Welcome to the Hellmouth (Part 1)

There's nothing like quitting your job to make you fully realize one thing- how much you actually hate it. This is pretty much where I find myself, with one week left to go on my job.

I haven't really talked about it, let alone write about it, for a variety of reasons. Among other things, the last time I wrote about my job, the Man came and shut me down. The main reason, though, was that after a year and a half of unemployment and with a job-market looking even worse than before, denial can be a wonderful thing. Now that I can be a little less careful about such things and are free to think how I feel, I can now only fully appreciate the level of hatred I have towards it.

Actually, I really liked my job. I also really liked my coworkers and I loved my boss. It was probably the first job that I had in which I could walk into someone's office, close the door, and tell them what I thought about something and have them listen to me. It was also the first time I had a job in which everyone constantly told me how much they appreciated what I was doing. I just hated the place I worked. The company I worked for was Madhouse, a Madhouse. A place that put the F.U. in Dysfunctional. And for the past several months, it had been taking over my life, infecting my brain like a fever, causing me sleepless nights and psychotic dreams. Even now, with only five days left working at the Hellmouth, I still wake up in the middle of the night in cold-sweats, dreaming about meetings and lost deadlines.

It all starts with the head of the company, the Big Head. He was, in the words of one employee "a brilliant, crazed, eccentric meglomaniac." And that was one of the nicer things said about him. At various times, I described him as Col. Kurtz, a Crazy Roman Emperor, a Stalinist Dictator, the Evil Eye of Sauron, and -in one particularly lucidly crazed dream- a James Bond super-villain complete with a hidden lair.

The company was privately owned and founded by the Big Head. He was definately a genius and a brilliant businessman, someone whose brain worked a little faster and on so many more layers than ordinary people- thus one of the reasons for the name Big Head. He built the company into an industry leader, was often right when others thought he was crazy, and a veritable rock star with People in the Know. He was also a control-freak, increasingly out-of-touch with reality, possessing of a massive ego, and never listened to anyone's advice. Although it was said that he could be rather charming, the most common description of him as a human-being fell somewhere along the lines of a "cocksucker." A copywriter who had tangled one too many times with the Big Head famously quit and ran out of the building screaming to everyone who could hear him that the head of the company was the Anti-Christ.

Ah, the stories I could tell….

First, of course, was the infamous race-car spectacle, described somewhere below. Then there was the story someone told about being his office overhearing the Big Head, on the phone, slamming his fist down while yelling at the poor person on the other end of the line "I don't care if it is your birthday party, you have to have this to me immediately." He called people names durinng meetings if they disagreed with him, which was often, and liked to pick fights with all the male manager's in the office just to show who was the Alpha Male of the company. My boss once walked into a meeting and when seeing the Big Head laughing, was shocked to discover that he was laughing only because he was so thoroughly enjoying mocking the Copy Manager that it was making him laugh out loud. It was also well known that while he pissed on all of the male's who worked underneath him, was often incredibly nice to the women who worked for him, especially if they were young and attractive. He also once went to go hand out an "Employee of the Month" award at an office gathering and upon reading the Chinese name of the recipient of the award, told several hundred people (most of whom were Chinese) that he couldn't make the name out and it really matter anyways because every Chinese name was the same. The Big Head himself was Chinese.

Then there was the time he e-mailed one of the Graphic Designers and asked him to drop some proofs off at his home the next day- that day being Christmas Day. Which was all kind of par for the course. A salesperson had a week-long vacation planned, a cruise with his wife (carefully planned because the cruise meant he was unable to both check e-mail and voice-mail) but was forced to cancel it at the last minute because the Big Head wanted him to go on a few sales calls. Two of our copywriters, both freelancing and both of who were to have been made permanent months before, we're finally told they were going to be made permanent, but only after they were to be interviewed with the Big Head. When word came down they were supposed to go to his house on a Saturday for the interview, none of the Manager's could understand why the two copywriters told them that they thought the idea of spending their Saturday going to someone's house for a job interview kind of sucky. They were so used to being treated like that that it was all normal to them. The company lawyer once found himself at the Big Head's house and when the Big Head said out of the blue that his pool needed to be cleaned, the lawyer wasn't sure it wasn't meant as a command to clean the guy's pool.

The truth of any company, any Department, is that the tone of the company is set by the guy at the top. When the head of a company treats people like his own vassal servants, making them do whatever he wanted them to do no matter what, that tone is set and that's how the company worked. He held meetings often til 8, had people scramble to his house after work hours- even on weekends- and frequently called people in the middle of the night to ask them to do things for him. And everybody had to put up with it because if they didn't, they'd get yelled and screamed at, belittled in front of the rest of the company for saying "no" to something. As a result things were dropped whenever he called or requested something. Or things were done for no particular reason other than he had asked for it. I once went into the Copy Manager's office to get him to do something, only to find him having to spend his afternoon buying concert tickets for the Big Head. During a really incredibly busy week, one brought on by the big trade show of the year, he made a request that an artist stop what they was doing to make him a big sign with his name on it that he could put on his car.

As a result, nobody in the company could make a decision about anything, lest they incur the wrath of the big guy. Meetings were held about products in which half of the meeting was dedicated into figuring out what the Big Head knew, what he'd say, when to tell him anything, and how to tell him. And heaven help the company if he was in a bad mood, the mood of the entire company shifted into high panic awaiting the inevitable bomb to drop. For some reason, I was the only who thought it was funny.

To be continued...