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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_Man |
I've worked with just about every type of human currently on planet Earth (twice, thrice, and more than nice), as part of the exclusive media elite of New York, and I studied alongside them, too, as part of the intellectual elite who attend the world's finest schools, rife with the wealth, power, and privileges the children of the richest families so often have. It's given me a wide range of deviant behaviors to observe (and fight) that even the most hard-bitten city detective would have a tough time beating me on, and that's also part of the point: working through the highly competitive and very selective environments that are so difficult to gain access to, they bring on a severe case of "the crazies" for people who are not mentally equipped to work at that level. It causes "freak outs" in the most showily aggressive and publicly hostile ways, which are necessary for us to take action against.
Underneath the cover of work, there's even wild accusations of corporate espionage among employees, ones that quickly followed on the heels of my official apprenticeship, and that's part of it, too: knock out the really gifted folks who threaten anyone in "the game" who can't perform well without using deceit. When I broached the supposedly large gap that existed between the worlds of manufacturing and art, they called me a "spy" on both sides of the fence for being brilliant enough to work technically as well as artistically, which was in direct conflict with company practices at the time, because I was the first classically trained artist to work in both the production and design departments at St. Martin's Press, and the harassment didn't end.
I "sucked" at design because I didn't know computers like the highly experienced graphic designers who couldn't draw expertly like me and my friends who'd studied many art forms could do. When that didn't work, the lead art director laughingly mocked me for not knowing computers like he did as an expert his 30s (I was in my early 20s at the time), by making all of us take some personality test that was rigged for assigning the name "Marie" as that of some stuffy old secretary, because I came into the department as a manager who could perform many job functions, unlike the diva designers who plead ignorance to anything they didn't want to do.
Like any old scam appearing daily at offices for the disordered worldwide, I actually came out ahead of the game through my proficiency and humility to absorb any type of task that was needed for the job at hand, and that was part of the point about my apprenticeship, too: I can do anything better than you, even when I'm robbed of your clear advantages in some sort of fix or "double-cross". When trifling co-workers couldn't hack at me though the work flow, they re-doubled their efforts to con me into social situations disguised as those mandatory horrors known as "the office party", in desperate efforts to get me drunk and spill the beans, which I always did, because more than one wise person told me repeatedly that if you never lie, you have nothing to hide, and that's the truth.
But, that didn't stop 'em from firing hard at me over the years. One of the best cons was a bitchy Eurasian gay girl in disguise, working her typical "art fag" hairdo and expensive designer clothes for all it was worth by sleeping her way through the office staff, girls and boys alike. Oh, I staved her off at arm's length like I know how to do in my sleep, which took 'em awhile to sort out amongst themselves. The industry types in the know rigged a mandatory job requirement for me, making me work oversees with her as their lead production editor (untrained in German, on foreign-language computers with European power sources), because the openly gay woman from the U.S. design team was openly sick, and she constantly threatened discrimination lawsuits that they told me they were afraid of behind closed doors, even though the company had other "out" gay people working there.
It put me in direct line of this editor's abuses overseas in English, which was a new one for me, working as I did alone in a supposedly German-language-only design studio that's a classic isolationist technique for the chronic abuser seeking to attack. It was desperately done, but I knew the deal ahead of time, because it took me six months to find work, a long time for someone as experienced as me, but that's an economic downturn for you. On my first day of work, I saw the gay designer and her manager savage each other in the hallways by violently cursing at each other, after which I immediately called my father to report obvious workplace abuse. He told me I "had to" work there because there were no other jobs out there, and since it took me "so long" to find a job, I had no choice. He told me to "keep my head down, and my mouth shut", which I dutifully transposed onto a small yellow post-it as the anagram "HDMD" in thick black pen, and taped it to my work monitor so as to remember his sage wisdom, which was noticed by the staff around me, though it oddly went unremarked on by the very same employees who seemed to be verbally abusive about any other thing, wherever I went.
In fact, I'm so good at keeping my cool, I became famous for it. Christina, the arty in-over-her-head provincial with the ready strategy of promiscuous office sex, made me her friend by force, which is a common enough technique when the work thing doesn't quite pan out. Her and her friends from Boston put the heavy hand on for inviting me out, so much so that I knew it was a corporate strategy for getting the personal goods on me, so as to use by attacking my psyche through office attacks that would be hard for me to prove, which it was, and which I won at anyway, but that's a story for another day. She tried to set me up one weekend with her guy friend who had trouble dating, and who was also working the online dating scene hard, just like I so happened to be doing at the same time. Huh...what a coincidence.
We had a day at the beach outside of the office that went bad, because my obvious female sex organs in my sexy, black, halter-top bathing suit freaked out their friend, which Christina explained away as the current "skinny fetish" that was all the rage in ads. He even told her she should work out those thighs of hers to sculpt away ugly body fat (she was a size two), because anything over a size four was "fat" (duh, Marie), as she eyeballed me derisively over crepes in some trendy Village hotspot. Oh. Poor me....I wonder if I can cut weight as an athlete? Huh. I did it to blend into their social structure, strict as their group's rules were about appearances back then. It all came apart at their very next party during a holiday Fourth of July weekend, when I innocently inquired about whether their friend liked me or not. Uh, no. They squirmed around me for awhile, until I overheard their skinny blond (and very tan) friend say that he didn't "like anyone over 'a buck seventeen'", in a thinly veiled reference to their group-sanctioned anorexia that has never been my real scene.
The jig was finally up at work when the gay female designer gossiped with us during one of our production meetings (we were all seeing each other socially outside of work by then: I even went to Diana's lesbian-friendly birthday party at a tech-themed bar!), by huffing over this same editor's revelation that the very same guy she tried to set me up with had met a short-haired blond woman online, and that they were dating. It was going really well! Oh, yeah? "So....she's dating men again?!" Diana seemed a bit taken aback by her reveal about her male friend's new girl. "That's funny", she remarked in an offended way, "because the last time I saw her, she was performing as a man in drag shows on the lesbian circuit."
You could hear a pin drop as the wanna-be, art-fag-with-no-talent from Virginia froze in our little circle of female-only media employees discussing million dollar licensing for a German publishing company on a low-paying teacher's salary. "Haha!" Christina turned bright red, "Oh, really?" Within months, she'd be back at work overseas (I broke the scam open on that already, because they couldn't prove it was worth the money for me to go there to work), but as an editorial lead (she'd forced out by then the woman who hired me by using all of us to "gang up" on her, though in truth the poor woman was simply incompetent, plus I already knew the group of girls would turn on me, too), Christina felt she had all the power in the world to abuse me until I left for a book publisher, figuring she had won. Whaddya think, New Yorkers? C'mon. Give it to me straight. I think can handle it.
