It is beginning to look a bit Year Zero-ish down at the old salt mine.

    Yesterday, forty folks were canned from the uptown office. So far, that's the single greatest loss a department has faced. Why the powers that be have deemed it best to drag all this out, instead of getting all the ugliness done in one big round is beyond me. Unlike Caligula, they don't seem to find it particular irksome that all the staff does not have one common neck. Upper management is, it would seem, happy to wail away like crazed lumberjacks, chopping madly away at any necks that make themselves available, whenever they are available.

    There is, however, classical precedence for their action plan. They seem to be taking their cues from The Management Secrets of Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus. In order to boost morale, take decisive action to fix the fatal flaws in the business model, and get Company Y back on track, the upper management group has taken bold action: they have headed off to a collection of rustic villas in the south of France for a two week company-paid "retreat," kids and wives in tow. There they will discuss profit-critical wine appreciation strategies, draw up reorganization blueprints for restructuring the brouchette de poulet au romarin to maximize lunchtime efficiencies, plan innovation-oriented expansions into dauraude provencale territories, and take extensive fiddling lessons.
    Let it never be said that the lessons of the ancients are not applicable to modern life. This is what people mean, I suppose, when they praise the benefits of a classical education.

    Feeling somewhat left out, the AVPs have organized a considerably less posh "retreat" to New Orleans for the same time. Though this trip speaks ill of their sense of timing, it does reveal an unsuspected grasp of thematic unity: they've decided to go from one ruin to another. If one had to contemplate the fortunes of Company Y between endless rounds of pain-numbing cocktails, I could think of no better setting than New Orleans. There one can ponder the disastrous mix of absentee leadership and faulty planning in concrete terms.

    While the bigwigs contemplate whether or new mission is to "competently enhance mission-critical deliverables in order to proactively pursue corporate methods of empowerment to exceed customer expectations" or "authoritatively provide access to high standards in information so that we may endeavor to enthusiastically simplify economically sound meta-services for 100% customer satisfaction," the rest of us are here in the cube farms, trying to get some work done despite the fact that all the deciders left for their getaways without budget projections – meaning only a handful of folks actually have budgets to which they can charge their time. We are, in white collar cube-monkey terms, in a sort of post-collapse limbo.

    As frustrating as all this is, it is somewhat fascinating as well. The reactions of the various cube dwellers would be rich loam for the aspiring organizational sociologist. Most are trying to expand the existing work to fit the space allotted through a process of hyper-division of labor. So that everybody has work that can be charged to a budget, the existing work has been decomposed to its most discrete and minute tasks. These tasks have then been rationed out to different folks who are, as yet, un-attached to accounts with budgets. For example, as far as I can figure, the fellow in the first desk in my particular row of cubes, is doing nothing these days except trafficking paperwork from his neighbor to the online folks a few yards away. We've made him a redundancy for our email. Should things get worse, I suspect we'll have him start transcribing Word docs by hand, making him a redundancy for our printer.

    Others seem to be treating the whole thing as a sort of semi-working holiday. They've been told they can't work, so they don't. You can find these folks gossiping away in the lunch room, reading at their desks (at least one gentleman, a hourly employee and part-time English grad student from NYU, is rereading Kafka's The Castle, which, increasingly, could serve us as an employee handbook of sorts), or, in the most elaborate instance, participating in a knitting circle that meets in our 9th floor conference room. This last group is particularly pleasant as they seem to be made up of women (and two men) for nearly every department down here, representing the only genuine example of inter-departmental cooperation I've witnessed since my return.

    The last group comprises an active and vocal minority and are, I think, my least favorite tribe of the company's Thuderdome-era. They seem to think that this is all some sort test by the now absentee management to separate the vital and useful employees from the motivationless slugs who will justly get the axe when the Great Men return. This subset of the office humanity has decided the best way to show they are fit enough to be selected for the dubious post-decimation days is to fill this dead time with meetings. Lots and lots of meetings. Meetings about workflow, should it start flowing again. Meetings about the hiring and firing of freelancers. Meetings about copy paper logistics. Meetings about the abuse of smoking breaks. Meetings about email etiquette (specifically the appropriate responses to meeting requests). Meetings about meeting agenda setting. Meetings about dress codes. Meetings about the proper volume at which phone conversations should be held. Meetings to regulate the number of meetings. Honestly, it isn't the worst plan I've heard for communicating one's institutional value to the Great Men. As a general rule, the Great Men take a sort of pride in not knowing what the average employee in the company does. They understand that we sit in front of computers for a good portion of the day, but any further details are met with the sort of bemused disdain The New Yorker reserves for youth-oriented popular culture: it is funny, in a slumming sort of way, but not really for Our Crowd. Meetings, however, are something they understand. The real work of the company, as far as their concerned, is done in meetings. A completely efficient employee would, I assume, never set foot outside of a conference room. The Meeters (not to be confused with the fine band of the same name) are simply doing what any good seducer does: appeal to the target's sense of themselves at their finest. To book yourself into a shit load of meetings is to appeal to them by reinforcing their sense of the worth of what they do. However, despite the seemingly reasonable approach, it 1) is completely pissing me off and 2) puts way too much faith in the reasonableness of the Great Men. After all, these are the same leaders who got us into this mess. Their keen insight and level-head judgments are what screwed Company Y from wit to Whitsunday. The belief that, upon their return, their judgments on the quick and dead will be guided by anything resembling reason is, I think, poorly supported by recent events. They are, I think, missing the obvious. This must be how atheists feel about Christians who eagerly await the Rapture.

Auto-meme

    The only automobile I've ever felt affection for was a pick ol' truck we dubbed the Big Red One. It was not a particularly nice truck, but I liked it.

Songs

Here are the song titles that I press-ganged into being diary titles:

1.    What’s New, Stan Getz and Chet Baker
2.    Whatever the Case May Be . . . , Spektr
3.    We Wanna See Santa Do the Mambo, Big John Greer
4.    Lost Someone, James Brown
5.    Pseudo-Bread, Boris
6.    Undeliverable, The Soviettes
7.    I Mean Wow, Imitation Electric Piano
8.    I'm Just Going to Blow My Little Mind to Bits, The Haunted
9.    All of the Time, Locksley
10.    It's Not You (But That's Just Me), Houseguest
11.    They Can't Take That Away from Me, Billie Holiday
12.    Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed, David Bowie
13.    If You Could Read Your Mind, Clinic
14.    Sorry for Laughing, Joseph K
15.    Baby, It's Cold Outside, Dean Martin
16.    Somebody, Somewhere, Larry Birdsong
17.    OK, So What? Freddie North
18.    I'll Be Seeing You, Sarah Vaughn
19.    But I Ain't Got You, Barry and the Remains
20.    Excellent Choice, The Horrors
21.    Homeward, The Sundays
22.    Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals, Raymond Scott
23.    The Side of the Decided, Fake Problems
24.    Black Thumbnail, Kings of Leon
25.    Love for Tender, Elvis Costello
26.    Beaten to the Punch, Elvis Costello
27.    All In My Head, Good Shoes
28.    World Shut Your Mouth, Julian Cope
29.    I Just Dropped in to Say Goodbye, Carl Smith
30.    Contort Yourself, James Chance
31.    That's a Good Question, The Pick Up Sticks