The Limbo of a Firing

In Kafka’s novel The Trial the bureaucracy appears as a decrepit ruin; falling apart, dusty, stale, the bowels of the system are full of holes, and yet the system itself is somehow stronger for it. The weakness of the structure is perversely its strength.

In Orson Welles film version of Kafka’s novel, Anthony Perkins is called to attend a preliminary hearing for his trial while he is at the theater. There is no official telegram, no formal sounding officer who reaches him by phone, but rather an innocuous note is passed to Perkins by a fellow theatergoer. The woman who passes him the note knows nothing about the business she’s participating in, and it is in this way, as an aside in an otherwise normal and untroubled daily discourse, that authority, in both the novel and the film, is made objective. Power floats weightlessly and is always out of the line of sight.

When my supervisor at Comcast informed me that I might be fired from my cubicle job at the Beaverton call center he did not make a big production out of getting my attention, but simply tapped me on the shoulder while I was at work selling what we called CHSI (Comcast’s High Speed Internet). When I turned to see who was tapping I found him, this 20 something who always appeared to me to have walked off the set of an HBO original series, talking to another salesman over the cubicle wall. He was smiling and laughing, apparently having been distracted from his task in the time it took me to turn around.

“Got a second?” he asked.

This is how I discovered that I was under the threat of possible termination. In fact, he didn’t tell me I was fired right away, but rather I was pulled aside, taken off the phones, and escorted to the dimly lit and windowless back room office of the human resource manager. If my immediate supervisor looked like Vincent Chase from Entourage, the human resources manager looked something more like Mr. Clean: bald, corporate and perhaps just a touch queer.

“Can you tell us why you didn’t offer this customer phone service?” he wanted to know.

And I started to relax. If they were going to fire me for this infraction I could at least be secure in the knowledge that the punishment didn’t fit the crime. The rule and its implementation were absurd, but too blatantly so. If Kafka had been writing the scene he’d have aimed to spread the absurdity around. The point is always to involve the accused in the passing of judgement. For example, in the Trial the police do not charge the protagonist with anything, but just treat him as guilty and in this way inspire the accused to magnify his sense of guilt. By telling me directly what it was that I’d done Mr. Clean and my hipster supervisor had let me off the hook.

Also I was wise. That is, sometimes a theory can be a useful thing. When you are working in a suburban call center for a major telecommunications corporation and find that you are subject to absurd rules, rules that are not only cumbersome and inhibiting but that even contradict one another so that in order to function at all one must break them, when pecariousness is the inevitable result of the way a job is structured, it helps to know why management is always pushed to push the workers in just this way. It’s helpful to seek some sort of big picture when faced with personal woes.

As the youtube star Brendan Mcooney wrote in his description for his youtube video, Law of Value 6: Socially Necessary Labor Time:

“Our private labor doesn’t immediately become social. It must become value in order to be social. But in becoming value it is disciplined by socially necessary labor time. SNLT acts as an external force which disciplines our private labor, constantly compelling us to work more efficiently, yet never actually making our work easier or more fulfilling.”

It’s probably worth noting that before Mcooney a writer named Marx made a similar point, and while it’s easy enough to get lost in the history of debate around Marx’s labor theory of value and various definitions of Socially Necessary Labor Time, this much is fairly certain. After the economic downturn of 2008 many, many more customer were calling in to downgrade or shut off their cable services. In order to make up this loss in revenue the sales department was being disciplined in the hopes that such discipline would make us more efficient. Before the downturn we could be confident that as long as we were making sales we would be secure in our jobs, but now we were being asked to be more efficient on every call. We had to push the product harder.

This was why my job was in jeopardy, and the fact that I had sold 2 of the three products possible during the call in question, the further fact that the customer had required an instant installation which made the selling of the third product impossibile, none of these facts mattered. What mattered was discipline on the floor, and if that put some employees in a double bind (one could just as easily be fired for failing to meet quota while adhering to the new efficiency protocol as for failing to adhere), well that didn’t matter either. Given the high unemployment rate in our community churn and downsizing was another efficiency.

I understood all of this. They could fire me, but they couldn’t touch me, or so I thought.

Their final trick was not firing me outright. They had to think it over, and in the meantime they’d keep me on the phones. They’d let me dangle, let me take in the full implications of the word ‘misconduct’, and then (when the newly hired sales team was ready to hit the floor) they’d fire me.

Going back to my desk the question that whirled around inside my head wasn’t whether or not the rule itself was just, but whether the rule was a cover story. Given the absurdity of it I had to wonder if it might have been enforced for the reasons other than those that were given, and perhaps these other, more reasonable, charges were more substantial.

My guilt found me as I walked back to my desk and once it came I looked for a reason for it. The feeling had to attach to something. What was it that I’d done to give power an excuse to excercise its arbitrary will?

As I took the next sales call (the young woman on the other end of the line wanted to know if she could get internet for 19.99 and I had to tell her that she couldn’t and sell it to her for thirty dollars instead) two competing questions spun around in my head. The first was this: What was wrong with me that I’d been fired from such a low level job? And the second question was: Why do we all put up with it? How did the spectacle of Comcast reproduce itself daily, and what was the connection between the content the company provided (Mtv, HBO or the Playboy channel, etc…) and the compensatory activities and beliefs that ensured that we stayed in our cubicles?

It turned out that the answers to these two questions were identical with each other.

The corporation imposes a cynical hedonism. The heroes of hipster Hollywood, the critical distance implied in every line of dialog in programs such as Californication or Entourage, both undermine and support the corporate culture. And the logic that reproduces daily life at Comcast is the logic of a strange loop or a knot.
For example, one must always be out for one’s self on the job and one must be willing to cheat and to lie in order to get ahead on the job. This is what we were secretly taught in our training class, and it is what we were more overtly taught during the daily practice of selling cable. However, one must never be caught cheating and lying to the customer. In order to get ahead in the system one must finally stop recognizing cheating and lying as cheating and lying and view it instead as using the right language. If one internalizes the lying deeply enough then one can never be caught.

Or as the anti-psychiatrist RD Laing put it in his 1969 poetry book/psychiatric rant Knots:

They are playing a game. They are playing at not
Playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I
Shall break the rules and they will punish me
I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game

And here’s another approach to saying the same thing: If a cubicle had four walls instead of three the worker would realize that he was trapped, but with just three walls the worker is free to stay in his cubicle.