the white collar jungle

I cut it off the story of Tamara Baum for dramatic effect. But it left both you and the person I originally wrote it to confused, so clearly I did not write it as well as I could have. When you are writing something you know all the facts and you think you can just hint at certain things, but that is not always the case.

Of course I really don’t know what was going on with Tamara Baum, but I am assuming it was business as usual, it was just that I didn’t know how business as usual operated. I was a country mouse entering the world of the city mice.

One point where I was led astray was that I thought that in some small way Tamara was my friend, that she would take my interests into consideration. It was that little chit chat that fooled me, a city mouse would know it meant nothing whereas a country mouse might think that if you were friendly to someone you must like them a little.

I think that what happened is that when the job came in, actually I think it was at a place called Bechtal, that they described the job to her just as they had described it to me, a not very good job, and one that I had no special qualifications for. She remembered me being in her office a few days prior and how desperate I was for any computer related job, and she figured that if she put me in that job she would get some kind of commission and some little gold star from the agency where she worked. When she described the job to me she built it up and also my chances of getting the job, because she had to drag me all the way back to San Francisco, spending the last of my money.

So her only interest in me was that she might get that little bump if I got the job. Once I didn’t, she had zero interest in me. She could have answered her phone and sympathized with me, or lied to me, or just said good bye or something, but why? She had no more interest in me, why waste fifteen seconds answering her phone?

That not answering a phone call is one that particularly bothers me. I have run across this situation several times in my life. They won’t say, “No we decided we aren’t going to hire you,” “No, we don’t want to buy your product,” “No, I don’t love you anymore, get lost,” but no, they just don’t answer and so the poor victim, thinking at first that the message didn’t get through, ends up making several phone calls before the sap realizes that the call will never be answered and feels like a fool.

Before I ever worked in an office, during those years of working in restaurants and as a janitor, people were pretty straight, if they didn’t like you, they didn’t pretend to like you, you always knew where you stood. We are kind of led to believe that low-income people are somehow not as morally upright as white collar types. It was my shock when I finally entered their world to discover how duplicitous they were. Everybody gives you a smile and a handshake, but the other hand is holding the shank, maybe to crawl up on top of your body, maybe just for sport because otherwise the office is a pretty dull place.

As far as the racial situation in Germany I am thinking another reason they were friendlier when they were fewer is that when they were fewer there were not so many bros to hang with, and so they had to hang with the white guys until they got enough of their guys.

What you said about the blacks going to their own bar to stay out of trouble with the crackers over white women sounds pretty perceptive. You know there is that thing, white guys don’t like seeing black guys with white women and black guys don’t like seeing white guys with black women, and likewise the women don’t like seeing their men go with women of another race.

It’s like you see that white woman with the black guy, and even if you know if she wasn’t with him, she still wouldn’t be with you, and maybe you wouldn’t even want her, but still it is one woman less in our pool of white women. Of course we also want free access to the pool of black women, which the black men don’t like because that is one less woman in their pool.