So, I'm three days into my new job at a small, private garage. I come away bursting with stories which made James suggest that I write and post them under the tag of Lili's Garage, along the lines of his Ghetto Grocer tales. The names will be changed to protect the guilty as well as any other identifying details.
It's election day, and one of the men has his daughter here rather than leaving her home when school is off, though he could have—-she's 15. They're African, and she could have passed for a customer, she's so composed. No teenage mouth or attitude, no unnecessary noise, no clamoring for attention, no disrespect whatsoever to her father. She sits at his computer when he's not, which throws me because I've gotten traumatized by my other work experiences: self, family and anything "personal," must be left at the work entrance to be retrieved on the way out. I've always struggled with the "personal" part. Professional = Not Personal. By definition, I'm a person, and anything relating to me as such is personal. But what I've been learning lately about slavery in this country explains why our work environments are so impersonal.
A slave is not treated as a person. Our work environments are modeled on our historical slave environments. Since wage slaves can't be whipped, tortured or killed as their slave predecessors were, we get other sorts of punishments. I'm thinking of different words used to describe sending someone away from their job: fire (at), let go, terminate, sever (as in severance package?), dismiss, separate, and downsize. These sound like words which are synonymous with injure, maim, kill, shun, abandon or divorce. Work rules have largely to do with not being a person, not taking care of yourself, and not taking care of your family. Everything must be sublimated to the corporate master. Don't be late or miss too many days. Take only the eight holidays and your few allotted vacations days off. Don't see your doctor too often. Don't have bad luck. Don't be honest. Don't show feeling, weakness, or age. If you do, color your hair. Your experience equals money, so look forward to being replaced by someone who has none but costs the company much less.
This garage is obviously not corporate America, and I am actually happy here. It's like a mini UN only better, with many third world citizens passing through. Of the seven of us, four of us are at home in English, and three are not. Two of us are hired to toggle between English and Spanish, and three of us are multilingual. Some of us overlap in these categories and some don't. I seriously love not being around a bunch of Baltimorons who can't deal with someone who doesn't speak or act as they do. I love having a boss who talks about nobody being perfect. And in all of this lovely, messy imperfection are situations that rattle my work indoctrination and give me cultural pause.
This young lady's movement through my small work space is one of them. Later in the afternoon I hear her on a call to her school discussing a future arrangement. Whoever she spoke to has told her to make an appointment with her doctor, she tells her father when he walks by. Next she calls the doctor's office herself and takes care of that. I go from being mildly annoyed about the unexpected person near my work area to struck by her competence and maturity. "You sound like you're 20 when you speak," I tell her. She smiles. "You must think your classmates are pretty silly," I say. She nods and laughs a little. I smile back, nodding acknowledgment, letting go of any discomfort I had with her proximity.
I have a counterpart at my job who should come in on Mondays and Fridays (I work the days in between). She has a baby at home. I asked the African man if it bothers our boss that she has not been coming in much lately. He looks at me a little quizzically as if the question is strange. "No," he says, "It doesn't. If she doesn't come in, he knows that it is because she is taking care of her baby." I am amazed. You mean in other parts of the world, the most important thing a woman can do is take care of her baby? And here, it is often structured so that we are not able to raise our children as they may need to be raised, and our only recourse may be taking our children to a psychologist after the damage is done. This, James says, is by design, which is another article entirely.
Well, soon we should know who the new president will be; clown or hyena, it doesn't matter to me. I will keep on rolling.
