The company I work for, they are crafty. Last week they held a “Service Day,” in which we engage three of our seven Corporate Ideals (I forget which ones) by helping out around town, at nursing homes, day cares, parks, shelters ... basically, the nice men at the top use us as a tax write-off by getting us to dig ditches for the park system. It makes me feel dirty.

I headed out to some park somewhere, met up with the other asses dressed in goofy corporate T-shirts. Twenty people and four shovels: was it my fault that some people ran for them? I did sprinkle the seeds around when they’d finished the grueling work of shoveling mud into a twenty-yard gully. At some point I picked up a shovel, but this one awkwardish dude with a habit for verbal repetition and giggling took it from my hand, saying, “I’m stronger, little lady.” Okay then. He called me little! He called me lady! Somehow I still wanted to shove a rake up his ass (rakes were for after the shoveling), but I didn’t.

An hour and a half later, the park director came and told us what our next jobs would be. She said, “Well, there’s that giant mountain of dirt back there that needs to be leveled, but that might be more work than a day can do.” She’d pointed us toward a pile about as high as the sun, then she turned to look pointedly at me, “Some of you, if you want to just hang out and chat with your friends, we have some weeding here and there, you know, if you just want to...sit and chat.” Bitch. I took the shovel. We set to work on the pile.

Okay, maybe we didn’t set to work on the pile, not initially. We headed toward the weeding, because to be honest, sitting and chatting kind of sounded nice, but only to find our boss’s boss right in the middle of the weeding patch. We turned around and headed for the dirt. The shovels lay abandoned; by now the other volunteers had lost enthusiasm.

Damn, did I ever do some shoveling. A rain the prior day had left the dirt wet. It held big rocks and roots and what have you. The awkward dude who shoveled before shoveled again, and kept banging his shovel into our shovels. He giggled as it happened, but damn, the metal-on-metal reverberated to my shoulders. After five minutes, he gave up and left to go weed. We missed him, we did, because one less person meant it would take that much longer. I occasionally thought I saw dogshit in the pile but somebody promised that wasn’t true. “No, I know dog shit. Believe me, that’s something I know about.” He doesn’t have a dog.

At lunch, to keep us happy, they passed out chicken wraps: what bullshit are chicken wraps! Why do they serve these at every corporate lunch? Just make a regular fucking turkey sandwich, everyone hates wraps. They’re dry, and you can’t get any mustard or mayonnaise in there because they seal the wrap by wetting the ends, leaving you to dab each dry, flavorless bite with your mustard packet. A Chinese co-worker brought his own fried rice, and everyone watched him eat it.

I know that corporate America is what it is, that cubes are efficient, that not everybody gets a window seat, that I’m not the company’s golden goose and that I’m essentially expendable. But why, why, did my boss’s boss have to stare at us throughout the entire break. He sat about ten feet off, took a bite and stared, and when we waved, he stared, and when we smiled, he stared. That is, when my coworkers waved and smiled. I am afraid of him, so I just hid behind a tree trunk and peeked around it here and there like a toddler edging out from behind her mother’s knees. I’m not afraid of him because he can fire me, I’m afraid of him because he is illiterate, and I’m worried I’m accidentally going to bring that up in polite conversation. “Oh you mean, because you can’t read. That’s why you didn’t see the meeting notes… God am I an idiot. I always forget!”

After lunch, the mountain again, and then some gullies. More dirt to be shoveled. More rocks to be stacked. And some woman in a silky pantsuit chasing us with a large sign: the company logo followed by “WE GIVE BACK.” I resent the sign; I’ve not seen any of the owners digging trenches or filling gullies. I’m not really sure anything I did couldn’t be done easier with a backhoe, but the whole thing reminds me of the Truth advertisement, the one where some guy walks an old lady across the street, and then they tell you that cigarette companies spent millions of dollars to advertise their $50,000 donation to a charity.

Don’t get me wrong: shoveling dirt outside beats the tar out of sitting in that cubicle. There’s something very Office Space about it; that moment at the end where Peter says, as he shovels away the detritus of Initech, “Fucking A.” I suppose I shouldn’t complain.

Drink the Kool-Aid, Little Lady, drink the Kool-Aid.

Afterward, we went to the post party. No food, but all the beer we could drink. And damn we set out to drink it. We knocked back all the buckets we could of crap ass Corona (ugh, why do people drink that stuff--oh, because they’re at a Corporate Work Function). Then, suddenly, the company owners, the ones who have not been digging ditches with us all day, suddenly those people appear: they have formed a corporate band. No, I’m not kidding. My company has a corporate band. The company pays for the partners to practice, record, play. Salary hours no less, making our company band the world’s most expensive music ensemble you never heard of. Wasting away in Margaritaville?  Wasting away in the mediocrity of corporate existence.  And good christ, no amount of Kool-Aid can numb me to that. Would I like another Corona? Why yes, I’ll have twenty.