American Shutdown - Chapter 2: The Show Must Go On

The cafeteria was on the first floor in the southeast corner of the building. A slow procession of workers made its way to the 10 o’clock conclave. Sam and Bernie grabbed two chairs in the back of the cafeteria where the morning sun was shining through slatted windows to await the curtain to rise on the big show.

In the front was an exact replica of the stage set for previous Micro-Medical Tek plant meetings except there wasn’t a speaker’s podium in front of the lunch tables. The room had taken on a funeral-like hum when a parade of suits filed-in and made their way to the front tables. The captured audience quieted down, allowing the static of the live sound system to cut through its stone silence.

The show began with a familiar face grabbing a wireless microphone and greeting the captive audience with, “Hello, everyone. I’m Daryl Freese from M-Mtek human resources here in Waltham. I’m here today with our corporate V.P. of Manufacturing Operations, Harold Smith, and our Executive V.P. of Human Resources, Ishaan Gilbert, from the Seattle corporate offices.”

The HR manager went on to say, ‘We have asked you to meet with us so we might personally explain a major reorganization we’re having at M-Mtek that will affect all of you.”

Sam thought to himself, “Well, the suit didn’t waste any time.”

Daryl handed the microphone to Harold Smith telling the audience he would give them details of the cost cutting measures M-Mtek was being forced to make.

Harold Smith’s carefully prepared talk had all the clichés down pat: foreign competition, government regulations, corporate taxes and post-2008 market recovery lags.

It was all a blur until he added, “M-Mtek has decided to close the Waltham plant.”

Sam was thinking he should have kept a spare pair of dress socks in his office desk so that when he received news that the plant was to be shuttered his feet wouldn’t have been cold. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Bernie taking a sip of his coffee as if it were just another day at the plant.

You could hear a micro-chip drop in the cafeteria. There was a faint buzz while the HR VP, Ishaan Gilbert, who had been handed the microphone, began telling everyone the drill. There would be an immediate shutdown. All current employees would be escorted to the door in shifts no later than 6 PM that day.

He told them that all company property like cell phones and laptops would need to be handed in by 3 PM at designated locations throughout the plant, including a separate one for the front office staff.

Separation packages would be distributed to all plant operations employees at designated locations throughout the plant. Office workers’ packages would be handed out in the cafeteria before and needed to be picked-up by 1 PM. The packages would contain postage-paid return envelopes for necessary documents to be returned to corporate HR for employees to complete their separation agreements.

He went on to say that special service contractors had been hired to handle the plant closing and de-commissioning of plant equipment, technical operations and communications networks. The contractors would be given authority to re-hire qualified separated employees as temporary independent contractors if needed during the pursuant shutdown operations.

With that the silence was broken with a wave of murmurs heard throughout the cafeteria. Sam glanced at Bernie who was flipping a double-bird below the seat in front of him that was meant for the speakers. Sam wondered if the separation package would say the layoff could be a great opportunity to finally reassess his life and go out to do something he always wanted to do, like making a bucket list before he turned sixty.

The way Sam figured it, he had about two hours to get his personal belongings in the office items packed. He needed a few of the boxes used for inter-office moves so he quickly went to see Jermaine in maintenance to get them before they were all gone.

“Bud, I’m headed off to see Jermaine to get some moving boxes before everyone else thinks of it and wipes them out,” he advised Bernie.

Bernie sat motionless and returned to Sam, “Always thinking, aren’t you. I’ll catch up with you later.”
As Sam took the freight elevator to the basement janitorial shop, his socks finally seemed to be drying out. Jermaine was already back in his cubicle probably contemplating the layoff with the rest of the hundreds of employees who got the axe.

“Hey, Jermaine,” Sam greeted him with an outstretch hand. “How are you doing? Do you have a couple of spare moving boxes?”

Jermaine looked up from his small desk, shook his hand and replied, “That’ll cost you.”

“Ok, I’ll buy your last lunch before the execution. That is if the cafeteria is available to us,” Sam said.

“All you techie nerds have the weirdest sense humor. So what are you going to do, now?” he said as he rummaged around in a bin with folded boxes. “You want one with lids, right?”

I don’t know. I’m fifty-nine years old. I might have to go bone-up on the latest stuff in my specialty to make myself more marketable. I know one thing, I’ll never match my pay or benefits, not at age fifty-nine. I’ll be lucky if I can get a full-time paid position. And you can forget about benefits. What are you going to do?” Sam asked.

“Oh, there’s always some job out there that illegal immigrants won’t do. I might take up forging green cards,” a smiling Jermaine answered.

On the way back to his office with his boxes, Sam’s meet-up with Jermaine triggered his memory with the story of his past. His grandfather’s last name had been changed from Petrisanti to Palermo by an Ellis Island customs official who had a bad habit of using where immigrants came from as a new American nametag for them.

Grandpa Sam begot his dad, Salvatore, who begot him, Samuel Palermo. His dad had tried to make sure his son would not end up in a janitorial cubicle like he and Jermaine did. It flashed through his mind that with the shutdown he might end up as a contract temp in a cubicle of different sorts, checking program code for an outdated mainframe system at a local government office.

After popping open the boxes into rectangles, the first thing he focused on was a Viet Nam Veterans plaque commending him for his volunteer work teaching vets computer skills and preparing job applications and resumes.

Next to go in the box were the many family and work pictures, his favorite being the one of his wife and daughter arm-in-arm standing on the eighteenth green at the club. It was taken on the occasion of his daughter Marianna’s first completion of eighteen holes on a professional course. She was only fourteen years old then. Now, she was a 39 year old math professor at a New England university who also coached its women’s golf team.

The boxes were almost filled when Bernie appeared at the door.

“Man, you’re fast. Think we can get out of this bullshit place for lunch over at Jimmie‘s?”

“We can try. Got to make sure we pick up our death notices at one o’clock. I also have to call Peg to give her the bad news,” Sam replied.

Bernie advised, “They already have the separation packages for the office staff laid out in the cafeteria. We need to pick them up by one.”

“OK. Let me call Peg and I’ll drop by Jimmie‘s. Let’s try to squeeze it in before one,” Sam offered.

Bernie disappeared from the door. Sam had his many golfing award plaques from company tournaments left to pack. He kept all his other ones in the family room at home. For a moment he contemplated tossing them in the trash. Or using them for a new kind of Frisbee golf game. He layered them on the top of the boxes, secured the lids with wrapping tape he used for shipping plant network equipment.

It was all in a days work. The show must go on.

Your basic talking suit
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American Shutdown by Benjamin F. Campanelli
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