The Worst Jobs I Ever Had: Coworker Profile #2: Dross

Dross was a big deal at a distribution company for which I worked.

Dross was brought to our facility in the Northeast by the Darkly-Hooded-Powers-That-Be in our corporate headquarters out West, the way Darth Vader was brought in to seriously fuck with The Force.

Dross was brought to our workplace to shake up the jellybean machine. We were actually doing fine. Apparently, the Hooded Ones thought we were capable of dispensing more jellybeans with each turn of the jellybean handle.

Some Sith Lord Darth Sidious or other in our corporate headquarters saw a great potential in Dross for enhanced jellybean production.

Dross was the size of a third grader and had a vocabulary to match.

Why did this Sith Lord Darth Sidious in our corporate headquarters see potential in Dross?

Apparently, Dross had once--long ago, almost in prehistory, maybe as far back as 1990--invented an instant messenging system (an Alexander Graham Bell moment of joy for pedophiles everywhere!).

And this instant messenging system had made the company he was working for at the time like 100 million dollars.

And then because of something stupid he had done with copyright infringement or something, it ended up costing the company like 175 million dollars.

Like five minutes later.

Even in the third grade, the kids will tell you, "That isn't a number!" when you ask them to do the subtraction to compute the "profit." (Okay, they probably learn about negative numbers in the sixth or seventh grade.)

Why anyone felt Dross was a good acquisition is beyond me. Apparently they paid him as though they believed he was a Shrinky Dink Donald Trump or Bill Gates.

Because hiring Dross was like hiring the horse that wins the Preakness. But. It was liking hiring the horse that wins the Preakness but then runs past the finish line, ploughs through the Winner's Circle, gnashes the roses of the horseshoe bouquet between his teeth, then jumps the hedge and fatally tramples the State's governor and his wife as they sip their mint juleps, wipes out the wheelchair brigade set up by the Impoverished Addicted Gamblers fund, then breaks through the Plate Glass of the Addicted Gambler's Day Care Center and reveals himself to be the only known carnivorous horse on the North American Continent and eats all the babies.

Eats all the babies dead.

Dross was that horse.

And that is how Dross is remembered at the company where he made all the money and lost all the money with the ease of a kid playing jacks.

Sometimes boys feel like big men if they can say things like "He made a hundred million dollars for ________. And I write his paycheck." And you certainly could say that about Dross, although it would have been more accurate to say "negative 75 million dollars." Probably the boys liked to ask Dross, "How did it feel when they first implemented the instant messenging system, and you got that first check?" Probably he gave them stories of what he did to celebrate. You know how those types of men are. They probably liked to touch him, their little money elf. Something might rub off, right? You never know.

Really, that's what they should have spray-painted on his parking space: "-$75,000, 000". With the negative sign bright radioactive orange. WARNING! WARNING! DANGEROUS TROLL MESSIAH ON PREMISES!

But they didn't. Of course, they put the troll's legal name on the slot and he parked his Lexus or whatever cliche he drove there every day.

Dross was Irish. You knew he was about when you heard the Irish folk ditty he had for a ringtone. I called him "The Leprechaun."

That sounds bad, I realize. But keep in mind that was only after he fired about half of my co-workers. And it was a large company.

And apparently my company was convinced the little troll knew where the pot of gold was.

If he did, he was keeping it secret. Productivity and profit spiked downwards with each quarter.

Because here was Dross's great plan for the company: Fire people.

Everyday. I have never worked for a company with such involuntary attrition. These people all ranged in competency from "incompetently acceptable" to "stellar beyond belief."

In other words, there was no logic whatsoever to Dross's vision for our company.

Dross was an alcoholic. Dross was a barely five foot alcoholic who hated mankind, but was receiving a stupendous paycheck every week because he had once lost a company seventy-five million dollars in a short period of time.

This is how life works. Forget justice.

We lived in a state of black humor, and everbody expected to be fired at any time. People quickly gave up attempting to curry favor with Dross because he fired those people too. Exceptional performance? Nope. You got fired for that.

In other words, we understood what it was like to be a Russian citizen under Stalin.

You presumed nothing. You began to read the Classifieds. You watched the Magic Leprechaun dance out of the building each day. "Firing people is magically delicious!" we would say in a brogue as soon as he had left for the day. This was usually around 1:30 p.m.

It was like being a character on Lost. You tried to figure out why the hell you had washed up on this crazy island, and what it all means.

We came out with outlandish theories of why this could possibly be happening, why competent workers who had been working here for years were let go without any explanation.

Theories were crazy and included things like:

1) We were part of a reality t.v. show and those still working for the company couldn't know the secret. The whole company had been created by like Abby Terkuhle at MTV or something.

2) Dross was an alien. He was terminating humans to replace them with other aliens. This company was somehow important to their colonization of earth. The size of Dross kind of lent credulity to this. But why would an alien be such a lush? Or was that a cover too? Maybe that would explain the extra time he needed to report to alien h.q.!

3) All of the people we knew to be good people and good employees were secretly involved in a cabal and bilking the company for millions. We were left behind, because we were the good, honest ones. (Comforting but no.)

And so on in craziness.

Oh, Dross's other Great Plan. I forgot to tell you about that.

Our building was the embodiment of Stupid. The building consisted of a warehouse longer than a football field with ceilings about sixty feet over our heads, filled with computer towers and equipment, and two narrow office spaces at either end of this warehouse. We were divided into Team A and Team B.

But work had to be physically carried back and forth constantly from Office A to Office B. This is good exercise and can help break up the monotony of the day, but it's not really practical. Faxing wasn't permissible and we didn't have pneumatic tubes.

Dumbest of all, machines needed by workers in Office A ninety percent of the time and by workers in Office B ten percent of the time were kept in Office B and vice versa. When this was routinely brought up to higher ups or to Visionary Dross, he would become mystical and imply we didn't understand the higher reasoning in this arrangement. Pressing him on this matter could be exceedingly risky.

I had never seen S&M played with office equipment before but this company was kinky in all sorts of unusual ways.

Anyway, one day, Dross got the brilliant idea we should all switch. So we had to plan for days for the problems that would be caused by the relocation of thirty office workers and desks, pieces of office equipment, networks, etcetera, at one end of the football field with thirty workers, desks, yadda yadda at the other end. You get the picture.

We even had to come in on the weekend to effect this miserable, backbreaking change.

We were told about this mandatory overtime, "If you don't come in over the weekend, don't show up on Monday morning."

Dross would come in around four p.m., after enjoying his Saturday. If he felt like it.

This strongarm tactic was used many times by this company, like when they pretended we were all suddenly trained inventory specialists, and made us inventory the whole warehouse over weekends. We had to climb and pick our way over all sorts of peripherals, software, hardware, housing units and such with which we had no real familiarity, and pretend to convincingly inventory it when we had no idea. We had to drive forklifts uncertified and go up in cherry pickers and count items off wobbly shelving units thirty feet tall. We had definitely become Russians. We were waiting to be told to wait in line for toilet paper and borscht.

Anway, we did it. We put the Scylla where the Charybdis was, and the Charybdis where the Scylla was.

Then he fired a bunch more of us.

The ill-placed office equipment was moved even though it was being moved where it was not needed. The insane status quo was adhered to. Lord Vader had his reasons and kept them to himself.

Later, I was told they switched the offices again. Dross decided it wasn't working. He missed his old office space. I think he liked to watch sparrows or something out his window.

Maybe he softly wept when he watched the sparrows. Who knows.

I'd like to tell you there is a happy ending to this story about Dross, but there isn't.

I downsized myself before they could downsize me. I missed too many people, and you get tired of constantly training new people who are then fired several weeks later anyway.

It got to the point where nobody knew anything about anything. Maybe that was Dross's Master Plan. Maybe that meant only he would know what we used to do here. Long ago.

When there were, like, people and knowledge and stuff.

I have no idea if he's still there but I suspect he is.

You know how these stories end.

Luke Skywalker got downsized. He never got a chance to confront Darth in this version of the tale.

Luke's probably working at Wal-Mart. He's probably too traumatized to ever try to get a job where he needs his M.B.A. again.

He's probably happily scooping out blue gouramis for eight-year-olds at Wally World. Watching the kids smile and gratefully receive the plastic bag he has just written a code on with a red marker. Warning them about how the anti-theft device can zap your fish "so have your Mom hold them over it when you leave the store."

And the Mom and her kid are probably appreciating his kindness and his work.

And Wally World is, after all, like that alcoholics bar on the old t.v. show, a place where everbody knows your name.

And he probably feels safe. Safe from evil leprechauns in a Darth Vader mask there.

He would never go back to the Deathstar.

Not even to blow it up.

The leprechaun would just jump in his little pod anyway.

They have Contracts for shit like that when it happens.

Leprechauns are Deathstar-savvy. They expect to blow the place up. They know how dangerous they are to things like profit and productivity and workplace sanity.

That's why they have their lawyers write those contracts.

You're better off, Luke.

Stick with the gouramis, dude.

Peace.