Suck Is Relative

Especially around Christmas, working in retail at a high-end technology company sucks. Folks feel entitled because they're big-ticket items. There's enough misplaced anger to fill three therapist couches. And people get aggravated at all the people here to do the exact same thing they themselves are here doing. 


You have to imagine even little baby Jesus (no crying he makes) might bind some cords and kick a few money-changers out of the mall.


So it's nice to have a reminder that 21st-century first-world suck is honeyed heaven compared to most work, even work in this country. And at least I've got a job, nothing to sneeze at when we came this close to a "Brother can you spare some garbage to boil into a stew?" type situation. 

Work Song

Joshua Mehigan

This fastening, unfastening, and heaving—
this is our life. Whose life is it improving?
It topples some. Some others it will toughen.
Work is the safest way to fail, and often
the simplest way to love a son or daughter.
We come. We carp. We’re fired. We worry later.


That man is strange. His calipers are shiny.
His hands are black. For lunch he brings baloney,
and, offered coffee, answers, “Thank you, no.”
That man, with nothing evil left to do
and two small skills to stir some interest up,
fits in the curtained corner of a shop.


The best part of our life is disappearing
into the john to sneak a smoke, or staring
at screaming non-stop mills, our eyes unfocused,
or standing judging whose sick joke is sickest.
Yet nothing you could do could break our silence.
We are a check. Do not expect a balance.


That is a wrathful man becoming older,
a nobody like us, turned mortgage holder.
We stay until the bell. That man will stay
ten minutes more, so no one can complain.
Each day, by then, he’s done exactly ten.
Ten what, exactly, no one here can say.