upon my expertise, having to personally ask me how to get a certain doodad or thingy-bob to work.
I
had transformed myself from the status of homeless vagabondage to invaluable employee, and significantly bettered myself financially. All the same, I was still more than a little annoyed at being paid hourly, when it was clear that I deserved to be a salaried employee… or at least be paid twice as much per hour as I was. I began filling out my timesheet with a regular forty hours a week, then moved up to fifty. My boss never really read the timesheet carefully—it turned out he would sign for anything. After I passed a certain point in my burgeoning career, I even made him pre-sign the timesheets! I was no ordinary white-collar worker, I was a badass gangster. And how could my boss complain? I was the first person in at work when I walked in, and the last person he saw as he left to go home to his wife and kids.
W
ith things on the work front completely under my control, I began inviting a few select friends to use the resources of my workplace. One friend of mine, a shaggily bearded man bearing no small resemblance to Ted Kaczynski, was in dire need of a computer on which to type up his latest manifesto on the madness of industrial civilization. Being a vagabond, he had no such computer, and kept getting kicked out of the supposedly public libraries. As his co-author, I felt a responsibility to help, and began to let him into the building as night fell, usually past nine when even the most hard-working of my fellow employees had left. Together with free reign over high-speed internet, word processing programs, and unlimited printing and office supplies, we spent night after night maniacally typing, looking up synonyms and antonyms, finding the perfect words to express our utter contempt and disgust for the current geopolitical situation. As soon as dawn broke, like vampires, we disappeared back into my secret closet, locking the door and cackling at the bizarre situation we were in.
T
he manifesto was nearing completion one morning when I decided to retire a bit early to the closet, while my stalwart companion worked on crossing the last Ts and dotting the last Is of our latest verbal rampage. In the heat of his writing frenzy, my companion would become so engaged in his task that he would take his shirt off and literally sweat out the various rhetorical problems he was valiantly confronting. One can
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only imagine the effects on the average bourgeois office despot of the surprise apparition of a bearded, shirtless, unwashed madman hunched over his computer keyboard, surrounded by a plethora of thesauri and dictionaries. One can only imagine what went through my boss’s head when he opened the door of the office space to see this completely deranged stranger typing away on his computers. Stunned, my boss simply asked “Who are you?” Muttering something unintelligible, my companion conscientiously saved his work, gathered his books, waved at my boss, and fled down the hallways and out of the office. Strangely enough, when I woke up and snuck out of my closet around lunch, my boss did not ask me a single question. When my co-conspirator informed me of the incident, I couldn’t help but laugh. Still, I felt I was dangerously close to being caught.
A
ll the same, who was I to let this one incident ruin my good nature? Indeed, just another few weeks had gone by when a friend of mine, the crust punk who told me about the roof of Hardees, stopped back in town. Being a kind-hearted soul, I let him in on my little scam at the office space. He was flabbergasted, and frankly, a bit jealous. After all, I had constant internet radio, access to CD-burners, broadband internet, and air conditioned housing without supervision, not to mention free money in the bargain. In a bizarre turn of events, he asked if I could get him a job there. I dropped the question to my boss in one of our semi-weekly meetings, and my boss told me of some webpages he needed made. I confided to my boss that I was an old-fashioned computer programmer, not a web master, but luckily I had a friend who was an expert webmaster who would do the job for him. Delighted, my boss arranged a meeting with my crust punk friend. After a bit of cleaning up, my friend was able to impress my boss as a competent web designer, and was hired on a part-time basis designing webpages. Now, not only did I live in the closet, I had a roommate. Later that very evening, he moved his backpack and sleeping bag into the closet, and we were set. We had great times programming away, listening to vicious metal bands over Internet Radio, doing as little work for maximum payment as we could get away with. The webpage never seemed to get done exactly right, the computer programs always had one or two bugs (“it’s not a bug, it’s a feature!”), and the money kept on flowing in. What could I say? We had found a comfortable
niche within the capitalist system as parasites, modern day silicon ticks on the back of the beast.
N
ot content to keep this privilege to ourselves, we set about sharing the wealth. The office space transformed itself into a bastion of anarchy as soon as the rest of employees left. When 5 p.m. rolled around, dreadlocked and mohawked local punks would come aknocking at the office, wanting to hang out and surf the internet. Soon, as word spread about the autonomous office zone, I regularly had half a dozen visitors clambering around the office late at night, mostly just hanging out. Lost in my minimum-work euphoria and snug in my hidden closet, I felt invincible. Still, even I began getting a bit worried occasionally. Punks would show up too early, sometimes even before 5 pm, and I would have to shoo them away until a more socially acceptable time. Since the office was naturally locked at five, they would have to knock on doors, sometimes being spotted by other employees who were leaving. However, once the crowd was in, there was no stopping them, and the office would become one giant anarcho-punk party complete with metal blaring from tiny computer speakers and everyone lounging around on the stools that spun them around in circles until they got sick.
O
ne thing your average anarcho-punk likes to do is eat. They especially like to eat when it is someone else’s food. One tragic day, I was typing up one of my latest works of art, when a young friend of mine sporting a lip ring and a Dystopia t-shirt rushed in and asked if there was any food. I told him I had some bread, and possibly something in the fridge. He bounded off, followed by two other friends of mine and my crust punk co-employee. Then, I heard some yelling from down by the fridge. Irritated that my solitude had been disturbed, I rose to get the door of the lab and poke my head out to see what was going on down the hall. Before I could even reach the door, my large crusty friend bounded in, smirk on his face. “Man, I think we pissed him off.” I was flabbergasted. Who had they pissed off? What the hell happened! My co-employee looked at me with a look of fear in his eyes, but he tried to crack a humorous grin. “Dude, it was just mustard.”
I
slammed the door shut and got my young protégés to sit still for a second and tell me what had just transpired. Everyone seemed to dodge my questions. Finally, the large one admitted his crime, “Yeah, I was
like looking for a something to put on your bread, and I took this mustard. And the mustard had this name on it. And this dude walked in real pissed off and told me it was his mustard and asked who the hell I was and how I got in the building… I was like, I’m a friend of (insert author’s real name here). And then… I don’t know, I just put the mustard back…” Damnation. I felt my house of cards collapsing, all due to the unnecessary use of mustard without proper security culture.
I
was simultaneously furious and despondent. The mustard owner, a middle-aged man in his thirties with no real prospects for upwards career mobility, was sure to be irrationally upset about the kidnapped mustard. Incidents like this destroy the fragile world of the white-collar worker. Now that he had my name, he would probably find out who I was and report me to my boss. After all, non-employees were not even supposed to be in the building. My boss might decide to inspect the lab… he might even discover my illegal office squat! My head was spinning with the disastrous implications of this incident. What was I to do? I grabbed the anarcho-punks by the collar and gave them the boot from my workplace. I tried to straighten up things in the lab and in my hiding closet, and then fled to a nearby friendly couch to contemplate my doom. We had gone too far.
S
ure enough, the next morning I received an email from my boss demanding an appointment. Fearing for my life, I replied that I was sick for the day and could reschedule it the next day. I spent an entire day evacuating my most important possessions from the premises and attempting to figure out how the hell to explain the incidents of the previous day. However, no quick and easy excuse would come to me, much less a rational course of events that my boss would believe. In despair, I shuffled to meet with my boss the next day. He looked at me with stern eyes worthy of the Pharaoh of Egypt. “You know what happened yesterday?” I nodded, and quickly cut off any further reprimand. “It won’t happen again. I just let two younger friends in and they made some mistakes. Don’t worry, it won’t happen again.” I repeated that like a mantra to avoid the inevitable action. Surprisingly, Pharaoh’s heart began to soften. He looked at me and, with his quiet, highly cultivated New England accent, asked, “Is everything okay? Are you going through personal
CrimethInc. Summer 2005 Testimonials Page 49