TEN
DIRTY WORK
Job Hunt
When Milton’s stockpile of day-old bagels and half-rotten two-for-one pineapples began to run out, like the last of his money, he hit the job market.
But this time, things were different.
This time he was a poet. A really-actually-read-a-poem-aloud-in-a-crowded-bar-of-angry-French-bikers poet.
He long had a vague notion, which he mistook for ambition, that poet might be a thing he could be. But he had no idea what the steps between vague notions and fame, fortune, and endless women might be.
But now?
Now he could feel it. He could feel the beer splashing across his face as he read some nonsense about Nickelback. He could taste Robin’s lips on his. He could feel her hand creeping down his back towards his ass. He was a poet.
No more 12-hour shifts with Stupid & Moronic Construction. No more up-all-night writing just to shove his poems—his œuvre—under his disgusting mattress. Poetry was his calling. His vocation. His passion. His purpose. A day job was just to ward off scurvy. He saw this now, at last; what all part-time writers/part-time waiters, part-time painters/part-time bartenders, part-time musicians/part-time baristas saw all along: the necessity of it.
Montreal, though, is not an easy place for an underemployed, underqualified, underskilled, underachieving Anglophone man-child poet.
Not that there is no work, just that the types of work are extremely limited; as in, there are only five things you can really do, all for minimum wage or less:
1. shoddy under-the-table construction,
2. video game tester,
3. call centre operator,
4. drug tester, or
5. work in porn (but not actually in porn).
There were rumours of some guy who got a good job in marketing (handing out hand cream samples at trade shows), another in real life non-porn film (carrying thousands of feet of cables on the set of a French language remake of the Hallmark Channel’s smash hit Santa Brought a Son), and another in the admissions office of one of the English universities (highlighting relevant course grades on thousands of high-school transcripts). But as far as Milton could tell, those real jobs were just rumours.
. . .
Wreckoning IV
He started his journey of a thousand jobs with a part-time minimum-wage testing gig of the forthcoming video game Wreckoning IV: The Awakening for local game design company PixNix.
The game was explained to Milton as “Mario 2 meets Sonic 3 mixed with Street Fighter 2 and Final Fantasy VI if it was directed by Michael Bay,” by Chief Quality Officer Maxime Laforge.
This, of course, wasn’t true.
The game, as far as Milton could tell, was the ‘story’ of a small crane that would swing a wrecking ball into an oncoming stream of angry looking mini-buildings until getting to the ‘boss’ building—a skyscraper-looking thing that took thousands of swings from the pixelated wrecking ball to topple.
This much Milton gathered from the nearly unplayable version he was tasked with playing for eight hours per day, five days per week, and filling out lengthy bug reports whenever there was a glitch, bug, twitch, or misplaced pixel.
And there were only ever glitches, bugs, twitches, and misplaced pixels.
There was only one extremely glitchy level complete—about 90 seconds of game play as long as it didn’t freeze up, bug out, or crash the machine. But it always froze up. It always bugged out. It always crashed the machine.
He got to the boss building only once, and when he did, the entire office—all 27 designers, testers, programmers, and the three guys who ‘ran’ the company (Zach, Kyle, and Cody) in between their endless games of ping-pong—gathered around to watch.
He had only a few whacks left before he’d become the first in the office to topple the skyscraper, but his ascension to legendary gamer was derailed by a bug so vicious it caused the computer he was using to burst into flames.
He plugged away at PixNix for a couple of weeks, playing the same 3/4ths of the same level of The Wreckoning over and over again, before he showed up one Tuesday morning and the door was locked with a chain and a padlock and wrapped in yellow police tape. A sign handwritten on copier paper was stuck to the inside of the door. It read: “Closed.”
Milton gleaned from the free French ‘news’ paper on the Metro the next day that PixNix was shut down by an early morning police raid and the three ping-pong dudes were arrested under suspicion of launching the E-Wreck-Shun Virus, which had been released a few days earlier as a bit of Trojan virus code that was part of a pop-up ad for penile enhancement pills on lovecams.net.
The virus had been active for only a couple of days, but had already resulted in the spontaneous combustion of thousands of computers, including hundreds of machines at the Canadian Revenue Agency Taxation Services Centre in St. Catharines, Ontario.
Most of the fires were small enough to just leave a molten puddle of computer, but at least a dozen houses and one entire mattress warehouse burned down because of the virus.
So much for video game testing.
. . .
CallCo Inc.
Milton didn’t have to wait long to find the next shit job on the list.
Ruddy had just gotten a job through a friend of Ava’s friend’s friend-with-benefits with a telemarketing company called CallCo Inc.
CallCo ran one of the largest call centres in North America way out in Boucherville—three metros and a bus from Milton’s apartment.
The company did pretty much anything you could do on a phone: polling, customer service, sales, TTY transcription for the deaf, and, although the internet had all but killed 1-900 numbers, they still had a few contracts for phone-sex services.
CallCo Montreal was referred to as “Planet Montreal” by corporate. It was part of a solar system with other heavenly bodies like Planet Pensacola, Planet Charleston, Planet Toledo, Planet Wichita and at least a dozen other planets strategically placed in cities with collapsed industry, low rent, and plenty of desperate unemployed folks.
Montreal was chosen not so much for how it resembled the crumbling post-industrial rustbelt ghost towns of Middle America, but because the constant threat of Quebec nationalism kept the rent low, and the steady stream of unemployable Anglophone Upper Canadian students and perma-teens kept the unskilled workforce flush.
The CallCo building was a massive former warehouse or airplane hangar or indoor wheat farm in an industrial park way out in the middle of what seemed like nowhere.
From the outside it looked like any of the other nondescript light-industrial buildings in the area, just with fewer trucks backed up to the loading docks.
Inside were acres and acres of fluorescent-lit beigeness, acres and acres of beige ceiling tiles splotched with brown water stains, acres and acres of industrial off-grey carpeting worn beige with traffic, and acres and acres of beige pressboard desks lined up in rows like tombstones, divided by chest-high beige cubicle dividers. Each desk had a cheap beige office chair, a telephone, and an old beige desktop computer with a giant CRT monitor.
At any given time, day or night, there were over three thousand people all talking on the phone in the same room at the same time.
If you stuck your head up above your cubicle divider all the voices selling phony herbal remedies, or cancelling lost credit cards, or asking about preferred candidates in an upcoming election, or asking, “Oh yeah, you like that big boy?” disappeared into an unrelenting buzz like TV static.
If your assigned desk were any distance from the door, and they were all some distance from the door, you’d have a headache by the time you walked the quarter mile to your cubicle.
The acres and acres of Planet Montreal, like all the others, were divided into imaginary “continents,” then “countries,” then “states,” then “counties,” then “towns,” then “neighbourhoods,” and each cubicle was called a “house” or a “home” and given a unique address.
Like the real universe, each part came with names, flags, cultures, customs, and petty dictators.
There were the Research, Sales, Service, and Erotica continents. Within these, there were countries like Outbound, with states like Xerox, counties like Parts, towns like Toner, and neighbourhoods like WC5755. In this neighbourhood, a collection of 12 cubicles, 12 people at a time over three eight-hour shifts per day, all day, every day, would cold-call businesses to try and sell them toner they probably didn’t need for the WC5755 copier machine they probably didn’t own.
Each continent had its own colour, and everyone working in that section was required to wear a standard company-issued, employee-purchased (via direct deduction of $1.32 each pay period) vest, which had printed on it the ‘flag’ of their ‘country,’ and name of their ‘state’ and ‘town,’ along with a box to write in their neighbourhood with company-provided off-brand Sharpies.
The vests went with each cubicle/‘house’ and were left slung over the backs of the cheap office chairs after each shift. They were never washed, so they smelled like armpits and cigarettes.
The entire corporation was overseen by the Supreme Commander and his board of directors, aka The Alliance. Each planet was ruled by an Overlord, continent an Emperor, country a President, state a Governor, county a Reeve, town a Mayor, and neighbourhood a Junior Floor Shift Manager, who all had been subject to indoctrination in the CallCo Universal Management Training System™, a.k.a. C.U.M.T.S™.
C.U.M.T.S™ was a proprietary program developed by visionary Supreme Commander Vladimir Ilich Smith. It boiled down parts of The Art of War, The Prince, Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book, Mussolini’s The Doctrine of Fascism, a rare surviving copy of the KGB’s original 1954 field manual, and Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People into the most advanced call-centre management system on earth.
C.U.M.T.S™ involved a complex program of employee—or ‘subject’ as they were called—surveillance and intimidation coupled with an escalating series of reprisals and reprimands for offenses ranging from failing to meet quotas, taking bathroom breaks, bringing fish or curry for lunch, showing up a few minutes late, being irresponsible enough to get pregnant, or, worst of all, taking no for an answer on a call.
At the start of each shift, each outbound worker would be given a daily call list, which contained about 25 percent more calls than was humanly possible to get through in eight hours, and would begin dialing and delivering a meticulously rehearsed (on subjects’ own time) script designed to keep the person on the other end of the phone from hanging up until “quotas were met”: sales made, upgrades agreed to, subscriptions extended, surveys completed, climaxes achieved.
If call quotas were filled, a subject could get meagre bonuses—usually CallCo Inc. swag, like travel mugs and t-shirts. If they did exceedingly well, they might be promoted to more lucrative neighbourhoods or towns. Subjects who showed the most company loyalty, met their quotas, and proved particularly adept at espionage and ratting on their colleagues could even be enrolled in C.U.M.T.S™ and start to climb the CallCo Inc. intergalactic ranks.
. . .
As Seen on TV Land
House 37720-B (B as in the second of three shifts), Product Neighbourhood, Infomercial Town, As Seen on TV County, Inbound Country, Sales Continent. This is where Milton started out.
Inbound sales was the easiest. People weren’t being interrupted during Jeopardy and being sold something they didn’t want or asked their opinion about the affability of some former prime minister’s layabout son they didn’t care about. They were calling to book a trip. Or calling because their wife left them and they’d been drunk for three days and were up in the middle of the night watching infomercials and thought that three packs of Super Putty for $29.99 or a super-sized pack of super-absorbent rags or an imaginary hand job was just what they needed to turn it all around.
From 11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, in a grass-green vest emblazoned with the Sales flag—a dollar sign on a large block arrow, which was supposed to be money coming in, but looked more like money going out—Milton took orders for Super Putty, the Potty Putter Bathroom Putting Green, Wax Vac Max the Ear Wax Vacuum, Booty Booster Ass Enhancing Panty Pads, the Sitty Kitty Cat Toilet Seat, Spray Mane Spray-on Hair, Micro Egg Microwave Egg Poaching Cups, and a dozen other tangible signs of the decline and looming collapse of civilization.
Even with the exceedingly tight security—CallCo had its own 300-person heavily armed on-site militia and secret police, the CallCo Green Berets, a.k.a. the CallGB—the poor pay, the not being allowed more than a single 24-minute break per day, and the constant harassment from the Junior Floor Shift Manager for failing to upsell vulnerable old women the Sock Knitter attachment to go with their new Purrfect Fur Cat Grooming and Wool Making Machine, Milton didn’t mind the work.
It was pretty easy. He would ride the metro-metro-metro-bus to work and back each day with Ruddy and Ava’s friend’s friend-with-benefits, Jay, and talk about bands and girls and which band was playing at which girl’s house party this week. Then sit in his cubicle and pretended to talk on the phone while secretly writing poems to Robin all day.
Despite this, Milton turned out to be a decent call-centre employee. He never hit his upsell targets, but no one did—they were set impossibly high on purpose—but he’d usually show up, usually close to on time, and usually feign an effort.
Unlike the dying rustbelt cities elsewhere, which were flush with desperate unskilled workers with mortgages and mouths to feed, the subjects of Planet Montreal were over-educated, socially progressive, and generally unencumbered, downtown Anglophone 20/30-something adultescents with limited employment prospects and ambiguous yet staunchly held ideas of social justice and workers’ rights—insofar as they would sign an online petition to ban fracking or cause a stink at their call-centre job to try and get unlimited smoke breaks.
With great fervour, various factions from different countries would stage protests, walk-outs, and sit-ins in Emperors’ offices.
In response, Presidents and Governors would give Subject Happiness Incentive Training™ to disgruntled employees.
In accordance with the C.U.M.T.S™ manifesto, Subject Happiness Incentive Training™ is a sophisticated system of covert espionage activities meant to gently encourage wayward subjects to fall in line.
Lunchroom clocks would be adjusted to shorten already short breaks, chairs would be tampered with to make them even more uncomfortable, dead rodents would be left in desk drawers, car heating vents would be pissed in, a small bit of Super Putty would be surreptitiously placed under a single keyboard key to make it stiiiiiiiiiiiiick, homes would be broken into and toilets upper-decked.24
For the most part, Subject Happiness Incentive Training™ would dissuade any further stand-taking. However, every so often a part-time sociology grad student/part-time Outbound Pudding Subscription sales ideologue would stoke enough discontent that Subject Happiness Incentive Training™ wouldn’t work. In this case, management would invoke the Direct Enhanced Experience Protocol of Subject Happiness Incentive Training™.
When subjects were in D.E.E.P. Subject Happiness Incentive Training™, they would be detained overnight by the CallGB and re-educated using the Ludovico Technique.25 That usually did the trick.
Yet, despite all the elaborate attempts at psychological and actual warfare, CallCo Inc. still couldn’t motivate the thousands of millennials, paid paltry sums, to show up every day on time. During and over the days immediately following Osheaga, Montreal’s Coachella, nearly 40 percent of Montreal CallCo Inc. employees called in sick or just didn’t bother showing up. Which meant Milton was one of the better subjects.
After a few weeks of showing up and mailing it in, Milton was rewarded for his half-assed effort with a CallCo Inc. travel mug. Not long after he was given a key ring. Then a golf visor, a four-coloured pen, a foam stress ball shaped like an old rotary phone, and then a tie-dyed t-shirt with the corporate logo splashed across the front.
Within a couple months, both he, Ruddy, and Jay were all promoted from As Seen on TV County to Grocery Store Give-Away Redemption County.
None of them could quite figure out how it was a promotion, but they were assured it was.
The crowd in Prime Time and Day Time Television Commercial towns were noticeably upset to see the three relative newbs skipping right over the upper echelons of As Seen on TV county.
The scuttlebutt around the Sales continent breakroom was that it was a three-way race between Milton, Ruddy, and Jay for Continental Employee of the Month, which brought with it a plaque on the wall with your name on it and a $15 gift card to an Arby’s franchise way across town that was owned by the Emperor’s wife.
. . .
Escape from Planet Montreal
The race would never be settled, however.
On a rather ordinary Thursday morning, Milton had to abruptly end a call with a woman from Santa Fe who was arranging a $2 rebate on microwave popcorn, because the fire alarm went off.
Someone on Research Continent, who was particularly miffed with the new parking policy—any car parked for more than two hours on company property, even if the owner was working an eight-hour shift, would be impounded in the corporate lot and a fine of $300 would have to be paid to free it—had figured out a way to bypass the CallCo Inc. impassable firewall and access the internet.
The hacking of the CallCo Inc. firewall was originally just an act of civil disobedience meant to quietly protest the parking policy injustice by wasting company time amidst the soul-sucking, mind-numbing drudgery of the never-ending surveys on customer satisfaction with long-burning composite fire logs.
Maybe, someone on Research Continent thought, as they first logged into Facebook, they’d share the hacking method with others in the centre to spread free internet like some kind of forbidden samizdat. But, as is inevitable on the internet, this Someone on Research Continent decided, before spreading this newfound freedom, to pop over to lovecams.net for a quick under-desk wank.
It was unlikely that Someone on Research Continent was able to finish before the E-Wreck-Shun Virus burst their machine into flames.
Within seconds, thanks to the robust network at CallCo Inc., hundreds of computers were on fire, then the pressboard desks, then the pressboard cubicle dividers.
The law requires commercial buildings to have fire suppressing sprinkler systems. But, in CallCo Inc.’s cost-benefit analysis, paying to arrange for the dancers from Club Super Sexe to attend the annual fire department staff retreat cost much less than installing a new system to meet code. So the fire spread quickly, engulfing Research, then Erotica, then Sales, Service, Accommodation, and then it overtook the corporate offices.
The evacuation was pandemonium. CallCo Inc.’s security measures meant that everyone was locked in the burning building, forcing them to smash through the few windows with whatever chairs and CRT monitors hadn’t burned yet.
Milton, channelling John G. Diefenbaker, hurled the massive Inter-Continental Employee-of-the-Year plaque—which was really just a nice-looking three-foot-square wooden shelf for a bronze bust of Overlord Gilles Faucon, winner seven years running—through a window next to the Sales breakroom and crawled through the broken glass, cutting himself quite badly.
Jay followed close behind, carrying Ruddy, who had screamed until he passed out, over his shoulder.
By the time the fire trucks arrived, Milton and Jay managed to get Ruddy back awake and calm enough to get on the bus back home.
Miraculously, only two people died. Gilles Faucon insisted, as the “captain of the ship” that he was to go down with it, so he did. And the other casualty was Someone on Research Continent who succumbed to smoke inhalation, according to the official coroner’s report.
It was announced a couple of hours later, before the fire was even out, that CallCo Inc. was closing their Planet Montreal effective immediately and their business would be moved to the new Planet Flint.
Milton was once more without a job. But worse this time, so were five thousand other unemployable Anglo-Plateau hangabouts.
. . .
Factotum
With the city now awash in Miltons looking for the same shit work, Milton couldn’t find anything.
Even Ruddy had to resort to going to work with Noddy. But Milton refused.
He wasn’t going to tear out old bathrooms and ride around in old pick-up trucks with angry old men to help Noddy. He was a poet. He had standards. And screw Noddy.
Besides, how much money did he really need to live and write poems? Not a lot. By his not-so-great math, he figured he could live on about $20 per day. Half of that was rent and bills. The other half was day-old bagels, half-rotten half-price pineapples, the odd ream of paper, and several nights out per week. So he began scouring Craigslist for odd jobs.
Business was slow, but he did manage to pick up a gig modelling for a drawing class. He didn’t get paid though, because the instructor kicked him out when he refused to go the Full Monty.
He made $40 helping three different people move different appliances into their houses.
He sold 42 books he’d bought from Guillaume and Gweltaz over the past few months for $20—about 10 per cent of what he’d paid for them.
Georgette clued him into donating plasma, which scored him $35 the first time, but everyone else had the same idea so when he went back a second time, they said they didn’t need any more.
He got the same response when he showed up at the sperm donor clinic.
He took to wandering the halls at the med schools in the city and joined every research trial he could.
They paid much better than plasma donating.
He got a $25 iTunes gift card for answering an hour’s worth of questions about his sexual history—it took him seven minutes.
He made $200 cash, a massive pay day, for spending the weekend in the laboratory with 30 other guinea pigs who were testing a new drug to treat lupus, which Milton falsely claimed was in his family—he didn’t even know what it was. The drug caused all of his body hair to fall out and his skin to turn orange, but he felt fine otherwise. Besides, it was $200. Which should have lasted him 10 days, but rent was due.
The hard times made him cut back what little expenses he had even further.
He began rummaging through the dumpsters behind the Parc Avenue fruiteries and St. Viateur Bagels to get his pineapples and bagels for free. Sure, they were much more rotten than the half-rotten two-for-ones and the stale dayolds, but the price was right.
He’d also go with Ruddy and Ava to every St. Henri freegan potluck he could. He’d take the same bag of petrified bagels that no one would touch, and help himself to all the garbage soup and zucchini loaf he could eat.
He went to every art gallery opening and book launch and gorged himself on squares of cheese, damp crackers, and stale pita chips full of just-turned spinach dip.
When he ran out of paper to type his poems on, he’d just handwrite over old poems. When his last pen died, he snuck into Noddy’s room while he was at work and borrowed a carpenter’s pencil.
When all the papers were un-reusable, he started sneaking the communal rolls of paper towel from under the kitchen sink and typed his poems on the long scrolls, just like Jack Kerouac. Sort of.
He had only seen Robin a couple of times since the night of the kiss. Once at a house party where Ruddy and Ava’s band, Spigot, was playing. She greeted him with a big hug, but that was it.
Ruddy and Ava were experimenting with Japanese noise performance art, which meant four straight hours of eardrum bursting screeches and wails.
The best Milton could do was scream in Robin’s ear about “how great it is to see you”, and “you look really good,” and “I’ve been thinking a lot about you,” and “we should hang out sometime,” and “I’ve been writing some new poems for you,” and “I love you,” and “will you marry me and have my babies.”
Robin couldn’t hear a word he said but smiled and nodded and shouted “hey” and “yeah” back, which Milton took as a sure sign that she was feeling something too.
Near the end of a 37-minute long atonal droning “song”, Robin mimed something about a watch and sleep, hugged Milton, gave him a peck on the cheek, and left.
The next time he saw her he was walking back home after helping carry a piano down three flights of stairs in exchange for a tin of cookies.
They almost collided when Milton came around the corner of Parc and Bernard not watching where he was going.
Robin was with someone; some guy Milton had never met before. He said his name was Chad or Max or Derek or something. Milton couldn’t remember because he couldn’t hear what Chad or Max or Derek said over the sound of his world crashing down around him.
Robin and Chadmaxderek were late for their bus downtown, but she mentioned something about going to Florida soon, for her next film project. She gave Milton a hug. He probably held it too long and squeezed to hard. Things got awkward and quiet so Robin and Chadmaxderek kept on towards the bus.
Robin and Chadmaxderek were jokey and flirty with one another, he could tell. He could tell they were probably talking about him, making fun of his poetry, of that hug, of his still-orange skin and lack of body hair. Probably.
Milton had just met him, but he hated Chadmaxderek with the fire of a thousand suns.