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A New Contract
by Mike Morris
Janaury 2, 2001
I just started a new contract in San Francisco. Looking at the gentle hills of San Francisco from the descending plane, I wonder why I stayed away so long. I am reminded the moment I walk into my new office.
The man from the recruiting agency is waiting for me, bent double with a stack of papers that he dumps on my desk with a crash, causing my terminal and my heart to flutter.
“Just a few forms to fill in, “ he tells me, sounding harassed. “California, you know,” he adds distractedly, before leaving.
I do know. That’s why I left California. Start a business and the state will steal $800 before you begin earning. Drive through California and they’ll harass you forever for state taxes. Set your briefcase down, and they’ll bury you in paperwork.
The Tip of the Iceberg
I start with the small stuff. A Per Diem questionnaire asks, among other irrelevancies, in which state I’m registered to vote. I circle YES/NO boxes randomly. Next is a non-disclosure form, and I sign various rights away. An attached Schedule A form warns that if they don’t like the answers on the questionnaire, I won’t be eligible for consideration for a per diem allowance. I turn to a nineteen-page treatise on Employment Policies. I am ordered to be careful in word and deed and attitude. Three levels of violations, each one leading to direr consequences, are described in loving detail.
A fifteen-page attachment, untitled, but with a table of contents, baffles me. Chairs, stairs, fire, earthquake, bad traffic patterns. What’s all this? I find out that it’s a work safety manual, written either by the village idiot, or someone with an incredible sense of humor.
The Safety Manual
The manual starts off with a blazing piece of wisdom: the first step in preventing injury is to avoid accidents. Next, it lists each and every piece of office equipment as a potentially lethal weapon. The author has a special hatred of chairs, which can apparently crack, crush and mutilate humans at the drop of a pencil. There’s a blurry page crammed with tiny text and footnotes, a comic strip with diagrams of deformed hands, office workers undergoing remedial contortions, or apparently strapped into specially designed torture-chairs.
An article titled ‘Fitting humans into a computer world’ shows a crash dummy ready to impact a computer console, complete with arrows and dotted lines. I move on to a section on lethal file cabinets, move quickly on, and read about stairs.
The writer of this manual has a talent for stating the obvious: ‘Some offices require stairs to move from one part of the office to the other,’ he writes authoritatively.
I say he, because only a man could follow this up by stating that women are more at risk than men because dress standards usually require that females wear high heels. Completely losing touch with reality, he rambles on about inattention, handrails and plastic mats, then adds some curious advice about removing one’s eyeglasses when walking down the stairs.
By now I’m pretty bemused. I skim the complicated sections on Fire and Earthquake. In dangerous situations, I’ve found that screaming loudly and assuming the fetal position usually helps. I’m feeling a bit like this right now, especially since I’m only a tenth of the way through this paperwork.
The next section, though, grabs my attention. ‘BAD TRAFFIC PATTERNS,’ it reads, and I’m wondering what advice the author is about to give on San Francisco gridlock. However, this is really about the best way to rearrange your office furniture. This will be especially useful to me because I usually drag all my office furniture to the middle of my cube so I can trip over it more conveniently.
By now, this is getting to be one of those books that are so bad, you just have to follow them to the bitter end. The next two sections are about Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, and Back, Neck and Shoulder problems. I skip them, together with the lighting and video display terminal section, in favor of looking at pictures of human suffering depicted in a full-color supplement that would do credit to Edgar Allen Poe.
Are You Comfortable?
‘Are you comfortable at your workstation?’ the little pamphlet gushes at three typical employees. The first, a pasty-faced hunchback with stick like legs answers hollowly, “not really, but I’m tall.”
The second, a young woman in prison brown with a deformed arm and a Borg-like headset attached to the side of her face, still has enough spirit to object to this uncalled-for invasion of her workspace. “Sure I’m comfortable,” she snarls. “Why do you ask?”
The third, obviously beyond hope stares blankly at the questioner, like a zombie in ‘Night of the Living Dead.’ “I guess so,” he mumbles, “but looking at the screen all day makes my eyes tired.”
The next few pages test the readers EQ (ergonomics quotient), and show before and after pictures: a bedraggled, beaten woman transformed into a ramrod-straight powerhouse, the tall hunchback, miraculously cured, and the zombie, clear-eyed and alive again. It shows employees eating healthily, sleeping well, and watching wholesome television programs (I’ll bring my stove, bed and TV to the office tomorrow),
‘Eat right and exercise,’ it commands. ‘Take micro breaks.’ There are pictures of insane micro break employees, sobbing violently, hands above their head, obviously about to be robbed, and waving their hands and grinning hideously.
The final section is a little quiz. “Let’s see if you can help these people,” the pamphlet suggests brightly. The first two look fine to me, although one of them has omitted the mandatory three-ring binder footrest (a good place for some of my specs). Apparently my EQ is not high enough to help these unfortunates. The third one, though, I can help. It’s the hunchback, once more hideously deformed. He sits in a low, broken chair, apparently trying to jam his head under the desk without getting up.
“Quit now, while you still can,” I tell the picture. “Sue the company and apply for permanent disability.”
The Rest of the Iceberg
I’m getting panicky now. Half the day has gone, and I haven’t started any real work. I skip the rest of the safety manual. I put aside the direct deposit authorization form, and the employment eligibility verification form, the calendar, and the list of ways to contact my agency by every method known to man. Everyone has cell phones, pagers, fax numbers, email addresses and websites.
I sigh and pin sheets of paper to the wall. There’s a company health plan, which is confusingly called the Cafeteria plan. If I elect to join, there are five pages to fill out, if I don’t, there are only three. If I don’t fill in anything, will they send in the Cafeteria cops?
It’s lunchtime and I still have a ton of paper to scan. There’s a pamphlet about workers' compensation, one about state disability, one about how to sexually harass someone (or something like that). I toss papers wildly into my overhead bin. There’s a checklist of employee benefit forms, a sheet of effective dates, a notice of COBRA rights, a dental plan application, ten more pages about the Cafeteria plan, plus a four page amendment. There’s a 401K plan description (20 pages), and some additional yellow sheets about something or another. A life insurance company has written sixty pages of legalistic gibberish, and I remember queasily, that the State of California requires that sub-contractors have certain coverages.
I’m throwing papers around wildly now. Kaiser Permanente has a whole envelope full of material. A health care company has two books the size of telephone directories on HMOs and PPOs, whatever they are. There are six or seven pages of other health material, and then the HMO comes back with more forms to fill in and two manuals on something called POS.
I take a lunch break and calm down. I’ll do what I always do when faced with something like this: I’ll ignore it all and hope my contract finishes before bureaucracy catches up with me. Or maybe the world will end tomorrow. No matter.
All I have to do now is get a place to stay and a cheap car. And then it hits me. This is California. Nothing is simple here. What hoops will I have to jump through to get an apartment, a car, auto insurance?
I’m drowning in forms, I’m having a nervous breakdown, but I can’t afford one, not until I’ve filled out my health insurance forms.
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