “Mission Accomplished” sign. Having learned all her management techniques at the feet of the Gran Maestro Cristobal Chrystalballs, she was the shining star about which the coding department revolved. She sent out e-mails documenting her greatness. “I’m going on vacation next week,” she announced grandly, “but I expect everybody to behave as though I was still here.” Once, when she had apprehended some pathetic losers in the elevator when they should have been at their desks, she ominously cautioned, “You’ll never know where I’ll turn up next…”

Wow, like Zorro! The problem is, saying you’re Zorro does not make it so. Once, while speaking to Juniper, I touched her arm and had the creepy feeling I was touching the arm of an embalmed corpse in a sarcophagus unearthed by an archeological dig in lower Mesopotania, all skin and bones. Thank God I never had occasion to touch her shapeless torso, which I guarantee would have squished under my hand like a bag of chittlins. An exercise regime is definitely not part of her Phalangist agenda.

And Phalangist is not too strong a word. Juniper’s politics are right in line with the authoritarian philosophy of Generals Franco and Salazar, though she is too ignorant to understand the meaning that those names imply. How about Mussolini? The Italian filmmaker Lina Wertmuller once made a film called “Seven Beauties” that featured an obese, coarse nazi female commander of an Italian concentration camp. Given her unquestioning adherence to authoritarian “chain of command” and her aggressively nationalist Republican sentiments (she is an unreconstituted supporter of George Bush and the jingoistic ultra-right wing of the Republican Party), she could instantly morph into a supremely dedicated black shirt. She already loves black clothes, and that alone betrays a certain authoritarian leaning. Juniper would love to run a jail and she has all the required attributes: a need to be unquestioningly followed by her own hand-selected motley assortment of sycophants; a virtually brain-dead attitude toward social philosophy; an astoundingly low level of literacy; voracious ambition coupled with a weasel’s animal cunning; a creepy talent for toadying to higher authority. Under the wrong set of political circumstances she could evolve into a one-woman social cataclysm equal to a tornado or other catastrophic disaster.

One day she passed out a little flash quiz on coding procedure. After all the tests were completed and graded, she sent out an e-mail reading, “This quiz was not for purposes of punishment.” Punishment! I never heard this term used before in any job. Juniper, until recently only a temp herself, was now openly thinking in terms of administering Punishment!

Even in the most advanced of human societies the spirit of fascism lies dormant like a virus in the human intestine, waiting for the right conditions under which to overwhelm the organism. Under what propitious circumstances, where democracy would be weakened and unreasoning authoritanism allowed to rear its ugly head, might a voracious, self-serving, illiterate woman of no culture be chosen to exercise authority over a broad segment of witless humanity?

Because secret police techniques of surveillance were not beneath Juniper’s purview. She interrogated contract employees about what was being said about her. Like all primal despots, she was intensely interested in controlling public opinion. I had long ago lost interest in socializing with the other temps on these kind of projects, but there was one other person in the building to whom I communicated by e-mail, and as time went on, as I became increasingly dismayed by her self-aggrandizing and power-grubbing behavior, I could not help but complain to him about her. Naturally, she was monitoring my e-mails.

Juniper was interested in isolating her charges from any contact outside the department that did not go through her in order to give maximum expression to her self-endowed supremacy. She meant to be the only center of power over the temps, with ultimate authority over who stayed and who got cut, and she was prepared to be ruthless in achieving this end.

As it happened, I discovered that the paralegal who was in charge of hiring the temps, and who had oversight authority for the project, a willowy brunette named Ginette Pizzola, happened to be the granddaughter of a man who had hired me to replace him as designer/production supervisor for a handbag company many years previously. I was very good friends with the old guy, since deceased, and hoped that my friendship would extend to his granddaughter. It’s natural.

Unfortunately, Juniper Dorkman is unnatural. She would make a great monster in a grade B horror movie, chasing teenagers with an axe. She first went into my e-mail account and deleted some letters between Ginette Pizzola and myself, wherein we shared reminiscences about the girl’s grandfather. Then she invented some monstrous venom about me to relate to the girl, who never spoke to me again.

We are living in an age of thinly disguised fascism, using fascist techniques to battle a shadow army of islamo-fascist terrorists; enforcing authoritarian control at home by methods of conformism and intimidation; slandering dissenting voices with labels like defeatist and traitor; consolidating mind-control by the dissemination of mood-altering substances produced by pharmaceutical conglomerates and distributed by compromised medical professionals; inducing complacency in a somnambulant populace by means of a hand-picked media elite of monosyllabic robo-commentators – these are conditions custom tailored for the emergence of a cadre of garden variety psychos who strive for total power within their cheesy little environments.

Maybe I’m the one who’s out of step, a malcontent whom Juniper Dorkman eventually despaired of ever eventually whipping into line by means of intimidation and eventually found justification for laying off as part of a mass reduction of staff, despite my having a perfect work record in her department. Actually, my employment history since I left the fashion business has not been characterized by remarkable success, tainted as it has been by an inability to eat crow dished out by self-important idiots.

I fully recognize the need for New Yorkers to develop economy-size egos in order to effectively bring home the bacon. Anybody who takes full account of his real insignificance as just another dot in an endless anthill is bound to get paralyzed by fear, with the consequence that he won’t be able to function and his kids will starve.

Nevertheless such large egos attached to persons of such mediocre ability is a bad fit, and incongruous. They become parodies of themselves, and nowhere more obviously than in the law offices of Hamburger Frankfurter and Pretzel.

I once knew this old girl who was obnoxious, insulting and who honked like a goose. I mildly inquired of her, “It’s none of my business, but God gave you a set of feminine techniques for achieving your goals. Have you ever considered using feminine wiles to get what you want, instead of trying to coarsely bludgeon people?”

She broadly replied, “That would be admitting weakness. I want to achieve things the way men do.”
This answer wasn’t exactly a revelation to me. I had long before deduced her motivation – it was the frankness with which she stated it that startled me (we later fell out, and I never spoke to her again).

I believe her to be off the mark. Men, who are widely credited for the ability to work in groups, are, at their best, extremely crafty and calculating in setting and achieving goals, and the women who see them otherwise are falling into a trap of preconceived stereotyping in perceiving them as primitive dolts. Women that attempt to bludgeon people into submission are creating their own stereotypical parody of life. They are unwittingly perpetuating a traditional frontier ethos of taking control in order to civilize uncouth males by the wielding of weapons of domestic destruction like rolling pins. The weapons they wield today may be institutional, like political correctness, but the goals have not changed – to achieve domination through coercion rather than through reason or charm.

There aren’t enough charm schools in the world to polish these frontier females, and since they seem to be gaining on the social front, there is no reason for them to alter their techniques. But they pay a price. As Juniper Dorkman once confided to me in an unguarded moment, “I’m not meeting any men.” Gee, no kidding! Even a cripple would throw down his crutches and miraculously grow wings to fly away through the sky rather than endure a date with this misfit.

As I previously stated, I had a perfect work record in that place. A couple of times during the course of the year I was instructed, with reason, to go back to some of my finished work to make some corrections, but that is par for the course in coding thousands upon thousands of documents, and at no time was I ever formally told that my work was substandard, nor was I admonished for any other reason.

After she let me go Juniper felt the need to dissemble the reason to a friend of mine, that she had made a large cut in the project when, in fact, very few layoffs had been made, as was related to me by somebody still working there.

Her reasons for cutting me were purely personal. She didn’t approve of my politics in the highly charged political atmosphere of the day when even U.S. Attorneys who are not deemed politically reliable are dismissed on the order of hare-brained political operatives. Juniper didn’t feel confident of her ability to manipulate me, which, given the low level of her culture and intellectual capacity, is closer to the heart of the matter.

I had experienced a rough year. I got my arm broken in a bus accident and still showed up for work for months with my arm in a cast. By propping my arm up on rubber wrist supports I was able to type and fulfill my daily quota of documents without complaining or making excuses. I never asked for, nor did I receive, any kind of personal consideration from Juniper, who is not inclined toward any gesture of generosity in any case. Trained in Cristobal Christalballs’ philosophy of management, Juniper adhered to only one consideration, that of obsequious fealty to herself personally, which, considering her feeble personal and intellectual qualities, was out of the question for me.

Since Juniper held me in such low regard, I don’t feel bad about broadcasting my opinion of her. We live in a new world of information, and offenses that previously went unanswered are now subject to public scrutiny, depending on the ability of people to bring them to light.

With the Democrats’ recapture of congress, George Bush is now undergoing much the same process. He thought he was tough but he’s not. All the nasty little gambits that he and his motley little clique have perpetrated are undergoing an aeration in the salutary rainbow of public analysis. The tectonic plates of public opinion are starting to inch in the direction of openness. Do I expect to contribute to this climate by exposing Juniper Dorkman’s dark little games, which owe so much to the spirit of repression and consolidation of personal power as characterized by the electoral coup d’état staged in Florida in 2000 and the naked attempts to disqualify huge swaths of voters through abuses attempted by forcing U.S. Attorneys to file court challenges in congressional and senate races in order to swing the contests in the Republicans’ direction? Do I really expect to influence anybody? That would be naïve. I prefer to think of this boring little treatise as a thumbnail sketch of society in turn-of-the-century New York, no more than that. What I write is for purposes of art. Let Juniper Dorkman and her ilk be exposed to the judgment of history for reasons of entertainment.

But when she poisoned the old man’s granddaughter against me out of a pure spirit of spite and personal vindictiveness, that really bummed me out.

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Posted on 5/14/2007 ( Permanent Link )
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