DAY JOB

I have a "day job". I use the clichéd expression "day job" because they pay me decent money and it is in fact during the day. As in, it is always light out by the time I arrive and rarely dark before I am allowed to leave. I also use the term "day job" to distinguish this paid work arrangement from what I like to consider the "real reason I moved to Los Angeles," which is best summed up as "Entertainment Pursuits." Which is a pretty vague phrase, I must admit. That could mean acting in a sitcom, dancing in a purple dinosaur suit for five-year olds, or bringing latte to the assistant director on an experimental art-house snuff film. Even if twenty years from now-- when, for the purposes of casting directors, I’ll be 45-- I have only acted a bit part in a non-Union, Korean-language wig commercial and written punch-up on an animated talking-potato show on the Intranet (like the Internet, only smaller), I will still defiantly call my non-"day job" pursuits the real goddamn reason I moved to L.A.

In the meantime, however, I work the nine to five, Monday through Friday. And every week I sink further into the soft, anesthetic complacency of the pleasant corporate environment. My day job offers many things to make me keep coming back every day, such as a tidy office with a view of Universal City, industrial-strength air conditioning, a sweet multi-line console phone with unlimited long distance, T1 Internet connection and all the free coffee with white chemical non-food "creamer" I could ever ingest.

But the single best perk that makes it so hard to leave the job is the paycheck. Every two weeks, come haze or sun, smog or Santa Ana winds, these deceived rubes issue me an official bank document good for an amount of money that would put someone on the list of the 400 richest people in central northeastern Bangladesh. Or pay for a small apartment near Hollywood, car payments on a Mazda, a few monthly bills and enough left over to buy a skinny, half-eaten slice of the great American dream of disposable-cash luxury living.

I would say that I treat my job like a callous-faced, over-the-hill whore, except that I would treat such a lady with a great deal of respect, interest and fascination, and I treat my day job as something between an annoyance and a knife in the gut. One of my biggest problems at the workplace is that they are constantly confusing me with some other guy and having exchanges with me that must be meant for him. Apparently, this guy looks exactly like me and sits at my desk, except that unlike me, this guy actually gives a good flying F about the job.

My job requires quite a bit of knowledge about our "product", which is marketing data, and a fair amount of knowledge of technical issues, which means how our special software application works and, more importantly, how it breaks. In the two-and-a-half years that I’ve been there I think I could fit the amount of truly intense, sweat-dripping, brain-busting work I’ve done into a thimble. OK, it’d be a large thimble, but you’d still have room left over for some root beer and a few ice cubes.

In a race for daily productivity, I’d be neck and neck with a back office postal clerk, an opiated snail and tree-moss. I have mastered the art of artfully doing nothing. Every day I'm sucked into the Internet browser in front of my face and spat out hours later dazed and full of slothful guilt. Another workday has come and gone, and I still haven’t started that "self-starter" project for the day job or typed scads of pages of my future Emmy-award winning yet street cred-approved sitcom. Instead, I’ve learned about the availability of turkey fryers on E- Bay, Howard Dean’s grandfather’s accountant’s business dealings with Hood Milk and Kaiser Wilhelm, and the general condition of slutty nineteen-year-olds who crave large man meat.

A couple of times a year the company, which is headquartered in New York, flies the small L.A. office out there for so-called sales meetings. I say so-called because these "meetings" consist mostly of ribald joking, getting fat on Louie Anderson-sized meals and drinking like a frat-house Quarters team at an Irish wake.

This past summer the company sent around 30 employees, including myself, to a small "resort" in Red Bank, N.J. I use the term "resort" lightly, because... come on, it’s New Jersey. The "Jersey Shore" has two main attributes going for it. It’s in New Jersey. And it’s by the shore. Oh yeah, and you can take a thirty-minute commuter boat to Manhattan. But when you’re surrounded by thirty or so wacky and fascinating marketing data professionals in their colorful summer duds and on their friskiest bad-boy behavior, what more do you really need? Well, it turns out you need a Paul Theroux book, your own hotel room to hide out in and a swimming pool’s worth of water in**** which to submerge. These things make it bearable.

The most excruciatingly horrible part of these get-togethers are the actual group meetings, at which the company’s president, vice presidents and a few other very-high-ups hold us underlings captive for hours in some sterile, tightly-packed room like bugs in a sealed glass jar, and assault us with a steady stream of big-picture platitudes, absurdly irrelevant minutiae and offensive stabs at comedy. This leaves us listless, zombie-eyed and resentful. At these meetings I find myself even more agitated than my colleagues, as I have almost no mental or emotional investment in the corporate path, and thus I end up seething with a bored frustration that turns to pure contempt and then borderline violent rage. Of course the only way I can vent these feelings is by doodling angry cartoons with foul captions and showing them to my nearby co-workers.

This year the meeting had a devious twist. Instead of us low-level underlings just sitting around and enduring the sadistic torture of upper management’s presentations, we were all expected to give presentations ourselves! There was no way around this. It is one thing for me to heap flurries of semi-eloquent bullcrap at a phone client or my boss in L.A., and craftily wriggle and dodge my way out of being branded an incompetent, technically deficient faker. It is another thing to stand in front of a group of senior technical hotshots and managerial fat cats and try to fool them at a game they either invented or gave their blood, sweat and soul to years ago in exchange for a prime four-bedroom house in the suburbs.

The big event featured all of the salespeople, and then all of us client service reps, each delivering a ten to fifteen minute rap on some technical or business aspects of the company to the rest of the assembled, who were seated behind tables in a U-shaped configuration along three of the conference room’s walls. People used wigs and pop music and cutesy, jokey PowerPoint graphics projected onto the big screen. A few people did rather hammy but lightly humorous sketches in groups of two or three. One woman handed out unhealthy bagged snacks to the crowd to help illustrate her point, another person distributed Corona beer.

When it was my turn, I used a gimmick called "being under-prepared". This little trick can add a feeling of spontaneity and unpredictable energy to a presentation. However, in my case, it led only to a sluggish, uninspired re-hashing of some of the software’s most basic features. Not only did I fail to expand upon or top any of the previous presenters’ content, but I used almost none of my effervescent comedic pizzazz to lighten up the proceedings. Perhaps I was suffering from advanced-stage cynical glibness.

After delivering my lackluster, semi-bumbling technical review, which I’d describe in comedy terms as a near-bomb, it came time for the judging. The infinite jesters in our company had decided to set up these presentations in a mock American Idol format. After each presenter, a panel of a "judges"-- comprised of a few vice presidents and the director of client services- would offer a brief verbal critique to the whole room. Playing roles analogous to the ones on the popular TV show, one judge was especially lenient and positive, a few were in-between and one played the nasty Simon Cowell persona to the hilt.

I like to give credit where credit is due and there are a handful of employees in my company’s New York office who actually do possess the humor gene. While my prejudice against corporate monotony and conformity made me actually want the people in the company to be vapid, innocuous dullards, I’ve found a few characters in that office who have lacerating razor-wit, smoldering resentment, and a subtle, yet finely polished misanthropy. In other words, my kind of people!

And one of the best of these is Mike D., a short, slight balding man from Long Island with the blazing eyes and taught face of a predatory bird and the sing-songy New Yawk accent and delivery of the edgy, wiseass white collar co-worker who’d be comic relief in an otherwise serious slash n’ burn Hollywood thriller.

Mike had impressed me on earlier trips with barbed insults aimed at co-workers, delivered in his flat, froggy deadpan, and his liberal use of the hardest profanity in almost any situation or context. But at the sales meeting presentations, Mike was dispensing venom like a fire hose of rancid hate. After almost every presenter, Mike’s lips nearly quivered from the anticipation of ripping into someone and registering his revulsion and disgust at their shortcomings. It was very, very funny and the whole crowd was laughing, partly because it was so exaggeratedly mean and partly because at least part of his brutal criticisms were absolutely true.

When it came my turn, after blasting me on the technical aspects, Mike said, "Adam, you’re a standup comic? That was the least funny presentation I’ve ever heard. Tell me, when you do your standup act, has anyone in the audience ever killed themselves?" Taking exactly one rhythmical beat, and looking right at Mike, I responded, "Well, you could be the first." The room went up in hysterics. The other judges laughed. The executive vice president Ian-- a good-natured, burly Australian bear of a man-- gave me an applause break and declared, "Good one!"

I’m sure Ian and a few of the others were delighted to see the acerbic Mike D. receive a verbal slap as stinging as the ones he regularly hands out. Several weeks later, when I happened to be in the New York office for other work-related business, Ian came up to me, patted me on the shoulder and said, "You’re a hero around here, mate." I stared back at him with scrunched eyebrows, unsure of what the hell he was talking about. "The sales meeting," he elaborated, "The comment." It had become, merely "The comment". And this was the second highest person in the entire company.

My natural tendency to respond to crises with comedy along with my several years of standup served me well, as I felt that I narrowly avoided coming off as a total jackass in my job by cutting someone down with a quick retort, much as we often have to do at parties, sidewalks in front comedy clubs or even up on stage. Except this time a funny line may have saved me a lot more than my pride. Perhaps Ian was assuming something very logical-- that a mind sharp and dangerous enough to come up with such a scathing rejoinder must be more than smart enough to learn a bunch of technical computer junk.