My life in the corporate world.

In 1988 I started working for a small electronics manufacturer. My childhood friend Gary worked there where his dad Johnny was a VP. Johnny was an asshole but he could see I was clean cut, respectable and a hard worker.

I started out counting parts, moving pallets, and doing dumpster duty, I worked for a horrendous annoying bitch named Donna. She was about the most nasally, passive aggressive drama queen I had ever met. She made my life a living hell, but I needed the job.$4.85 per hour was almost 30% over minimum wage. So I put up with her crazy ass.

This company had 30 employees and I was at the bottom of the pile. I showed initiative and slowly they gave me more and more responsibility. I took any bit of overtime they offered and would do any job they put in front of me.

Soon I was building modems, soldering, talking to vendors, processing returns, and pretty much everything and anything they would let me learn and do.

The company began to grow and we moved to a larger facility. They fired my crazy bitch supervisor and hired a girl named Sandy to run the department.

Her and I hit it off and pretty and soon we were friends with benefits. Johnny saw us having lunch together at Taco Bell one day. I thought nothing of it.

Gary came over to my house the next day and told me his dad roughed him up demanding to know if I was screwing Sandy. Gary is a loyal friend. He didn't talk and just let his dad throw him around until he got tired.

Johnny immediately transferred Sandy out of my department. That kind of sucked because we were truly friends not just in the sack. I had no idea what his problem was until much later. (Turns out the married asshole was screwing her too.)

When Sandy was transferred, that made me de facto supervisor of a much larger department and soon I had a bunch of young assholes working for me. It was like the dirty dozen but much worse. I was a good boss and I got promoted to a salaried position by the time I was 20.

Sandy and I drifted apart when she started dating a IV drug addict ex con, biker, gang member that we had in our "hire a parolee for the tax write off" program.

This guy was scum, he bragged about his rapes, robberies and murders to anyone who would listen. I was shocked, disappointed and disgusted when I saw Sandy making out with him in the break room.

I washed my hands of her. I couldn't have any part of that. She ended up in the hospital several times. He nearly killed her but she blamed it on muggers in the mall parking lot. She kept going back to him so I kept out of it. Secretly, I was furious at the way she was ruining her life, but I knew better than to get in the middle of that mess.

Soon after, I was promoted again to manufacturing planner. I had my own office and computer. I ran reports, assigned vendors and directed the manufacturing of our components. This is about the time I met my soon to be wife. We were both taking night classes in the local college. Life was good.

Things seemed to be going really well. I was ready to be promoted to the next level, but Johnny kept hiring his old unemployed buddies and making me train them to do the managers job I had been doing all along.

They made me an outside manufacturing coordinator. Which meant I was the bad guy who kicked our vendor's asses when they were late with our stuff. It was fun but stressful. I was at the mercy of broken down machines, incompetent parts handlers and Taiwanese wafer shortages. (don't ask)

They soon hired two more people to work with me. After I trained them from scratch but I found out they were both hired at double my salary. The payroll people mis queued a salary report to my personal printer (oops).

I confronted my boss and he lied to me about it. Johnny quit the company and Gary was soon fired. My boss moved me back downstairs to the production floor to supervise two of the worst employees in the company. Suzette and Robert. Suzette was the biggest jabber jaw 35 year old dungeons and dragons girl on the planet. She was ADD, incompetent and annoying as hell. Robert was an alcoholic habitual drunk driver, woe is me, cry baby who was wearing an ankle monitor.

These two assholes fought like cats and dogs, fucked up everything they touched and made my life a living hell. I begged my boss to fire them and let me do the work myself. He refused. Saying I wasn't managing them properly. I doubt The Croc hunter, Dog whisperer and a 8000 volt shock collar would have made any difference with these two fucks. They would actually do the 8 year old turn your head, closed eyes slap at each other thing when they would get angry. It was surreal watching two 35 year olds act like this.

I was dealing with diabetes, my stress level was through the roof my bosses kept hiring outside buddies to take the new positions. I was working 12 hours a day and getting no respect.

So I quit.

.

My boss shit his pants and begged me to stay. I told him this is where I get off. People that had never spoken to me before were trying to get me to stay on. I knew every job in the company and could run all the machines. I was the only one who knew every part number and what it took to build it. Most of this stuff wasn't properly documented and 7 years of knowledge went with me. Muahahahah!

I took a year off and lived on my 401k. It was the best decision I ever made.

As soon as I left, all of the companies contracts were cancelled because their quality and delivery times went to shit. Within months the company declared bankruptcy and the stock tanked. They dropped most of their product lines and went totally tits up in about 18 months.

I eventually retrained and went on to bigger and better things. That experience taught me that the corporate world was no place for me.