Meet Natalie!

Natalie was the general manager of the store for the majority of the time I was employed with Mahjong. 

She was in her late 30's, and a fixture at the company. By every single account she'd slept her way to the GM position, and had apparently slept high enough that she was virtually unfire-able. Which seems like a solid way to run a business. Natalie was like bubblegum that you chewed, fucked, and then never got out of your pubes. 

As manager, Natalie's bonus structure incentivized behaviors like obsessively regulating stock, rationing hours to drivers and insiders with an eyedropper, and coming down with a hellwhip on people she didn't feel were being productive. This mind-numbing lack of knowledge of organizational psychology fell into one of two categories:

Hilarious when it happened to someone else. 

or 

Awful when it happened to you. 

The best part of Natalie's managing style was that she was constantly, constantly in the office. Her judgment of your productivity depended entirely on the 20 minutes she was out of it. My favorite example of this was the time Jeremy, in an effort to show me how easily impressed she was, said, "Watch this." 

When Natalie walked out of the office, Jeremy picked up a broom, spread his legs shoulder-length apart, and stood stock still holding the broom hamfistedly a foot above the floor, staring straight ahead with a glassy look in his eyes.

She jumped upon seeing him with broom in hand. "That's the initiative I like see Jeremy! He's getting extra hours next week!" She moved to the schedule and magnanimously scribbled in a 4 hour shift for him. Beaming with pride, perhaps a tear glistening in her eye, she returned to the office.

Jeremy had not moved a single hair the entire time. When she was firmly in the office, he tossed the broom aside, picked up an order, and left to deliver it.

There will be many stories to come about Natalie and her reign as head shill for Mahjong. But evidence exists, if you'll believe it, that she once felt emotions, perhaps even love.

And I will tell you the story of the precise moment I believe that that ceased to be true.  

Natalie was a cat-lover. A cat calendar was the sole personal touch that adorned the office (her son merited neither a picture nor keeping him in house past 15). It was pleasant to know there was something she loved outside of Mahjong. Humanizing.  

She once had a cat, a kitten really, which she'd stolen from a pair of friends. The pair had gotten the kitten addicted to cocaine as a lark, we're talking really fucked up stuff. Not cool people. So Natalie stole the kitten and over the course of the next few weeks, weaned it off the coke. She bought smaller and smaller amounts until it was well again, and grew to love the kitten.  

Fast forward another month or so, the cat was sick, so she rushed to the vet, leaving it overnight. The next day, the vet told her the kitten had feline AIDS, and that the best option would be to put it down. It was then that she got the call from her supervisor, the Area Manager, Lena (she has lots of stories in the future!). Natalie was needed immediately.  

She protested. The last of her humanity gave her the strength to cry out, she was about to send off a beloved friend.  

But Lena said if she wasn't there within 20 minutes she wouldn't have a job. Natalie sighed, and this is the moment we freeze frame on, this sigh. This sigh is the noise of capital eroding the human soul. No screams or whimpers or howls, just a sigh. It's the soul escaping, and the next noise you hear is the crinkling of the skin, as it is now simply a husk. This was the very second Natalie lost her spirit and became the Mahjong zealot.

An Introduction

These are the collected tales of my time at the Mahjong Pizza Company. No names have been changed to protect the innocent; there are no innocent. No details have been spared out of respect; I have none.

Jim is to blame for the entire damn thing. Just try to call him out on it, he will hem and haw about how he warned me what it was like, how I needed the money, he will do whatever it takes to escape moral culpability. But when you read my tale of woe, know this: Jim is to blame.

I'd been unemployed for four months. My enormous stash of ramen and tiny stash of rent money had both dwindled, and I needed to rejoin the ranks of the gainfully employed. Jim had worked at Mahjong for over two years by this time. He said he could get me a job there. He couched it in constant reminders that it was the worst place he'd ever worked, but I had reached the point of no return. In poverty, you are allowed no standards.

So an application was filed and good words were put in, the churning colon of employment at Mahjong was massaged, and an entire fucking month later, I was ready for orientation. Never mind all the terrible things a month-long hiring process indicates about a company; never mind the hiring manager boasted to me the company's near-100 percent turnaround; never mind every bit of it, I was a fresh-faced youth ready to live the capitalist dream. It was time to earn money, to become an integral part of my community and pay my rent as a self-made man.

The orientation was held in the district office, which was little more than a tiny office building adjoining a Mahjong. The batch of new recruits were here told about the list of benefits Mahjong provided:

No Vacation

No Health Insurance

No Raise Structure

No Paid Time Off

Alright, sweet, Texas is a right-to-work state, got it. Money's money, right? Time for our drug tests!

Except there's only one bathroom and we need to hurry this along, so ladies, line up at the bathroom, fellas, pick a cubicle and pee into this cup. I laugh at this, and the orientation manager gives me a dead-eyed smile. "Yes?"

It takes me a moment to realize he's not kidding, and I decided then and there it wasn't worth it. No, money is not money, we are human beings, we are entitled to the basest level of dignity, this is the line. I rallied the other new hires. "We're not going to huddle in a 3-walled, shoulder-high cubicle and pee for these fuckers! Today we take a stand! Worker's rights are human rights! Unionize!"

The only bright side to my year-long term of wage slavery with Mahjong is that no one saw my dick that day. Money's money, right?