Thursday, October 13, 2011

Day 58 to 60


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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