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Many years ago, I worked a Dominick's, a large chain of supermarkets here in Illinois. While I was there, we got bought out by Safeway, which I had never heard of but apparently is a dominant force in groceries across most of the rest of the country.You can see they're keeping their hand in the pot, too. Take a look at the two pages I linked up there, and you'll notice a number of similarities. As part of the buyout, all us employees were required to attend a meeting in the second floor stock room of a different Dominick's. I don't know why we had to go to a different Dominick's, as everyone there was from my store. For that matter, I don't know why their stock room was on the second floor.

The meeting, as anyone with any familiarity at all with corporate America can guess, was basically a big old bluster-fest designed to tell us how things were going to be run now that Safeway was in charge. I'm pretty sure I signed a non-disclosure agreement or something, so I can't really say much more, except that the buzzword for this program was "superior customer service." That and it was basically four hours of us being told how to comport ourselves in public, something every one of us presumably had learned how to do at the age of about 6. It involved watching a lot of stupid videos that I think were made by the same yahoos who made the videos I had to sit through in Grade School. They certainly weren't treating me as if I were any older or more sophisticated. That and every one of the videos said pretty much the exact same thing as all the others.

As a side-note, one of the women from my store had a minor emotional breakdown about halfway through the meeting. She had to be led away, and I recall her saying between the tears "It's too much to remember!" While it would please me greatly to say that the woman had simply rebelled against the doldrums of corporate drone-hood, I have to be honest and say she just wasn't a stable person. She was generally on the verge of tears even at the best of times.

The thing I remember clearest about this meeting was that, among the suits from Safeway deigning to breathe the same air-conditioning and dust as us (seriously, why is it always dusty in stock rooms? There's damn near constant motion in those things), was our store manager at the time. He informed us that earlier that week, he'd attended a meeting much like this one (though I imagine in cheerier surroundings), being told about the new policies and whatnot we would be working under. He told us that he "walked away from that meeting feeling very excited."

It was the first time I'd heard that particular word in a business setting, but it sure as hell wasn't the last. I think the main reason I remember it was that it sounded so alien coming from this guy. While he wasn't exactly the Boss From Hell, I just couldn't see him being excited about anything. He was the kind of guy whose emotional scale, if you'll forgive the musical pun, was barely an octave. I'd seen him mildly upset, vaguely disappointed, putting on a fake smile for the customers, acting warm and friendly in a rather distant manner with the employees, and sternly disciplinarian. In all but the faux happiness, his facial expression was generally of one suffering from mild but uncomfortable constipation. No matter how I stretched my imagination, I couldn't see him getting excited over anything, save a laxative.

Fast forward several years, to my office job at SecurityLink from Ameritech. I had gone from pushing carts to pushing buttons. I was pleased with the change, and it should tell you something about working as a bagger at a grocery store that I considered the move to cubicles, grey-on-drab color schemes, and its ilk an improvement.

I had been working there for not quite a year when a bunch of changes took place. From what water cooler gossip told me, Ameritech, which was in the process of being bought out by SBC, had to get rid of its security company (that being the part I worked for) because of some anti-trust law or something. So we get bought out by this mom-and-pop security company called Cambridge. That lasted about a week, before Cambridge got bought out by ADT. I've always had the sneaking suspicion that Cambridge bought SecurityLink to sweeten the deal with ADT. Especially as from what I could tell, Cambridge spent pretty much all the money they had in buying us. At least, that was the excuse they gave when raise time rolled around and we all got royally screwed. I'm not kidding, either. My boss explained to me that the average raise that year was $.08 an hour. I explained to him that it would have been less insulting to get no raise.

So after working for Ameritech for almost a year, then SBC for almost a week, I worked for Cambridge Security for about a month before the merger with ADT was complete. And soon after that, ADT got bought out by Tyco. For those keeping score at home, in the course of a month, I worked for five different companies, while keeping the same actual job. Maybe that's pretty normal for corporations in a world of constant mergers, buy-outs, bankruptcies, and other uncertainties, but it was all new to me, and it all happened pre-9/11, when our economy was supposed to be going strong.

One thing with all the paperwork I was getting welcoming me to the new company of the week: I became very familiar with corporate buzzwords. I could have hosted party games where someone had to drink every time some permutation of the word "excited" appeared in a memo, but I didn't want anyone dying of alcohol poisoning.

People like to throw around the word "soulless," but I hesitate to apply it here. It seems to me that it's more like blind dogged follow-the-leader antics. If that's the same thing to you as soulless, so be it. What seems to happen is, some guy makes millions (or billions, if millions are no longer the gold standard) climbing the corporate ladder, and then he publishes a book chronicling his achievements. Others in similar positions (or who want to get there) read the book, and decide that rather than it being that one guy's personal success story, it's some kind of alchemical formula that, if followed exactly and perfectly, will lead to the exact same success in everyone else who attempts it. So you've got hundreds or thousands of corporate drones fly fishing in the Andes while only wearing boxer-briefs because that's what the CEO of Megacorp does.

The ironic thing is, you've got all these people aping the actions of a man who made himself famous for not doing what everyone else around him was doing. All they're really accomplishing is setting up a staircase for the next outside-the-box thinker in the right place at the right time to ascend. In a way, it's Social Darwinism at it's very finest. And you have to wonder how much of that guy's personal fortune are due to royalties from the book on how he became a success?

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights