On Work

I was hired as a technical writer in 1997, by a company I'll call the Eskaton Telephony Corporation. Eskaton developed and sold commercial telecommunications software, and my job was turning out customer documentation for products that ranged from telephony servers designed to work with different makes of switch, to software that call centers used to manage outgoing call campaigns.

My boss was a "tech-pubs" manager I'll call Ed. Ed was a company man who seldom joked around, and certainly not about work. He wore shirts with the Eskaton logo. He was not tall, and one thing that sticks out in my mind all these years later is his walk, a brisk Napoleonic stride.

An un-tenured refugee from academia, Ed tried with real determination to make his life at Eskaton "work," to fulfill the impossible demands on him. I think I know why: he wanted to "succeed."

Twitching from his coffee, Ed updated us eight technical writers in weekly department meetings each Monday morning. Somebody from the marketing department wanted the Installation Guide for the 4.2 Meridien server, who was going to revise it? He'd just received word late Friday, after that big ramp-up, that the Jamison project was dead. That fast. The call center team was pushing for a big release next month on for the Outgoing Suite, and all hands were needed. Could Don work Saturday?

"I really don't understand what I'm supposed to be doing from one minute to the next. It seems either of two levels of priority gets assigned to any project around here: 'Urgent,' or, 'Right fuckin' now,'" one colleague remarked thoughtfully.

Right fuckin' now.

Eskaton churned out software that the marketing people promised to customers ahead-of-schedule, with custom features the engineers could not possibly implement in time. The documentation was supposed to be ready to ship when the product was, and it was often embarrassingly poor.

I remember Ed collaring writers to spend time in "strategy meetings" with marketing honchos, blue-eyed, pink-cheeked young men who spoke cryptically, all in metaphor.

"You can't tell just by looking at the tracks, which way the train will run," remarked one lad, when a colleague expressed wonderment at an intended market.

The technical people and the marketing department had bosses in common. These higher-ups worked in offices with sleek furniture and set the day-to-day pace in the cubicle farms at Eskaton. We didn't see them much.

If you'd asked Ed in those days if he liked his job--and people did--he'd have told you it was "exciting." It was the sanctioned response, in the circumstances, the one that maintained the corporate culture's euphemistic self-description as a "challenging, high-energy" work environment. But it was largely a lie.

"This User Guide is taking you too long to write," Ed told me earnestly one day. We were alone in the conference room, with the door shut. "The proportion of your yearly salary going into this book is too high."

When he hired me, Ed had been rather cute, with an athletic build, big blue eyes behind wire-rimmed spectacles, and straight blond hair parted to the side. At the time of this conversation, he probably did not even recall what his children looked like, for all the time he spent working. His sloppy beer gut preceded him wherever he went, like a late-term pregnancy. He looked unkempt.

I don't recall much else that went down in that meeting. But, damn, I started staying late to finish that guide. The memory of this, and other personal sacrifices I made for Eskaton, sting. The memories sting, because I wasn't working unpaid late time out of personal ambition. Deep down, I harbored a dirty little secret, one shared, I think, by most of us who stayed late. For the competitive, high-achieving environment we supposedly found ourselves in, we drones really weren't working to "get ahead." We wanted only to keep up. There. I've said it. The air at Eskaton was thick with unspoken threat.

Many of the developers were new immigrants and depended on their employer issuing them H1 visas. Eskaton, then, had what amounted to a stable of indentured servants it could pay barely competitive wages.

"The shareholders are going to find out about our failure to get out this release," I once overheard a project manager lecturing his minions. "It isn't going to be pretty."

It was just software Eskaton was turning out, some of it pretty inferior. It's not like we were saving lives. There was absolutely nothing to justify the mystique of self-importance at Eskaton, an attitude fed by the Puritan work ethic, and one that served the unchecked profit motive.

I last worked for Eskaton in 1999. Enough time has passed that I am in a position to reflect on what might have been different.

The clash between an employer's expectations, and human reality, is an old theme and has been addressed in many different ways. I think of organized labor, at its best, ensuring adequate pay and job conditions to skilled workers in many industries, and setting expectations for humane workplaces in many others. I think also of Dilbert cartoons, poking fun at the plight of downtrodden white-collar employees, though they do nothing to change the victim mentality of the real-life objects of humor.

Through it all, I entertain one quirky personal vision, tinged with a radicalism that excites me. I see Eskaton employees turning off their computers en masse at 5:20 PM, rising, and going home to have dinner. Just like that. No matter what "has to be finished by the end of the week." My imagination has the Eskaton offices vacant on weekends, or infrequently, peopled by those whose personal sense of vocation or ambition motivates them to work late. I think of throngs of skilled, disciplined employees steadfastly refusing to sacrifice themselves in any particular at the behest of any employer.

I expand this vision to other places of employment besides Eskaton, and even to workplaces in other industries.

"Workers who mutinied like that would quickly be replaced," you say, "Their jobs would be out-sourced all the faster."

Hold on: If my vision really took hold, I believe the whole economy would look vastly different. "The profit motive" would founder, lacking a slave mentality to drive it. Maybe the "tech bubble" would have burst much earlier than it did. Or maybe we never would have seen that manifestation of cultural hype in the form we knew it, at all.

Back to reality. Perhaps victories to be counted in this struggle are ones that amount to "changing the system from within." In the years that followed my departure, I got news occasionally of Eskaton. Last I heard, Ed had been let go. He'd been replaced as tech-pubs manager by a group member named Rita, an earthy and no-nonsense former housewife.

When I left, we had had eight group members, hired by Ed in the two-plus years he'd held the manager post. I heard Rita had hired to swell team ranks to twenty in less than one year on the job.