So, last week I was back at the Enormous Corporate Behemoth, for about the fourth time in a year. I was guessing that the temp service staff was living in the hope that if they only threw me often enough at the E-C-B that eventually I would stick. Their hopes are alas, a triumph over my experience. To them it is a mystery why I wriggle out of the E-C-B’s smothering but very well-paid embrace: “But you were military, you should love it!” they cry… well, yes I was and I still don’t. I flee, screaming (softly) at the end of every assignment, putting off my contractor ID badge and tearing up the parking permit, and swearing that this time, it will be absolutely the last time… really!

The E-C-B is one of San Antonio’s munificent and magnificent employers. I have met many people who seem to be quite happy, and enormously fullfilled, they smile in the corridors, and laugh in the lunchrooms, and decorate their cubicles with stuffed animals and family pictures, and little banners and awards for this and that… and most of them show no sign of having had lobotamies… but there are so many of them. I have never seen anyone from a previous assignment, again, the place is that big. The ranks of cubicles go on, and on, and on, as far as the eye can see.

Their main complex is a huge edifice, sprawling across the length of a ridge in the middle of a wooded and beautifully landscaped park. From a distance, the place looked like one of those sprawling and crenellated fortresses. A number of ponds and a resident herd of very tame and slightly undersized deer heighten the likeness to one of those rambling castles or palaces in the middle of a European city, or maybe a stately home in it’s own parkland. Employee appointments and convieniences are lavish: There is a Starbucks at either end of the mail building, and another Starbucks in an adjacent facility, an on-site gym, a daycare, cafeterias, snack bars and little lounges wedged in wherever there is a nook big enough to fit two cushy chairs and a table, and a bit of original art… and the place creeps me out, completely. It is just too big.

I have worked for big firms since I retired, and small ones, too. The small ones had a disconcerting tendency to either treat you like family— and in a dysfunctional and abusive family way, either that or fold underneath you. Bad sign, when the employer starts letting contracted services go, and stalling on cutting checks for work already done. Almost as bad as having employee paychecks bounce. That last hasn’t happened to me yet, but I did have an acquaintence who came to work one normal morning, and found it padlocked and empty of furniture and all the employees owed a paycheck. No, the smaller places have their perils, and even the medium-sized firm most recently on my resume had a creeply way of suddenly shedding long-time employees without warning…. to them or anyone else. Usually our first clue was the next morning,w hen the combination to the employee door wouldn’t work: we’d all be whispering to each other, “Hey, the combo is changed… OK, who got the sack this time?” This made all the slightly forced jollity of company picnics and events ring just a tad bit hollow.

Frankly, I’d rather spend my days at home writing, with Spike the Weevil I Know Nothing Of sitting under my chair, and just temp for a week or two here and there: there may be a fair amount of crap going on where I work, and I have pretty definitly lost my capacity for enduring it… but a week here, and a couple of days there pays the bills and I pack up my stuff and go well before it gets to me or I piss someone off. Or look around and realize that Ihave spent several decades in the cubicle farm.