“I Want To Be A Japanese Cow”

This rant started years ago when I was laid off my job. It was a good job- great pay, plenty of opportunities and room for advancement, lots of travel. The work was hard but rewarding. And I liked it. But, as will happen, some jag-off new VP came in and saw how to save some pennies by looking at short-term savings, and laid off 80% of all the personnel in the section I was in- nationwide. The really amusing bit here is that this VP was later “let go” as he misplaced most of the inventory of the Oakland warehouse. What happened? All of us who were laid-off knew, but why tell?

My next job lasted little over a year. This was a supervisor position in an understaffed facility, so my group was required to do all manual labor- including taking out the trash even though we had janitors. The job was OK, but the management had… issues- seemingly random procedures, decisions for the now instead of down the road, and amazing lack of ability to communicate with their employees. Every year, they would have a round of lay-offs to show these savings in their annual numbers. Then, when their new budget was set, they would hire new personnel to do the same jobs but with different titles. The first round happened just after I was hired, and I was let go during the next year’s round. I heard later on that the management there was under internal investigation from the corporate office, and most of the management left within a few weeks of each other. Coincidence?

About 2 weeks after, I found a new job with a direct mail company. The phrase “direct mail” means “junk mail”- the crap that fills up your mailbox every day. It comes with your name on it, is a meaningless waste of trees, but let’s you know “HEY, you exist”. There were 3 owners, and each wanted me to do something different as part of my job. You see, my job description was so vague and blurry that they had to come up with stuff to justify my salary. I started with simple data verification, then quality control, then was made the liaison with the Post Office, then blahblahblah. By the end, I had no idea what the hell my job was but I seemed to be co-running the office. One of the owners was artificially chemically unstable (*SNORT*). His decisions were erratic at best and he was prone to fits of rage (once making allusions of taking a baseball bat to an employee’s head during a meeting) and shouting. One owner almost never spoke, he just fixed machines. The last owner was an OK-kinda guy. Their main source of work came from the mortgage industry and when that popped so did the company. Within a 6 week period, they laid off almost ½ of their workers, myself amongst them. This hapened, again, about a year after I was there. Not too much later, the rage-aholic was found to be siphoning off company funds and was bought out. He soon opened a rival company doing the same business, only a few blocks away. There’re rumors he might now be under investigation by the IRS.

Less than a week later, I was at my new job. I was hired just in time to go directly into their busy season where they would do almost 80% of their yearly business. So I had to train myself and the seasonal staff. The busy season went fairly well, and the job itself was relatively easy. The owner was a different subject- hypocritical, self-opinionated, with a dislike of hearing anything that wasn’t “yes, sir”. After the busy season, he started letting the seasonal personnel go- which made sense. Then he started moving some of the staff he retained to other sections- again, made sense at the time. Then he started letting the remaining full-time employees under my management go, to the point where there was only me. I was doing 16% (the owners’ number) more work than the summer before, primarily by myself when there were 3 people there the summer before. It was during this time that his instability really got to me. When I tried to get help, he yelled then got me the extra help. When he told me I could get whatever I needed for my area and I did, he yelled. When I tried to tell him what he wanted to do was unsafe, he yelled. When I told him there was a problem with employee moral, he blamed me (even though the employees has specifically named him as the issue). Thankfully (yes, thankfully (it was like having a 300-lb weight with diabetes and bad breath being lifted off my head) I was fired. One of the reasons? I wore tank tops twice in my 13-month employment. I understand he is now under investigation by both OSHA for safety issues and the Fair Labor board (for several reasons, including making derogatory remarks concerning gender preference).

And this all leads me back to the title: “I Want To Be A Japanese Cow”. I was out at dinner not too long along with a young lady, and we were discussing food. I mentioned wanting to eat a real Kobe steak one day. She didn’t know what that was, so I explained that Kobe beef is from a type of cattle in Japan which is fed beer & sake and massaged regularly. She, in a somewhat tipsy state, proclaimed the title of this rant. And I have to agree- the idea of being pampered for years before being slaughtered does indeed seem better than years of dealing with fools before old age & death.