Day 58
And the work plot thickens.
But not in the good, pudding-esque way.
My initial impressions of
my boss and his McCompany (this is what I have increasingly thought of my
workplace) have proved correct. The organization I was sold on simply did not
exist. What was there is a
tenuously-funded, ragtag group of B-teamers. I am on that team.
We were located in a
biotech incubator on the edge of town. Start-up companies flock to incubators
for relatively low-cost lab space and access to facilities they could otherwise
not afford. Some flourish, grow exponentially, and are usually sold to
corporate giants amid a flourish of stock options and Porsches. There was
evidence of this type of unqualified success at this facility: One company had outgrown
their space and were in the process of purchasing a brand new buildings for
expansion. I was told the company
founders had been offered a hundred million dollars, but were holding out for a
sweeter offer. Indeed, being nurtured to such titanic proportions is
undoubtedly just the thing many entrepreneurs are drawn to when they hear the
word ‘incubator.’ But a lot of babies also die in incubators: For every success
story, there are ten or twenty tiny companies that struggle, desperately
scrabbling for survival until they die a pathetic, unremarkable death. Behind
most doors lurked the quiet stench of desperation. C’est la vie.
The entire scientific staff
consisted of me, one other scientist, a lab manager and three interns. The
scientist is a Chinese girl who wears dangerously short miniskirts and
dangerously long heels in the lab. She has repeatedly asked me about my dating
status. Most of her time appears occupied with online shopping; each day, an
average of two or three boxes of clothes pours in, all addressed to her.
The lab manager is a short, overweight Arab
guy who spends his time equally between complaining how little he is paid and
documenting to me his sexual history in graphic detail. I have begun mentally referring
to him as ‘the oversharer.’ On lunch
during my first day, the oversharer claimed to have briefly dated and gotten a
handjob from the miniskirt-wearing scientist before a falling-out occurred. It
is unclear whether this is true, but it is clear they hate each other with a
passion.
We also have three interns.
Initially, why a company with three employees has three interns is beyond me.
Then I learn (from the oversharer, of course) that the boss is legendarily
cheap. In order to save money on payroll, he has packed three Master’s students
from San Jose State into the lab. I quickly learned that two of them are
absolutely useless, parasites who demand constant handholding, both battling to
suck my work day away in futile investigations of why their most recent
experiment was totally fucked. The star
intern is an Ethiopian guy who moved here two years ago. Six months ago, he was
working as an orderly in a nursing home. Other than me, no one speaks English
as a first language. All of us are
crammed into a space roughly the area of a large bedroom.
And now the boss. The king
of the little empire.
To say the boss was a only
a little business-obsessed might be generous.
He would micromanage to an extreme degree. Memos would come from his office announcing
changes in our corporate policy and our strategic mission. Often, these changes
would be passive-aggressive answers to someone’s direct question. For example,
one of the interns asked for a normal holiday off. Boss said he’d think about
it. Six minutes later, all of us were cc’ed on a new corporate policy that we
needed to take vacation days to cover holiday absences. These pronouncements ranged from comedic to
pathetic, especially considering our entire staff were six people, all within
easy earshot of his office. And he was
cheap. Really, really cheap. On multiple occasions, he spent the better
part of half a day arguing with the management of the biotech incubator over a
ten dollar charge. On several occasions,
I was told to try and find things we needed for cutting-edge scientific
research on Ebay. And nothing, not even the most delicate chemicals, had an
expiration date. According to the boss,
if you could read the label, it was still good to use.
Underneath all of it, I smell
desperation. This man is scared.
Not only am I apparently on
the B-team, it seems as though I am in command of it. The boss is not a PhD and has
apparently never actually worked in a basic science lab. The fate of these
people rests in whether I, a burned-out science bum, can get them all moving in
the right direction. This may be the most terrifying realization. Actually,
that’s not true. The most terrifying realization is that I’ve turned down
other, more stable jobs and driven across the country, spending most of my
money in the process, to work here.
Day 59
The weekend. Jan and Rose
tell Jason he can’t sit by the front door all day. Jason pedals away on his
bike. Later, I go for a run and find Jason loitering creepily down the street,
perhaps 200 yards from the house. He
waves. I wave.
Day 60
One of the sons, Nathan,
has a girlfriend move in with him. I
asked the girl how long they’ve been dating. Two weeks, she replied.
Jan and Rose are, as far as
I can tell, OK with this.
Next Time: Jan and Rose
have the infamous 25-cent fight, and we discuss Rose’s workout schedule and Jan’s
ass.
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