Date: Sat, 31 Mar 2001 15:49:43 -0500
From: Chuck0 <chuck-AT-tao.ca>
Subject: [i-news] "Attack of the Mad Shitter"





http://www.hpoo.com/columns/hells/news54.html

"Attack of the Mad Shitter"
by Paul T. Riddell
Originally published in the Hell's Half-Acre Herald (March 19, 2001)

Ah, the news in the business community keeps getting better and better.
The
March 18 New York Times ran a little report in its "Week In Review"
section
of some of the crass and thuggish layoff methods used by dotcom
companies in
the last few weeks (one of the best: a company that announced layoffs
and
then told employees to wait at their stations for an E-mail message
letting
them know if they were staying or going), right alongside the
lamentations
in the Business section about the ongoing crash of the stock market. A
few
days before, Reuters ran a report on a study that showed that employees
near
the bottom of the company hierarchy were much more likely to seek
retribution or revenge against real or perceived slights than those near
the
top, thus helping to explain everything from company virus attacks to
office
shootings. (As refreshing as it was to see that someone seemed to care
enough about employee morale to commission this study, the basic
response is
still "Well, duh." These guys and gals aren't pissing in the coffee pot
just
for giggles.) Right now, the big worry is that a decrease in American
worker
productivity will only aggravate the impending recession, and never mind
that this collapse is inevitable once the folks working 90-hour weeks
with
the promise of future benefits realize that they'll never see those
benefits. At this point, no rational person is going to believe anything
coming from a 22-year-old MBA about job security or pension plans or
stock
options: if these scum weren't sharing when times were good, why the
hell
should anyone trust them now?

Even considering that the stories about the tight US job market is a
blatant
lie, the recent five-year boom was a nightmare for managers used to
alternating between King Log and King Stork. Ten years ago, it was easy
to
keep employees in line with that old saw "You know, it's a really bad
job
market out there, and I don't think you'll be able to find anything
better
than what you have right now." Then, with the boom in open positions in
any
number of companies, employees treated like abused housewives didn't
have to
resort to the shotgun in the middle of the night to escape the
nightmare:
they could just leave. (This is one reason why I always detested the
Dilbert
comic strip: since everyone has a story about having a stupid boss and
lazy
co-workers that compares exactly to one Dilbert strip or another, the
strip
encourages those suffering under lousy working conditions to suck it up
and
keep taking it, because it's just as bad anywhere else.) Instead of
working
together, management and employees at far too many companies are
adversaries, with management regularly breaking promises and then
screaming
about how nobody has any loyalty because the abused finally say "to hell
with this" and walk out.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not advocating killing all managers in their
sleep
and forming communes or anything silly like that. If anything, the
deaths of
so many of the hippie communes during the Sixties proves that ultimately
someone has to take charge, if only to decide who washes the dishes and
who
cleans out the outhouse and how often. Good bosses are rare, and they're
extremely valuable, so they should be cherished and respected and
protected
from sharp objects coming at them. Unfortunately, these good bosses
usually
have bosses above them who shouldn't be trusted with used Q-Tips, and
the
good bosses are usually replaced during a layoff cycle by dingbats fresh
from business school who haven't worked a real job in their lives. I
understand it's because the good bosses are too busy trying to get
productivity by the use of rewards for loyalty and improved production,
not
by creative application of the whip.

I once took a journalism class taught by Bill Marvel, one of the only
good
and true writers at the Dallas Morning News, and he related that
graffiti
was a valid communications medium used by those who felt that they had
no
other venue for expressing themselves. In that way, office rebellion is
an
act of expression, if only to let the rest of the office or factory know
"This has gone on far enough." Many intending to rebel tend to pop off
too
early and in the wrong way: you don't shoot your boss and everyone else
in a
three-county radius if you expect anyone to listen to your complaints
about
the lousy quality of toilet paper in the employee restroom. However,
considering that nobody seems to want to apply the Magna Carta upon CEOs
and
middle managers, the only option is the strike for (relative) freedom.
This
may be exercised by nasty comments written on restroom stalls; it may be
exercised by "blue flu" or by general refusals to put in "mandatory
voluntary overtime". One way or another, though, the more a company
tries to
stifle dissent, the more it grows. Push someone too hard, and WHAMMO! a
nice
big writeup at Fucked Company that relates how the board of directors
blew a
year's operating expenses on booze and hookers during a weeklong holiday
in
Aspen while telling the grunts to recycle office supplies to make them
last
longer.

Everyone has stories of subtle and not-so-subtle terrorism intended
against
their managers or fellow workers in the search for a decent work
environment. I remember one manager for an insurance company who found
that
her serfs spent their lunch breaks at their desks playing computer
solitaire
because they didn't have enough time to go out and get lunch anywhere
else…and contacted the tech department to have all of the built-in
computer
games removed from every computer in her department. She then had the
nerve
to look surprised when someone climbed over the fence in her gated
community
and slashed all four tires on her new BMW. (I was not involved, nor do I
know who was, nor do I have any interest in computer games, but
considering
that this was a company that required its employees to show up to the
company picnic and then charged them $20 a head to attend, I understood
the
motivation.) Her predecessor was such a petty tyrant that she held a
mandatory meeting when she left the company so she could bask in the
perceived rush of sadness from the grunts, but instead her announcement
was
greeted with an impromptu rendition of "Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead".
But by
far, the most base, most disgusting, and most honest rebellion against a
toxic work environment I've ever come across came from a fellow I only
know
as The Mad Shitter.

Back a decade ago, I was working for Texas Instruments, back when TI was
still involved in the defense contracting business and before it sold
that
big chunk to Raytheon. Although a firm supplier of Cold War armaments
for
the self-appointed Forces of Good, TI also spent quite a bit of time
encouraging its managers to study the book The Business Philosophies of
Josef Stalin, leaving every midlevel manager protected from
assassination
attempts by a good multilevel layer of professional asskissers and
stoolies.
TI encouraged betrayal of one's co-workers and friends at every level,
and
if upper management wasn't able to inflict the right level of terror
through
flunkies standing at the front door of offices and workshops to make
sure
that employees came back on time from a 26-minute lunch (not 30 minutes:
26
minutes, and never mind that the lunch area may have been a 12-minute
walk
from those areas), it encouraged the mobilization of a vast volunteer
secret
police force that tattled any comment, no matter how minor, back to a
supervisor's ear in a matter of minutes. Talking out loud about anything
deemed improper, from the lousy food in the cafeteria to the merits of
joining a union, guaranteed that the offender was sent to gulag. Before
1990, that gulag was an inability to move up within the company, which
just
stimulated more improper talk. After 1990, that gulag was the layoff,
which
convinced the survivors to work harder and smarter if they didn't want
to be
next.

And if you're wondering why anyone would want to suffer under those
conditions, remember that this was during the late Eighties, when Texas
was
suffering from a major recession brought about by the drop in the price
of
oil in 1985. By 1986, any permanent job for those without a college
degree
that didn't involve flipping burgers or bagging groceries was treasured,
and
these were the days when blue-collar jobs were still valued or at least
respected. Compared to all of the nasty and foul temporary jobs around,
the
promise of something approximating a decent rate of pay combined with
basic
benefits was seen by many to be worth any amount of discomfort, because
that
decent rate of pay was enough to buy enough booze and weed to ease that
discomfort and make getting up in the morning a little more tolerable.

Not that Texas Instruments was willing to give a decent rate of pay: the
initials "TI" stood for "Tiny Income" among the workforce. (They stood
for
"Training Academy" for the engineers, who took advantage of the great
training but left because of the miserable pay the moment their
contracts
were done. This changed to "Totally Incompetent" in the Nineties, when
TI's
layoffs regularly caught fresh engineers who had started weeks or even
days
before. A long-running joke among the labor pool was that they should
get
their resumes ready whenever the company promoted new vice-presidents:
without fail, the company would promote anywhere between two and
fourteen
new vice-presidents to replace those who cashed in their stock options
and
bailed out, and then lay off another 6000 employees.) Every year,
management
would argue that TI paid a median rate compared to other companies for
the
same general type of work, conveniently leaving out that they were
including
companies based in maquiladoros on the Mexican border so as to skew the
statistics. Shortly after making everyone feel that they should be proud
to
have a job at all, someone would roll out some boneheaded new policy
intended to save a little bit of money but that completely destroyed
whatever morale remained. (One of the best was the new smoking policy in
1991, which charged anyone using tobacco products an extra $10 per
paycheck
for insurance purposes. A well-intentioned policy, to be sure, but any
former smoker or chewer who decided to quit had to be "clean" for a
minimum
of six months, and any contact with tobacco automatically turned a
non-smoker into a smoker. How was this to be policed, one asks? By
encouraging fellow employees to tattle on each other, of course. The
only
rebellion that seemed to work was a mass exodus from making
contributions to
the United Way, which just made it easier to spot the obvious
troublemakers
and lay them off.) The only policy that backfired was the mandatory
random
drug testing policy that started in 1989: intended to round up all of
the
pothead proles, it was quietly dropped, according to rumor, because far
too
many members of upper management were testing positive for cocaine for
their
firings to be explained away as "leaving to pursue other opportunities."

In a novel, the author would create a grand hero to fight the forces of
oppression and incidentally make a name for himself in the process. This
would have worked at Texas Instruments if anyone with ambition or
options
hadn't left as soon as inherently possible, and the rest were happier
complaining than doing something about the situation. Petitioning the
government for a redress of grievances didn't work, either: the only
petitions the boss of my department listened to were petitions from
those
willing to get up at 5 ayem on a Saturday morning for a good eighteen
holes
of golf, and anyone coming to him during working hours with issues were
either blown off or told in no uncertain terms that making waves was a
good
way to lose employment. In a comic book, we would have ended up with a
strangely dressed but inherently noble protector of the weak and
helpless,
determined to prove that managers are a superstitious and cowardly lot.
This
was real life, though, and people running through a factory wearing
leotards
and their Pokemon Underoos on the outside get escorted outside by
security
or popped in the ass with a taser and thrown into the back of a police
car.
The stress was intolerable, and nature abhors a power vacuum, so TI
nature
created an avenger for us. It created The Mad Shitter.

The first signs that we had a superhero in our midst happened sometime
in
1989, when one of the supervisors went to the supply mezzanine to
collect
some three-ring binders. To explain, I was working in the Non-Metallics
Shop, a little area at the TI facility on Trinity Mills Road in
Carrollton
that was dedicated to making the nose cones for the Hostile Anti-Radar
Missile (HARM for short) that TI was foisting upon the Navy. The company
was
doing well at that time, but very little of that wealth was trickling
down
to the people on the bottom, and we were definitely the people on the
bottom. The Non-Metallics Shop ran three shifts for at least five to six
days a week, and I was on the Second Shift: 3 p.m. to 11:15. Most of
management only operated during daylight hours, and our supervisor at
the
time was usually in the parking lot with his girlfriend in the back seat
of
his pimp-red Camaro shortly after dark, so the environment wasn't quite
as
foul as it was during the day. This time, though, the girlfriend was out
of
town, so The Man was actually accomplishing a bit of work when he went
up to
the second level of this gigantic shop space to get those binders. He
got
his binders, but he also found a gigantic human turd on the mezzanine,
placed so that the first thing anyone saw as they came up the staircase
was
a nice brown replica of the Hindenberg. He screamed and ran back down,
demanding an accounting of all of Second Shift, and waited for someone
to
confess to this atrocity.

Naturally, nobody in their right mind was going to confess to taking a
crap
on the mezzanine, so The Man bullied someone into cleaning it up and
dutifully reported it to his boss, the Golfer. Quick triangulation
ascertained that the offending fecal matter could have been plunked down
at
any time between 7:00 that morning and 7:00 that evening, so everyone
received a stern lecture on proper toiletry the next day, with
horrendous
threats implied for those without proper bowel or bladder control.

A month went by, and then the Mad Shitter struck again. And again. And
again. This time, he wasn't going for an obvious doody drop: he was
obviously hopped up on too many Judas Priest albums, because he was
Screaming For Vengeance. Considering the size of those dumps, he was
definitely doing some screaming: when security came in, they ascertained
that these were (a) human feces and (b) left where they were issued and
not
made somewhere else and hauled in via wheelbarrow or forklift. They
started
appearing in other places, suggesting both lookouts and access to
various
equipment, as well as a particularly demented imagination. Kong turds
started showing up on the tops of light fixtures, on storage racks, and
in
file cabinets. The Mad Shitter struck one of the locked file cabinets
intended to hold classified documents, tooting on an open file folder,
folding it quickly, and deftly shoving it through. He even hit The Man's
pimp-red Camaro, squeezing out a long but pungent trail that looked and
smelled like a dead water moccasin.

One of the vilest yet most appropriate attacks came upon the cafeteria,
which remained a joke up to the day the facility shut down. This
facility
was in the middle of what was then absolute nowhere, and heading out for
lunch on a 26-minute break was career suicide, so we all had no choice
but
to bring in our own meals or buy the slop from the company vending
machines.
The "food" would have been rejected by dogs, pigs, maggots, and coliform
bacteria, and all complaints about the quality went absolutely nowhere.
(A
year before the facility shut down, TI suddenly had money for a massive
expansion and revamping of the cafeteria, which was finished just in
time to
announce that everyone was being laid off or transferred, and TI had a
wonderful tax break. The running joke was that if complaining about the
food
got us a brand new cafeteria, maybe complaining about the cafeteria
would
get us edible food.) The Mad Shitter finally managed to get results, in
the
form of a freshly wrapped bowel movement on a little plastic platter,
complete with a scoop of potato salad and a sprig of parsley, loaded
into
the vending machine to await discovery by someone looking for a new
taste
sensation. One person told the anecdote of finding a shit sundae,
whipped
cream and a cherry on top, in that same machine, but this was never
confirmed.

By this time, The Mad Shitter was a true folk hero to the masses: the
managers wanted him dead or at least unemployed, and every report of a
new
atrocity just fueled speculation as to his identity. The Mad Shitter
obviously wasn't a woman: women were rara avii on a par with promises of
profit sharing that actually came through. He wasn't a member of
management,
unless we had a really sick bastard whom liked blowing dirt. (One
manager
was fond of sneaking up behind his charges, farting, and running away,
but
he was quickly removed from suspicion.) By the time the Mad Shitter
somehow
managed to break into the plant manager's office, shit on both his desk
and
chair, and then get out without leaving any traces of his identity other
than that his blood type was O-positive, we knew that we had our own
blue-collar Bruce Wayne, and anyone with an IQ above sixty was watched.
Instead of quelling the attacks, this just increased the strikes against
anything and everything in range, culminating in the great Fourth of
July
Bombing.

The Golfer was not only mean but paranoid, and he had enough clout that
he
actually had a real office instead of a cubicle with high walls like the
supervisors. It was composed of cheapo Henry Miller wall units bolted
together to make a monolith in one corner, but it was a real office in a
gar
bage dump scavenger sort of way. Under no circumstances were any of the
grunts allowed near that office unless they had legitimate business with
him, and that business almost always consisted of lectures on Getting
With
The Program or scheduling for tee time on Saturday. Every evening before
he
left, he'd get up from his desk, close and lock the flimsy door that
kept
all of the proles away from His Stuff, and wander home, comforted that
no
matter how miserable everyone was, in no way could the Mad Shitter get
in.

Well, July 4 fell on a Tuesday that year, so we had a four-day weekend.
The
Golfer came back rested and relaxed, opened up his door, and had a
seizure.
Sometime during that weekend, the Mad Shitter struck again. However,
apparently MS really had something for the Golfer, because the Shitter
had
apparently overdosed on laxatives before going in. It was all over the
desk,
the chairs, the file cabinets, the walls: the place resembled the sets
in
The Wild Bunch if the film had been directed by John Waters instead of
Sam
Peckinpah. (Or, for those who saw the film adaptation of Trainspotting,
this
spot was an easy candidate for The Worst Toilet In All Texas, if only
someone had put a potty inside.) And did I mention that the plant shut
down
its air conditioning over that four-day weekend to save money? Or that
the
Non-Metallics Shop had one air vent up in the roof that was too small
for a
human to crawl through, but that let snow and bugs fall from the Great
Outdoors?

Those faced with the horror of that stench once the Golfer opened his
office
were also hit with a puzzle. The lock on the door was still secured; the
floor was concrete, so the Mad Shitter didn't climb up from underneath.
An
investigation by Security ensued, and they discovered fragments of the
acoustic tile that passed for a ceiling atop the mess. According to
them,
the Mad Shitter had somehow slung a rope from one of the overhead
I-beams
holding up the ceiling, climbed down, removed at least one of the
acoustic
plates, did his business, and climbed out, all without anyone else
spotting
him. Whoever he was, he didn't do it over the weekend, because all
weekend
visitors had been accounted for. This wasn't some garden-level pooter
running around. This guy was good.

Sadly, this was the last strike by the Mad Shitter, at least at the
Trinity
Mills facility. Almost exactly a year later, the plant manager announced
that TI was shutting down the Trinity Mills plant, moving the main
factory
equipment back to the plant from which it had sprung a decade before and
my
department to the facility in McKinney. In all of that time, although
those
smart enough to see the layoffs coming down had left while they had the
chance, nobody stood up and even whispered about the identity of the Mad
Shitter. Anyone who knew would have disappeared the way Sakharov and
Theremin did, so he escaped to crap another day.

Well, it's been twelve years since the Mad Shitter first popped up, and
I
still wonder if he's retired, or if he's still running around, his
nightsoil-smeared face and shit-eating grin mortifying idiot managers
everywhere. Either way, we could use someone like him to strike terror
into
the hearts of evil, and evil is all we seem to be getting out of
business
schools these days. Any retribution more subtle than his ways won't get
the
point across, so it's time to get up atop the city and turn on the
ShitterSignal!

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