I live in Sao Paulo Brazil, in 2017 after Natura dumped me after i worked double the hours of a normal trainee i decided that i would try to get into the best public university , in my entire life i wanted to do a Humanities major being it Portuguese,Philosophy whatever.
2 months studying and recovering after the shattering of my hopes with Natura an uncle of mine suggested that i did an interview with a friend of his working in Helpdesk in a small office, nepotism and a tecnical course i did in my teens made me get the job, later that year i didnt pass the exam to enter in the university.
Slavoj zizek in a seminar told a joke about Catherine the Great “A servant went to Catherine and said Catherine the other servants are stealing your wines and jewels then she said I know thats how i make them happy” this small anecdote explains the job perfectly , everytime you try to do a big project to improve some logistical or whatever is not recognized or even outright disencouraged but you have a lot of smalls things to compensate for example a big party in the end of the year, you can play games in company hours while you wait for things to happen and coffe and biscuits for free.
My job is divided between two castes, 9° floor and 2° floor, people of the 9° floor arent economists people of the 2° floor are, the enterprise only care for the well being of people of the 2° floor i of course am a proud 9° floor plebeian.
In compensation we will fuck you hard , if something happens near the end of your shift you are fucked, if a big boss humiliates you too bad, they didnt planned how they would do a reform or any fucking change in the phisical workspace guess who is going to bear the blunt of the backlash even tho you dont have fuck nothing to do with the infrastructure of the building guessed right you, people dont respect your time and humanity because you are in helpdesk so they make you do a lot of personal things in the shifts , menial tasks like turning on computers and tvs so they dont need to turn on everything when they enter the meeting room, shuting on and off air conditioners because “Its hard to turn on i thought it was broke”.
In the first day i met my new companion a man called “Luiz” Luiz had 5 years of company when i entered and he was emotionally unstable, in the month that i entered the job he was promised a big raise since the guy that worked with him verbally abused a pregnant women and he had to bear a MONTH alone doing the job of two, but a month after i entered the raise that he was promised wasnt as big as they said to him , they raised 100 barely more than the inflation raise that every brazilian gets at the end of the year, that broke him he started to oscilate between saying that i was stupid that i only got the job because my uncle knew my boss and showing humanity after my boss verbally scolded us one time saying “You two should make a lunch break , since you are saying so much stupid shit that your brains must be starving” and exiting the room LIKE A BOSS , in this hell of a year Luiz taught me two valuable things Stealing and Fear.
He stole almost everything old that he had the chance to , since he was a Bolsonarist he did a lot of mental gimnastics to justify his stealing , his ideology started made him more violent by the day , since i am a pretty alternative person just by looking he started picking fights and arguments with me and other LOW LEVEL personel randomly and cultivating his hatred towards everything lefwing specially the economists of my office, but he was unable to rationalize a harassment that he was victim of, one of the member of the board of directors screamed and called him “Stupid , idiot ,childish , animal , ret*rded” in front of guests because Luiz was unavaible to support him when he wanted, the result of this harassment was another director hugging him in the end of the year party and saying “You are a real man for taking what the director did and enduring it”
One day i bantered with a human resources guy and a coordernator and they both scolded Luiz for my crimes of speaking with higher beings, after this event he started turning more violently towards me , in an effort of making a friendship with him i told that i was an atheist in less than 5 minutes the entire office knew that i was an atheist and it rendered me as persona non grata for at least a year with some older folk, open hostilities , unending jokes about going to hell or condescending me for being younger and not knowing enough and then he started randomly getting an hour before my boss arriving, since some tasks were his “responsability” i sended him a message asking if i could do X thing because Y person was asking for help he then responded “Why dont you care for your job and leave me the fucking alone instead of putting your nose in things that arent your business” after that we started drifting apart to the point that he started showing up earlier just to get tasks before me , and then he asked to be dismissed and they granted to him after the aforementioned moral harassment and i was free of a emotionally disturbed man and able to work with only one abuser my boss.