As far as gigs in the vast sterilized wasteland that is Corporate America go, this one was pretty sweet. The building was clean, cool, and quiet. The other employees appeared friendly. The job itself seemed like my financial and professional salvation. They had every one of my favorite sodas in the commissary (even Vault, FTW). On top of all that, the company itself was physically situated just across the street from Sea World. Every day, I could burn a 10-minute break by going up to the top floor and watching the dolphins frolic verily in their giant blue training tank. With slightly less clothing and more chocolate, this place could have been Heaven’s waiting room.

Unfortunately, my tenure at this organization was tainted from the moment I first arrived. Turns out I was never supposed to be hired. The individual who brought me on was told explicitly by his boss not to do so, but he did anyway, because he was one of those middle-management rebel types who didn’t play by upper m’s rules. A regular loose cannon in khakis, that guy was. I didn’t know about any of this until well after I was fired, so it was a bit of a shock when, in an attempt to exact revenge and get me terminated, the head of my department stopped giving me work to do a couple months in and told Hiring Boss I was jerking off all day, every day. Of course, I got called into one of those tiny corporate Nazi interrogation rooms for a “Hey, what’s going on, I hear you can’t handle this job, what’s up with that?” discussion/passive-aggressive tongue-lashing.

I practically imploded. This job seemed like it could be my ticket to complete security by 30, and here I was getting thrown under the bus. I told Hiring Boss through a salty ocean of tears that Department Head was giving all my work to the other guy, that my inbox had been barren for weeks, that I was specifically asking Department Head if there was anything for me to do three or four times a day with no results. Hiring Boss was silent for a moment before officially placing me in another department. He gave me an hour off to get my shit together, which wasn’t quite enough time to dam the river that was pouring down my face. I reluctantly returned to the office; I don’t think I had restarted my computer before people began approaching me to offer quiet congratulations for not letting Department Head crush me. Apparently, this woman made a habit out of fucking over people she didn’t like, and she didn’t like me simply because I wasn’t supposed to be there.

This brought on a whole new rush of emotions. What is this cunt’s problem? What is this company’s problem? If this bitch is so petty and crazy like that and everyone knows it, why does she still work here? Why are people tip-toeing around her when everyone seems to agree she’s the one who needs to get her head checked? How does shit like this happen? These people mostly seem reasonable. Where’s the coup already? I didn’t have much time to process these thoughts before a serious batch of real, actual work hit my desk (courtesy of my new, caring, and human boss). Right as I started to get comfortable again, the hardest working employee in my new department, a girl who had been hired by the same guy as me on the same day as me who also was not supposed to get a job, was let go. If I was giving 500 percent at my new job, this chick was doing six times that. She was totally James Browning it. Her firing was the worst omen since nipples on the Batsuit.

Whatever job security anyone felt suddenly rushed out of the building. Even the dolphins over at Sea World seemed on edge. I was feeling especially frightened. This was the only publishing house in the entirety of Orlando. If I couldn’t hold on to a Project Editing position here, where the hell was I going to go? I’d be the quintessential twentysomething failure, sucking his girlfriend dry because he couldn’t manage to convince the suits that no one was better than he at finding typos in children’s books and Googling shit like The Three Little Pigs. I’d eat two-dollar microwave pizzas for every meal and bemoan the fact I bought all those neckties for nothing. Eventually, I’d die of exposure or consumption or both, leaving a corpse the size of a houseboat. My future looked non-existent.

The shining light during this period, the one thing that refueled my motor and eventually made me realize the only thing keeping me down was the same endless cycle of corporate bullshit that had felled far greater men, was Devo’s “Gates of Steel”, the seventh cut from the band’s 1980 Freedom of Choice album (I discovered it on a co-worker’s shared iTunes folder). Indeed, I had to twist away the asinine head games and the ridiculous mistakes of my polo-shirted, coffee-addicted overlords. Humankind by nature is completely illogical—especially anyone who devotes any significant chunk of their life to succeeding in office politics. A man like me is real, not made of steel! If I dwelled on every bizarre, nonsensical action thrown my way at 100 mph, I’d have no time to be swept up and inspired by breezy new-wave anthems of empowerment.

The day I was fired would have been comical were it happening to some other hapless bastard like Jason Biggs in a bullshit teen T&A flick; the axe came down as I was getting ice for the company-wide party we were having in honor of some forgotten milestone. As I cleaned out my cube, the searing chords of Mark Mothersbaugh and pals glided through my head, lifting me above the quagmire of office politicking and interpersonal nonsense I was about to somewhat reluctantly escape from. This hadn’t worked out. Oh well. Thanks to the guys who wrote “Whip It”, I would be okay. A man is real, not made of steel! Whenever I need to be reminded of that, I throw on Freedom of Choice and twist away whatever metallic gates are encompassing me. It always helps.

Watch: “Gates of Steel” [at youtube.com]

Tags: Devo, Gates of Steel, Freedom of Choice

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