These Stars Always Go Down.

 

 

They go for broke, they take it to the limit, they reach for the stars and they never look back. Whose shoulders are they standing on? Oh bother who cares, they are on a mission of professional advancement, and petty considerations of courtesy and bona fide professionalism mean little.

This is to say I got on the train. I came to Seattle, and I am in what I gather some around me believe to be a shark tank. Survival of the fittest is the rule of the game. Back-stabbing and petty positioning pervades even the most polite of moments. Territorialism is the by-word, and scramble to the top of the heap is the order of the day.

I, on the other hand, find it patently ridiculous. There is no reason for me to get excited over this little gig I have found myself. R&S testing or some such thing, software development, as if respectable people still do such things. Ordinarily my skills are only required when one of the hustling little upstarts (like Apple) finds themselves infringing multiple patents or copyrights. One holds such parties at a distance, a wide and perceptible distance. One does not lie down with such dogs.

But up here, in the Emerald City as they say, it seems to be en mode. But it isn’t entirely fair to get down on Seattle. I see this everywhere if not as prevalent.

The underachieved now overcompensating Asian is a genus all too itself. The family is invariably disappointed, the marriage wasn’t what they wanted and very few even bothered to show up assuming it wasn’t a rushed civil ceremony. Now, all efforts are placed, rather fruitlessly, into asserting dominance over co-workers who aren’t even co-workers. We work in the same vicinity, vaguely on the same subject matter, but in a matter of weeks the project will be over and all the hustling and obnoxious jockeying has achieved the same as it has always achieved. No substantive results other than an entire group of people who would prefer to never work with you again. Ah-So.

The Jettisoned Dot-Com employee: They are all over the place up here. Most have made a decent living bouncing around from ‘non-profit’ to ‘non-profit’, trying to impart some knowledge garnered in the heady years of 1996 – 1999, and possibly trying to recapture old glories. They relentlessly name-drop people you have never heard of, the type of people who had a ‘position’ in the tech field some years ago, but got out after making a sizable amount of money and now work for some oversees charity which allows them to travel and maintain a ‘worldly’cosmopolitan aura. The Jettisoned Dot-Commer envies the name dropped, but there is also a scarcely concealed trace of resentment like ‘Why not me? I'm talented.’, but there is always something accusatory in their tone, as though they are inviting you to mention someone of similar vague accolades. You realize there are free snacks in the breakroom and you veer away from the miasma of self-pity as quickly as possible. When you return you notice the process is repeating itself in an even more open area of the office which you now avoid.

The “My Wife is the primary breadwinner and I’m grudgingly OK with it” dude is almost as common as the underachieving overcompensating Asian. In many ways these guys represent a level of Gen-X Slack that I haven’t even been able to approximate. Their participation in itinerant temporary work is augmented by their wife’s hefty salary so it tends to be even more sparse than my work. This primary income allows them to support their 2 children which would ordinarily be impossible on a temporary employee’s salary. The reason I’ve been able to skirt workforce responsibility for so long is quite easy: No kids, no mortgage, medium student load debt = I do what the fuck I want whenever the fuck I want. Full stop.

The ‘always sad and always in North Face’. They are like cockroaches in the Southland. They are everywhere, they multiply, and they have a collective consciousness that rivals anything like the Borg. Their fetishizing of everything outdoor and technical belies a soft romanticism of everything trivial and immaterial. One of them freely admitted to being ‘competitive’ when it comes to their work. When reminded that they were on a fixed term temporary assignment the blank open mouthed stare gazing back at you draws the eye to the ubiquitous North Face logo. It’s like someone always said, ‘Go climb a mountain.’

They all have something to prove, but they also are not above hoarding free snacks and food. Their pride has limits, and those limits are being tested on a daily basis and I have a front row seat. I literally have a front row seat because for all of their jockeying, positioning, and mindless curry-favoring they at least have enough sense to stay clearly out of the line of fire. Save that spot for the adults.