This is a poem I just submitted for my Poetry class. It is in homage to a great and wonderful place, one of many that I had the pleasure of working at for what was a sadly short three month, from November of '08 to January of 2009. It has been edited for conciseness that the professor requires. I will include the long edition some time in the future.
Ode to City Electric
This is a great place to work,
They say with a straight face.
Someday you can become a salesman too
Making the owner Sandy millions,
sitting at a comfortable desk
working at a leisurely pace.
Then someone appears one day, you’re told
To learn the computer system
To take the comfortable place of one of those
calm, content people
Sitting at a desk in one of those rooms upstairs,
Who shrink in fear of you on the stairwell,
Dirty warehouse worker,
Unfit to breathe the same air.
Why are you taking so long
Filling orders?
Searching high and low
for something not there.
But according to the computer it is,
Are you blind?
Is the prescription on those glasses you wear
Up to date?
We by the virtue of being employees
Of the great City Electric
Can get a 15 percent discount at Lens crafters
You sightless, stupid fool.
If you can’t find what you’re looking for,
Search the area nearby
Where the computer says it should be.
Develop the powers of clairvoyance, remote viewing,
Telepathy, telekinesis.
My coworkers agree
He’s a fucking asshole
Doesn’t want to listen to the blaring sports report
Doesn’t want to talk shit
Doesn’t want to hear me quote
Spaceballs all day
“Let the Swartz be with you”.
Doesn’t want to take Travis’s spot
Putting away shit
all day in the warehouse.
One of my coworkers who had been here
for some miserable years.
Dying to escape
From the monotony of the warehouse,
of days, months, years,
running up and down three flights of stairs,
of the moods of fat, moody Farnham.
Send me please to another branch
Put me on the road
Free from the prison of the warehouse
I’ll do anything. PLEASE!!!
Tell Farnham the boss
when you’re on your lunch break,
All the things you’ve confessed.
In what you foolishly thought
Was their confidence,
From having psychotic fantasies
To hating having to work here.
Hired as a backup driver,
a guy they call “Glue-stick”,
the dispatcher of this place,
his name some unpronounceable
Balkan last name
comes up to you in their midst.
“Do you know where such and such place is?”
Before you can form a thought
The others desperately and agitatedly
yell, “Oh, Oh, Oh, I know where that is”.
Wednesday my favorite day,
the only day they let me drive.
So I make it last the whole of the day.
Day trip to the Rochester store,
stop at the rest area,
then after your delivery
picking up half of what
you delivered last week as a return,
then tearing off as fast as I can
to stop at the diner down the street for brunch,
coming back to jealous co-workers
who spent the whole day
talking shit about you behind your back
as they spent the day
running up and down three flights of stairs.
Terminated after the holidays
for “poor performance”.
But we’re so nice
“We’ll let you work out your last two weeks”.
Their mistake.
Big mistake.
Now I get paid to lolly gag
more aggressively than before.
Smashing bulbs,
graffiti the place.
"Harvesting" batteries.
Do you want to buy some back?
I have so many
They’ll go bad before I can ever use them.
What was I thinking?
Stuffing boxes of them
down my pants, behind my belt,
inside my pants,
front and sometimes back.
One on each side of my jacket,
in pockets that seemed to welcome them.
On and off for months as the weather got cold,
then two or three times a day
after I was told I was “laid off”
How about some flashlights?
So many dumps like this
I have worked in.
Sweated,
Sometimes bled,
And cried when I got home.
This lesson existed before me,
for so many years,
unwilling to learn.
The only way to escape?
The one that finally sunk in.
Go back to school.
Get yourself
a Bachelor’s Degree.
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