Sometimes a SuperHero hits bottom. Rock bottom. Bottom-of-the-frickin'-Grand-Canyon bottom. And as she's sailing towards the hard earth at a rate of 9.8 meters/second (squared), the main thing on her mind is, "How did I get here?"
It's all so simple:
1 Woman. 2 Identities.
First, the mild-mannered Lulu O'Brien--aspiring artist, aspiring educator; fond of new ideas, clever plans, funny people, staying up late, checking it out; known to smile a lot and laugh loudly; partial to puppies, kittens, little yellow chicks and other baby animals; in short, a friend to all. Well, or almost all. She's not a total Pollyanna.
Second, the SuperHero Great Big Girl: Feminine Avenger! Great Big Girl: Pink Collar Hero! Righting the wrongs done to her sisters! Fighting the injustice of the pink-collar life! Demanding that The Man get his dirty jackboot off her fabulously accessorized neck! (For a complete list of extraordinary powers, see entry #2. I mean after all, it's a narrative, people.)
So that's easy enough, right? Public identity. Private Identity. Earning a paycheck. Fighting injustice. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. What a brilliant, streamlined system! What could possibly go wrong with that?
That was not a rhetorical question.
Since I last left all y'all, quite a bit has happened. I'll try to be brief: I finally left The Company (i.e., the embroidery factory) after an ugly incident. Well, ugly from my point of view, but really run-of-the-mill for The Company.
As many of you know, all the people who worked on the sewing floor were ladies. As many of you also know, not a single lady on the sewing floor had English as her first language. In fact, the vast majority of them did not have English as any language, relying on Estrella, the shift supervisor, to translate. You can see where I'm going here--it was a bubbling cauldron of labor rights abuses just waiting to overflow.
At first, here's me, you know: I have a job! I'm paying bills! I'm out of the house! The Boss is funny! My co-workers are nice! So it was going to be great...until I realized that The Owner (not my immediate The Boss) was actually my nemesis, the SuperVillain known as Little Bully. (Are you remembering any of this now, folks?)
Little Bully yelled a lot.
Little Bully fired one of the seamsters because she had a frowny face one day when he walked on the sewing floor--although her face looked frowny every damn day because that was just her face.
Little Bully kept a fat bankroll in is pocket and peeled off the bills one by one to give to you, like you were a Dickensian street urchin begging for a handout.
Little Bully rigged the paging system so that he could listen to every conversation anywhere in the building--even the bathroom.
Little Bully installed hidden cameras throughout the building, trained on the employees, so he could watch them wherever they went--um, even the bathroom. (Do recall that none of this was disclosed at the time of employment, thus making it TOTALLY ILLEGAL. Especially the bathroom.)
In short, Little Bully was evil, and he was in sore need of an old-school Great Big Girl smackdown. But it didn't come in the way I thought it would.
I was at my threshold. Whispering conversations at work, or writing notes, or turning up the TV in the break room to try to get a little privacy (all tricks that Estrella taught me); the superiority complex; the constant yelling; trying to keep all my business covered when I peed because I couldn't tell the exact location of the camera (although it wasn't inside the bowl itself--I did check that)...well, all that, you know...it can get a girl down.
But the last straw was really this: Little Bully forced my boss to fire a bunch of the ladies because he said there wasn't enough work. So a bunch of the ladies got canned. But really, the work didn't decrease at all. Instead, Little Bully just wanted to make the seamsters work overtime. Okay, fine, overtime is good cash. But then I saw it with my own eyes: Little Bully telling Estrella that all the ladies would have to work all weekend. Okay, so, time-and-a-half into double-time = awesome. But when Estrella asked what she should tell the ladies about overtime pay, he said, "Tell them I'll throw an extra $20 in their pay packets." Like he was being all magnanimous. $20 for a whole weekend of work. And it was very clear that there was no contradicting this man. Let's spell it out together, kids: I-L-L-E-G-A-L.
So, a little girl talk with the ladies, and I found out that he did this all the time. Because what were they going to do--quit? Who else was going to hire a bunch of women who couldn't speak English?
Driving to work the next day, I was overcome with dread. I couldn't do it. I couldn't do it. I couldn't spend another second of my time condoning this man's labor abuses. Not a second of my time helping him line his evil pocket with cash. Not. Another. Second.
By the end of my 45-minute commute, I was shaking and on the verge of tears. So as soon as I did my morning code-punch, fingerprint check, and retina scan, I marched right into The Boss's office and told him, perhaps less than articulately, "I can't do this anymore."
The Boss--a genuinely good guy, a former fiber artist, a Roxy Music fan--seemed...frustrated. Until he asked me why and I told him, "The way Little Bully treats the workers is completely morally reprehensible. If I keep working here, I'm supporting his actions. And that makes me feel like I'm killing my soul off piece by piece." Exact words. For reals--Great Big Girl is a badass motherfucker, but Lulu O'Brien can be soft as a down pillow. But The Boss melted. He even said, "I was like you when I was your age. Fight the Power!" And then he finagled a final week out of me.
That last week, while brutal, proved to be a 40-hour, no-holds-barred, Great Big Girl SMACKDOWN! As soon as I got back to my desk, my phone starts to ring:
Me: Welcome to The Company. How can I help you?
Little Bully: WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO ME?!?!
Me: Um...This is The Company. How can I help you?
Little Bully: WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO ME?!?!
Me: Um...is this Little Bully?
Little Bully: YES!!!! WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO ME?!?!?!?!
He said if I wanted more money, I should have asked. (Remember: $11 an hour to be an office manager.) And for the next five days, Little Bully begged and whined. He threw temper tantrums unbecoming of a man his age. He tried to bribe me. "Keep that blood money in your pocket," says me. "I can't be bought."
As it ends up, that was perhaps the best way to vanquish my foe. Because no one had ever said no to him before, and I did it for a whole week straight. Publicly. Calmly. No matter how much he huffed and puffed and cursed. And the sewing ladies saw it all happen, nearly every time, and they laughed and laughed, and pulled other ladies over to watch, so everyone got a chance to chuckle at the impotent little lion who could roar all he wanted but couldn't do much else. Because the answer was still no.
So he lost. And I was free. The almost anti-climactic Fall of Little Bully.
I found some adjunct teaching gigs afterwards (see last post), and after a year of adjuncting, I landed a full-time Visiting Professor gig. Never fear, though. I haven't shucked off the pink collar--I make less than a kindergarten teacher. So I'm soon to move to a place called South Central, a strange, far-away land without businesses or people, but with lots and lots of livestock. What can such a place hold for a girl like me? Does South Central have need of a girl with a demon in her mouth and a SuperHero in her heart?
Tune in next time to find out...
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