So there we were wrestling....

  Wet tee shirts and mud.  Utter emotional chaos.  In the working world there was resistance to change, resistance to youths and ex-cons getting work, and resistance to becoming slaves to the machinery instead of each other.

  Middle agers were a mix of shock and doubt.  The challenge from the young workers who'd survived various "trainings" (bumped up pay by roughly 1/8 of a load of laundry and served as part of promotion for many) had come without mention of whether or not there would be alcohol involved.  The survey on preferred beverages was as revealing as the assessment question how far would you go to help a team member? And this helped us too busy to put it on paper people to pass torch and glean what wisdoms we could in a workforce suddenly really on the move.

  Some local parents were mortified that a generic management team was going around surveying "knockers and ass".  Scouts for "server jobs" were mostly young, white, and male.  They were at odds with male and female "in house" management that had developed a practice of people looking each other in the eyes when speaking to each other and being like soccer players not touching "the ball" with hands.  Actually looking at each other to communicate, well, it changed the tone of megaphone and pedestal management.  Looking at your boss/propietor and admitting the nature of error, well, it gave space for people to work our attitudes into more work day; less backstabbing, talking behind backs, and slamming things around instead of reasonable confrontation.  

  "Is this over the top?" An intermediary asked.  "The extension cord?  Or, the amount of fantasy in 'dream job'?" The painting crew wrapped up a mix of disposable and re-usable tools in a sheet of plastic.  The floppy painter's hat was spattered and autographed and had big black marker music notes all over it.  "Are they making you guys, uh, girls wear the outfits they picked?" She asked.

  "No ONE IS MAKING ME DO ANYTHING.  I'M JUST having a work day until it all becomes too ridiculus.  Then I'll..."

  "QUIT?!  I've done it 18 times already this morning."

  "Up your butt micromanaging control freaks and then the disappearing vacuum style?"

  "I guess."

  "I heard about them," a visiting site-manager raised bushy eyebrows and made spooky sounds."

  For trying to keep conversations professional some of us young people kept calling everything style.  It went with glimpsing aspects of full-grown peoples' "lifestyles".  And there were "good people" among the crowds.  These were grounding rods in sometimes stormy days where all manner of people were equal as consumers.  Some of the best managers refused to get wrapped up with anyone emotionally, but managed to filter the rough and tumble into calm and steady work environment.

  At one job we spent about three weeks taking turns being manager.  "That's a style alright," a beloved traveling manager rolled his eyes at the asleep on a stool for working three jobs M O D (manager on duty).  "Better than being whistled at and ordered around through a megaphone," someone commented on another's turn taken.  "Hey," the other person said, "I told you guys I was also a PE teacher." Chuckles.

  "Or was before...."

  "The avalanche

  "Landslide

  "Armaggeddon"

  People were coming up with similar description for the mixture of debt and job change and wage stagnation.  Disasterous economic state.  "And that will never change in a place like this," a good person spoke truth.

  Meanwhile any time outside work for people with energy and ambition (despite a lack of funding) was spent in a landmined landscape with it's own mostly unchanging tones of dysfunction.  The language for all that varied.  The super-religious colored it all witches and demons, no gray areas, don't care what you call it.  And, almost as a response to terrible troubles made fortress of church and family.  This as political party shuffled "the peoples'" point of view like playing cards to develop a presentable popular show.

  People who'd spent lifetimes on cause were bordering on feeling suicidal, but nobody could talk about that out loud without being slapped with labels like "crazy" and being told (like you'd say to an overtly romantic couple) to "get a room"....only there weren't any more sanitoriums or group homes.  Especially for working people it was a one foot in front of the other march into the battles of survival, no safety nets.  And for people who couldn't get work and/or couldn't get on "the grind" it became work to drum up survival too.  People teamed and re-launched as their economic recoveries happened.

  And people grew thicker skins about getting attached and not holding back....say what you need to say.

  If you go down that road, you might not make it back.

  Who says I want to come back.

  I don't want to get stuck.

  The stuff of my dreams or bust.

  For some people all disasters-- natural, economic, emotional were all the same.  In analysing "abuse" we were also getting better understanding of "balance" and good enough and drive!  In looking at the "divisions of labor" and the American Dream we were also gaining insight into how much time and energy anything takes.  Youthful passions didn't often match up, exactly, to "vision plans" and not losing "edge" creatively, as a caring person.  We wondered if we'd traded our souls for purely "making money".  People marveled at how just working people could get.  And in music and the arts, some "outsiders" said, told you, told you.

  Just be you!!!!!!!   People were yelling at people in a daze of picked apart, never quite the ideal (given in media, magazines, and theoretical worker modeling), crumbling under an ethereal pressure that sounded like a chant: USA, USA, USA.

  No matter political persuasion and/or religion, we prayed for STRENGTH.

  

Building relationship IS part of recovery

  It was a major discovery in the 1990s to realize that "relationship" had to do with "recovery".  It was why we organized networking dinners without alcohol.  Many "small businesses" were just ideas and seeds at first.  And even people in the midst of divorce and devastation could understand, more objectively, that seeds need water and soil and sunlight.  There's a relationship there.  Or not.

  "Work-life-balance" hadn't been a thing, certainly not for the working poor.  And we had to overcome being raised up as servants and taken advantage of and even abused in/within ourselves as we were adjusting to the equalities of being professional.

  Of course there was no way around giant issues which people had been boxing and slapping labels on--GENDER, RACE, SEXUALITY, RELIGION....all the diversity had been labeled and people had been mastering CAUTION, CAUTION about personality.  And bringing things up.

  All this stuffing stuff down, ignoring, and denial lent itself to a stiff structure between management and "worker", and/or wrestling over job duties for team.  Kind of like the infighting in D.C.

  Is we is or is we ain't a team?  Some Knoxvillians reinvigorating jazz culture and working in retail and restaurant kept asking.  And that asking each other was checking in on relationship.  It was also more "give" than just showing up.  And, it was: Let's take the high road here.

  We can do it together.

  But it's a professional relationship.

  Silence.  Assuming something else?

  My MAN....

  Suddenly, everyone had a man!  Even manly men.  Stumbled through awkward for me parts of the over-talkative exuberance about getting on with life, around gaffes, with "saves" like, "Yeah, I gotta guy for that."

  Fighting crime and drugs just sort of happened most days as we all made a safety-net of professionalism.

  

  For a while in the 1990s we were full brakes and full speed ahead.  People were getting the economy back on track and we all discovered: you can't do that without being in your life.  Even the people in denial and fighting that basic factor were worked over by group dynamics which required presence.

  This was before 4000 choices of energy drink and a non-profit craze.  The world seemed split like an atom....came up, uh, what word do we say now?  Us young people had had good educations and had  already started down the roads to, all fresh and excited about "the American dream" and the promises of a prosperous nation.  Our middle agers were towing "the mainstream" and losing the Greatest Generation.  Our mentors and leaders were not in Washington.  Not except for visits and carrying the batons to the face we need to put on.

  "You're fucking kidding me?"  A manager was sucking a cigarette in two drags and letting the body fluids and drinks ooze out of a trash bag before carting it to a dumpster.  He'd whittled his entire vocabulary down to those four words though he'd studied philosophy and psychology.  It didn't matter if "the news" was good or bad.  "Yah," an out-of-work Ukrainian mechanic said back.  "Is he?" The manager asked a co-worker.  The co-worker shrugged and walking away loudly mumbled, "How the fuck would I know if he's fucking kidding you?"

  "What this mean 'kidding'?"  The Ukrainian asked me.

  "Means faking or pretending," I told the mechanic's girlfriend.  She translated and the man's face fell out of the trying to uphold smile--new day.  He pointed his finger at the manager and said something in Ukrainian.  The girlfriend translated: "Don't point at me." The finger then pointed at the sky and he asked the girlfriend to explain, he shouldn't be accused of breaking the pipes, that's bullshit, and he'd explained he was a mechanic and not a plumber.  "Did he tell me that in English?"

  A squid of an electric sound zapped and hissed.  Cooler lights flckered then kah-put'd.  Workers sighed and frowned.  The boombox kept playing.  And stockers who'd worked up to letting their personalities "shine" but only at work pulled dance moves with inventory and mentally wrote if this was a movie.  "You're fucking kidding me?" The manager asked the ceiling.

  In the parking lot a makeshift team of kind of like human resources rotating assistant managers tried to sort which stores were at what exit.  Highway traffic had been picking back up and, too young to sell alcohol; if that one's there until the other one's kids come home from school; just left, the MOD or the manager of the store?  A mounting list of snafus and issues per new policy demands.  A pot of coffee.  Highlighters rainbowing schedules and reports.  "Are you really Human Resources?" A guy in a shirt and tie under his tee shirt asked.  "No, but we're people who care."

  "Good because I've been sent to four different stores this week.  This is only Wednesday.  And I'm out of gas."

  Between the pay and the debts and the mis-spending of budget and the unforseen costs of damaged property, just go to work and work was becoming nearly impossible for most everyone.  As was getting through a day without confrontation between people not working and workers.  One visiting manager had off-the-record taught us by example that the store couldn't also be "social services". She'd recite not my problem, not my problem before having to approach on the nod in front of the pumps, or, piling up groups of people waiting for an EBT holder.  Then she'd diplomat.  Maybe one out of six people needed to PARK IT OVER THERE OR IT WILL BE TOWED.  Some people got out of steaming vehicles with hands up, waving, NOT ON ANYTHING.

  Some of the days in a final phase of the last free stuff UNLESS....find a program....for your friend then....were a crush of rambling inactivity even while previously "laid back" workers were drilled on not succumbing to apathy.

  "Wassthat?"

  "Not caring."

  "And if you don't care about yourself, just so you know, most of us are FILLED UP."

  A woman with big hair piled under a floppy painter's hat shook her head, no, not me either.  

  I have my own to care for was implied.

  An abundance of people showed up in the mornings at stores on the highways and all over in the mountains.  Political frozen-over was in a thaw.  There were, of course, people who kept on being political.  And there were those feeling ousted, so fine ah-ga-me-su.  An older woman gasped then pressed her lips together.  Then walked over to a man painting and whapped him on the back of the head.  "How dare you teach younger people to curse in Greek." He smirked.  A manager called out, "That's a cuss?!"

  "Why?"

  "Told me it was a friendly greeting." The manager put a hand over his mouth.  Shook his head.  "And on a Sunday, so you know who I cussed."

  The painting man smirked harder and winked.  "Perfect world, not so perfect eh?!" He dripped paint on the shoulder of the older woman. 

  "Because your recovery is yours, get it?" Other workers had worked through a short list of blames and excuses and into a daily sort of okay and not okay on the agenda.  Apparently a couple, someone mouthed.

  "Okay, so this hand-held device makes your labels," a visiting manager started to explain.  Someone asked, "Who drowned ours in IPA?"

  "Come on I'll show you how on this one."