A Flashback Poem To A Twelve Hour Work Day Poem by Julia Luber

I think of those ten plus hour days at work.
The paper-cuts on files that truly stung and hurt.
The phones ringing off the hook, usually four at a time.
The desks with the certification books stacked, the files piled, and the
distraction perhaps of sniffing down a crime.

I think of the lines twelve deep outside to the heat and the sun,
somebody asking me, "How can you put up with this? " as if I was doing it for fun.
The hundred or two people a day; that meeting for being assigned "What to say."
That instance with the same request three or four times. Which was not granted till
after I left, so that nobody could establish the credit was mine.

I remember being called stupid, being falsely accused about a logistic-
having to be on the defensive at times, restraining myself always from going ballistic.
I remember an associate threatening to kill the human resources department if
they laid him off, and so me with my pleasant submissive unthreatening demeanor
was the first for them to slough.

Even though I was the only one from the county they 'serviced'-
they actually treated me with all me and my family's tax payments and
third generation with over fifty year residence in this county, they treated me-the absolute worst. As if to spend all the security and decent pay and benefits in some other county. They felt no hesitancy to exploit every inch of my dignity.

I remember the exam for a permanent county position in an engineering department, having thirty questions using the same fraudulent intent. And I remember the three page letter to them explaining what they had done wrong, and them figuring out how to corner me into
abandoning and not dealing with a truly sincere and acutely correct long winded exposive alerting psalm. I remember the concerted effort and diligent bothering responded to with flippant dishonoring.

I remember the traumatic aggravating dread of having to deal with HQ and some very sordid secrets that they have that are unfortunately horrifically true. I remember how elaborate and complicated their corruption was and I'm sure still is, and how when I made another effort to work for them about a year ago, all four clerks at the administrative desk in human resources were speaking Spanish amongst each other, which I did not understand, putting me in an alienating dizz.

I remember the fiscal division being ninety nine percent one race with one member of another and how that division did not practice any accommodation of their accommodating 'brother.' I suppose they migrated from a country without any diversity laws and were busy turning the county of this country into same, turning tables, not supporting the "American" cause-except for hiring most likely people from their own families. Putting their families before that of the counties.

I remember my committed and diligent work consistently met with an attitude that I was "just a clerk." I remember customers yelling at the top of their lungs, being called 'Nazis' for expecting ladders to have a specifically spaced and numbered rungs. I remember the complete exploit of the truth and absolute of Frame Mutation Theory, as if they exams could not reflect exactly what they expected from customers, my own exactitude met with red lined correction, their wrongness and corruption almost getting repetitively dreary.

I remember having some money to go out to lunch almost daily and this is what I lived for and did with my payday. I remember being 'those people' sitting twelve at a table. Enabling the wait staff to get a good tip and how somebody once in awhile would tell a good fable: some story about the department back in the day- what somebody might do with a file, what somebody might say. I remember being left as the only one at the counter while they would all go out to lunch or be in a meeting. The social hierarchy/the hierarchical treating.

I remember how tired I would be sometime. How I was too exhausted to go to my son's birthday and how I didn't consider that a threat of stroke/ labor crime. I remember how it went from like a hundred people a day to closer to twenty, how busy it was sometimes and how at other times merely a few people would feel stunty- like they themselves didn't really need to be there. But there was anxiety, stress, and as well some fear.

I remember sometime people who had done me some wrong decades before would be at the counter after walking through that door. And I remember working very hard and feeling quite poor and boring, amidst the rockstars, the royalty, the actors and actresses and the stories of spouses off touring and how they'd be in Paris that week that fire department inspection was planned, so that it needed to be rescheduled, "You can understand."