Diary of a Fat Slob

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Bum vs Lady

Walking to the train to the movies, there was an unpleasant altercation on the sidewalk. I was a block away, too distant to hear whether words came first, but some homeless guy pushed a well-dressed woman, she pushed him back, and they shoved and swung at each other a few times.

The bum tried walking away, but a man on the sidewalk grabbed him, and while he held him, the lady smacked the bum a few more times on his face, head, and back. Then he got loose from the man’s grip and ran off, and the lady climbed into a taxi, and it was over. Everything took a minute, max.

Post-fight analysis, on the train: I know some of our local bums, by face not by name, but this bum didn’t look familiar. He was a special guest bum, I guess. The lady wins, by unanimous decision. She was a tough dame, but she shouldn’t have to be that tough. The man who grabbed him did what strangers are supposed to do, got involved.

Would I have grabbed the bum, like he did? I don’t know. I think I’d be more likely to punch him than grab him, but there’s no knowing until it happens. Today I’d been too far away to help, but I had quickened my pace in their direction. I’m fat and it’s been years since I’ve actually run, so quickening my pace is the best I got. The whole mess was over, the lady was gone, the derelict was gone, before I got there or even got close.

I should’ve shouted, though. Yelling at them wasn’t even an idea in my head, until ten minutes later on the train. Too late by then. Living in a big city where crap like this happens sometimes, I need to be mentally prepared, and today I wasn’t. Should’ve shouted, damn it. Next time (and there will be a next time) I’ll at least shout.

♦ ♦ ♦

At the Castro, I'll have a big bucket of buttered popcorn please, and some Red Vines, and a Roman Polanski double feature.

Rosemary’s Baby (1968) stars Mia Farrow as a pregnant housewife whose unborn child may or may not be the spawn of Satan. With the marvelous Ruth Gordon putting a comical spin on everything, you’re never quite certain whether Farrow’s gone batty, or whether there might be some grounds for her paranoia. Except, it's a movie, so you know Satan will make an appearance.

It’s a classic thriller, and often the so-called classics disappoint me when I finally get around to seeing them, but this one did not disappoint. "The miracle of birth,” as everyone calls it, can be terrifying when viewed just slightly askew.

On another level, Rosemary’s Baby is also about the vulnerability of being a woman in a very paternalistic world, with decisions made for you by the loving husband and the male doctors. Ms Farrow doesn’t get to decide much for herself. It’s a subtext as eerie as the movie’s surface-level plot, and more true to life.

The Castro’s program had advertised Rosemary’s Baby as a new print, but it wasn’t. It was scratchy, and so warped that only one side of the image could be focused at any moment, as it spooled under the lens. If you’ve seen lots of old movies, you’ve occasionally seen warped prints like this. It’s a fact of old movie life, but several people in the audience kept shouting “Focus!”

On my way downstairs for a wizz between the movies, three guys had the manager cornered in his office, demanding their money back. Which is stupid another way — you don't get to watch the whole movie, and then ask for a refund.

Maybe because of the fight on the sidewalk earlier, or maybe because I was pretty sure these were the bozos who’d been shouting “Focus!”, I had to butt in. “You the manager?” I asked the chubby blonde guy (who was obviously the manager). He eyed me sadly, started to apologize for the print, and the angry men smiled, believing incorrectly that they’d gained an ally.

“Well, I’m not here to ask for my money back,” I said, more to the morons than to the manager. “If a theater shows old movies, they’ll get a crappy print now and then. Big fucking deal. It’s still a great movie, and my only complaint is the jerks shouting ‘Focus!’ like barking dogs, when focus was obviously not the problem.” That was fun. Then I peed and came back upstairs for the second feature.

The Tenant (1976) is one of those intense internal dramas where not a lot happens, except inside someone's mind. It's about a quiet, introverted guy (hey, I resemble that) taking an express elevator down to the depths of insanity (maybe I resemble that, too). Starring Polanski himself, it’s set in the wacko world of tenement life, where the new guy in the building is unpopular with his neighbors, annoyed by his landlord, and possibly possessed by the spirit of a lady who jumped to her death out the apartment window. Except for that last part, it could’ve been filmed on location in my life.

Complete with Polanski in drag, it might not sound like a delightful way to spend two hours, and indeed it’s not. It gave me goose bumps, though, and the ending was wild, so I’d maybe, maybe recommend The Tenant. I still don’t know what was going on with the movie’s communal toilet down the hall, though.

♦ ♦ ♦

Hey, I got a post card from Kallie. “I’m camping at Tannery Gulch and having more fun than you’re having at work. Ha ha!”

From Pathetic Life #6
Saturday, November 19, 1994

This is an entry retyped from an on-paper zine I wrote many years ago, called Pathetic Life. The opinions stated were my opinions then, but might not be my opinions now. Also, I said and did some disgusting things, so parental guidance is advised.

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No longer friends

At the office this morning, maintenance workers were climbing ladders and tweaking knobs, restoring the Muzak to an inescapable volume. The first speakers they turned on were right over my desk, so I put on my headphones, cranked up the volume to drown out the Muzak, and the office will never again see me without headphones.

Next time the building is on fire, when they announce it over the public-address system instead of sounding the fire alarm, I hope a co-worker will tap me on the shoulder and let me know.

♦ ♦ ♦

It’s been only a week since the last lying e-mail from management promised that no layoffs were being considered, and today there was another round of layoffs. There was no announcement to employees. We heard it from the news on the radio, at about noon.

The company is shuttering one of its subsidiary chains of department stores. 13 locations will be closed, and about 2,000 people will be “let go.” It won’t affect anyone in the building where I work, but it strikes close to home — the largest store in the soon-to-be dead chain is next door to the store where I work, overlooking San Francisco's Union Square.

The announcement didn’t even come from my employer, the company that owns the stores that are closing. Nope, according to the news, the announcement came from the company that’s buying/merging with my employer. The merger is still “pending before the FTC,” but while it’s pending, the company that’s not legally running things is running things.

The news report said they'd rebuffed a buyout offer for the chain that’s being closed. The new management felt it would be "more profitable to liquidate the assets.” There’s your true meaning of Christmas, Scrooge-America: Two thousand people are out of work, because there’s more profit in selling the real estate, than in selling handbags, umbrellas, and ladies’ coats, or than selling the company itself.

It’s wrong, it’s cruel, and it ought to be illegal. And even from a capitalist perspective, it’s stupid. I don’t have an MBA or a BMW, but check the calendar: It’s November. It’s moronic to slash prices and have a frenzied going-out-of-business sale now, just as the Christmas shopping season is starting. Until December 24, any store that doesn’t physically slap customers in the face will make triple its normal profits.

Even if those stores must be closed (which obviously isn’t true — they’re not losing money, just not making as much profit as the company wants — and there was a buyer!), wouldn’t it make more sense to have a normal Christmas shopping season, and then announce the going-out-of-business sale on December 26?

These are the brilliant minds running the corporation that’s buying the bankrupt corporation where, for now, I work.

♦ ♦ ♦

What with the merger, the fire, and now the announcement of stores closing, the name of the company that employs me must be obvious to anyone who reads a newspaper. Yeah, that’s right. We’re the huge balloons parading down the streets of Manhattan every Thanksgiving Day.

♦ ♦ ♦

Here’s an object lesson about friendships, and why I don’t have many. For months, since Beatrice was transferred out of the department where I work, she and I have chatted via e-mail, trading complaints about the company and whatever else is on our minds — within limits, of course. You always have to be careful at work, not to accidentally reveal an opinion about something that matters, because that could piss people off.

On Wednesday, Beatrice and I were ‘chatting’ via e-mail, and the newspaper strike came up. I typed to her what I’d said in the zine on Tuesday: “Don’t mess with the Teamsters.”

Well, that was too political or too subversive or just too much for Beatrice. She wrote back, “The ends never justify the means, Doug, and strikers who vandalize company property ought to be penalized to the full extend of the law. I hope you don’t *really* believe violence is ever justified.”

I’ve known Beatrice for a year, we’ve even had beers together, so I rolled the dice and gave her an honest opinion:

“Yeah, I meant it. I have no sympathy for a company that treats employees so shitty they're forced to strike. You do what you have to do. If a Teamster took a sledgehammer to one of the paper's printing presses, I understand it and forgive it.”

She replied, “Right is right and wrong is wrong, and vandalism or breaking the law is wrong.”

Having rolled the dice and lost, I went double or nothing. The whole friendship, riding on this next bet:

“If we had a union and walked out, I’d throw a brick through the window here. It wouldn’t bother my conscience. ‘Right’ and ‘wrong’ depends on how strongly you believe what you believe. No worries, though — we don’t have a union, and I don’t have a brick handy. So tell me, Beatrice, is all this getting too political for friendly interoffice chit-chat?”

It was two hours before she replied, and she said, “Yes, it’s too political,” and changed the subject to the fire. She hasn’t replied to the two e-mails I sent since then, one yesterday and one this morning, so it seems that with a few words of honesty, I have one less friend.

Que sera sera. If we can’t be honest, if she can’t handle a difference of opinion, or isn’t able to discuss it, then we weren't friends anyway.

♦ ♦ ♦

I wasted six bucks at the Castro tonight, not even including the popcorn, for what sounded like an intriguing noir double feature. Checking my old movie guidebooks, The Spiral Staircase (1946) was supposed to be a “superb Hitchcock-like thriller,” but there were no thrills. From the opening logo to The End, you’d need strong, black coffee to stay awake.

Then came Gaslight (1944), starring the incandescent Ingrid Bergman, but even she’s not enough to salvage this paint-by-numbers drama. Half an hour into it, with plot points the rest of the way laid out plain as a AAA map, I grabbed my backpack and came home. Both these movies combined aren’t as interesting as my job, which ain’t interesting at all.

Or, maybe they’re both masterpieces, pinnacle achievements of cinema. Between the fire, and the fire alarm that didn’t sound, and today’s layoffs, and getting scolded by Darla and Babs, and losing my friendship with Beatrice, maybe my mindset wasn’t right for a night at the movies.

From Pathetic Life #6
Friday, November 18, 1994

Addendum, 2021: I Magnin (pronounced Eye Magnin) was the chain of department stores that was ended with a wimpy press release on this day in 1994, and I can't let it pass, even in retrospect, without a moment of remembrance.

I Magnin was unlike any other store I've seen. I couldn't afford to shop there and never worked there, but I'd been inside their flagship store in San Francisco, sometimes delivering paperwork or reports, since my employer owned the place. Sometimes I walked in just to gawk.

Nicknamed the White Marble Lady, I Magnin was almost literally a shrine to capitalism and opulence. The exterior walls were marble — genuine marble, not a facade. Inside, the first floor shopping area was what I'd call the sanctuary — it was two stories tall, perhaps three, with handmade display cases, beautiful murals behind glass on the walls, and enormous crystal chandeliers hanging from the gold-plated (or solid gold, for all I know) ceilings.

If you're lucky enough to know what an old-style movie palace was like, I Magnin was like that. Their San Francisco store was designed by Timothy Pflueger, who also built the Castro Theater, and the Paramount in Oakland, and many of the area's most physically beautiful buildings — the Pacific Telephone Building, the San Francisco Stock Exchange, the Mayan mansion called simply 450 Sutter Street, and the world's swankiest bar, the Top of the Mark.

I would conservatively estimate that I've stood to urinate at least half a million times in my life, and I Magnin was the finest place I ever peed. The restrooms had art deco pedestal sinks and other extravagant features, and everything was maintained in its original decadence. The urinal might have been mere porcelain, but it was fancy porcelain, older than me but pristine and unstained, and a sheet of marble protected my penis from view and my neighbor from my splatters. Even the tile on the floor was shiny, green, and clean. All the facilities had the same splendor as the day it was built.

I Magnin was the store where Scrooge McDuck would've shopped. It was undoubtedly evil and a phenomenon we wouldn't want to bring back. It was the opposite of egalitarian — an awe-inspiring structure where the world's wealthiest people were given (literally) white glove treatment, and people like you and me were tolerated at best — but damn, it was a beautiful place.

Trivia: I Magnin was founded by Mary Ann Magnin in 1876, selling upscale baby clothes she made by hand. She also sold wood carvings made by her husband, Isaac, and named the store after him because shoppers and suppliers felt more comfortable when she said she was working for her husband.

I Magnin was sold to Bullock's Department Stores in 1944, and Bullocks was sold to Federated Department Stores in 1964, and to Macy's in 1988. Federated Department Stores bought Macy's in 1994, and I Magnin was closed on January 8, 1995.

In a final indignity, Macy's, located next door, knocked door-holes through the marble walls, dismantled and removed whatever architectural features could be unbolted and sold, and expanded its mundane store into the former I Magnin space.

Macy's has since moved out, retreating to its older building next door. The former I Magnin building was sold in 2019, and in its next life it'll be a bunch of lawyer's offices underneath overpriced condominiums.

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"I'm not going to die here."

At work, still smoldering over yesterday’s fire at the store, I wrote a polite but pointed e-mail to the Security Department, and CC’d my boss and her boss.

“We knew nothing about yesterday’s fire until we smelled the smoke. The building has a fire alarm system, as required by law, and we have drills every few months, so we know it works. Next time there’s a fire, we’d appreciate it if the fire alarm was turned on.”

Both Babs and Darla replied, separately, telling me my email was inappropriate. Darla said I should’ve brought my complaints to her, as this is “a management purview,” but I did bring it up with Darla yesterday, and all she said was that the Muzak would be turned on again.

Babs told me I should've gone through proper channels, and she sent a separate e-mail to Security, CC'ing me, telling them, "Please disregard Doug's e-mail." She said that Security would be hearing from her “within a few days,” which is probably supposed to put my mind at ease but does not.

Was my e-mail out of line? Do I care? No and no. Yesterday was a real fire, not a drill, and it showed that the fire drills are bullshit. It’s “a management purview”? Maybe, but management has fucked it up so it's also going to be a Doug purview.

I did not reply to Darla or Babs' responses to me, but I did reply to Babs’ e-mail to Security — the one where she told them to ignore my e-mail.

“I work here, do what I’m told and don’t make waves, but I'm not going to die here. My request for a working fire alarm is not unreasonable. If it’s disregarded, as Babs has requested, I will next contact the Fire Department and the Chronicle.”

No response to that, yet.

♦ ♦ ♦

In the mailbox, a letter from Stuart Mangrum, publisher of Twisted Times, with some compliments I don’t deserve, and asking me to write film reviews for his zine. Flattery will get you a movie critic, Stuart. I phoned him and said sure, asked a few questions about deadlines and formatting, and now I feel good all under.

Nice letters are always appreciated, but this one made my week. Twisted Times is a major-league zine — it’s been around since forever, always well-written and thoughtful-slash-fun reading, has a deservedly great reputation (jeopardized by a new movie critic), and an improved format for the current issue makes it look almost slick, but not in a bad way.

I’ll be proud to be part of it, until Stuart wises up and kicks me out. You can get your copy of Twisted Times by sending three dollars to ████████, CONCORD CA 94527.

♦ ♦ ♦

I was out front at the Pacific Film Archive, making eye contact with every youngish white guy who came alone, because that’s all I knew about Leaf Smith. He was already inside, though, approaching every fat white dude he saw, with similar un-success. When I gave up and went inside to buy a ticket, he approached me (“Fat and ugly, that must be Doug”) and we had a few minutes of light conversation before the lecture began.

Yeah, a lecture. Some literature professor from U Cal Berkeley had seen the movie before, and wanted to analyze everything about it, which sounds like something I might enjoy — but not before the movie, damn it.

The film, Dante’s Inferno (1935), wasn’t what I’d expected, though I'm not sure what I expected from a 1930s film of the hugely overwrought 700-year-old poem about the punishments of Hell. It’s Americanized and set in the 20th century, of course. Spencer Tracy plays a gruff ignoramus who gets a job as a carnival barker, for a sideshow called Dante’s Inferno. With a promise to “put Hell on a paying basis,” he makes this dodgy business so successful he’s soon creating a new Inferno attraction that could rival Disneyland.

Some of this seems very dated, and time is crazily compressed — Tracy meets a woman, dates her, proposes, and they’re married with a child in about a minute and a half. The story draws you in, though, and the effects are excellent, especially a brief reading from Dante’s poem, stunningly visualized. The characters are vintage 1930s stock, caring about quaint concepts like integrity and honor and all that rot, but overall it still packs a wallop.

Afterwards, Leaf and I walked to downtown Berkeley, and went into a bar so fancy that when I ordered Bud the waitress said, “Not here.” We sat in the patio and talked for a couple of hours, drinking imported beers — same pissy taste, but more expensive. Whenever the conversation went quiet, I babbled about meaningless nonsense. I can babble, man, just look at the zine.

Leaf is a likeable guy, not as immediately wide open in person as he is in his zine, but in life instead of on paper that would be difficult, maybe dangerous. We talked about a zillion things, most of it interesting, at least to me, and most of them forgotten, because I can’t drink two beers and remember much detail the next morning.

What I remember is that I had an OK time, the waitress had a pretty smile and a tight sweater we left her a good tip, and I’m not sure but I think Leaf paid for the beers. I don't want to marry him and have his babies in a minute and a half, but he seems like a good guy. Any time you’re doing nothing, Leaf, feel free to dial my digits and I’ll do nothing with you.

His zine is very good, and you ought to send a couple of dollars to Leaf Smith, ████████████████, BERKELEY CA 94704 for a copy. It’s written in a diary format, like this zine, and it’s honest, angsty, and smart, but without my annoying anti-social attitude.

From Pathetic Life #6
Thursday, November 17, 1994

Addendum, 2021: I don’t remember writing any movie reviews for Twisted Times, and I don’t remember ever seeing Leaf Smith again, after that night.

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“Do you smell smoke?”

There’s so much in life that I want to do, see, say, hear, wonder about, laugh about, dream about, ask about, answer, admire, inhale, touch and feel, understand, share, fart around with, read, and especially write, but instead I have to go to work.

♦ ♦ ♦

And what a day it was at the office. Here's the morning idiocy:

Darla’s only been our boss for a couple of months, and she knows what we do, but she hasn’t really known how we do it, so a few weeks ago, she asked Jennifer for a crash course. They spent a few hours together, and Jennifer said it went well, and now Darla understands how to use the software and the basic rules for how we process price changes. Sounds like a good thing, right?

Last week, we were briefly behind on the data entry, and Darla offered to help out. Sounds like an even better thing, right? How often does a boss anywhere volunteer to pitch in with the actual work? The gesture was appreciated, sincerely.

Or I thought it was, until Darla finished her short stack of work, and returned it to me (because Jennifer (my ‘lead’) was out today). “All done,” Darla said, “but I did a goof on this page, and on this page. Can you fix it?” Sure, I can fix it. Everybody makes occasional mistakes, and Marcia showed me how to make corrections, before she quit.

When I went into the fix-it program, though, and started poking through what Darla had done, she hadn’t done any of it right. She’d skipped fields that must be input, made huge typos that would print on every price tag, changed prices on some of the wrong items, and not made price changes on some items that need the prices changed. Basically, she did everything wrong. If she was a temp or a new hire, I’d be concerned, because even rookies don’t make this many mistakes.

I spent the rest of the morning fixing my boss’s fuck-ups, on a small pile of work that would’ve taken me half an hour to input correctly. And then I swallowed hard, and knocked on Darla’s door, to ask her not to help us any more. Said it about as politely as it could be said, but she took it as an insult, got defensive and dismissive, and said something like, “Thank you for fixing my many mistakes,” but she said it sarcastically.

“No problem,” I said, and went back to my desk.

As an employee, I believe it’s part of my job to bring problems to my boss’s attention, so that's what I did. With that response, though, I'm not going to say it a second time.

If Darla volunteers to ‘help’ with our work again, I’ll fix her mistakes again, and do so for as long as I work here. And then, when I quit or get laid off, there’ll be a little booby trap — Darla’s mistakes suddenly won’t be corrected.

Better yet, since she (thinks she) understands the intricacies of the work, maybe Darla will train my replacement to do price changes the same way she does them — wrong.

♦ ♦ ♦

And here's the afternoon idiocy:

One of the junior executives dropped some paperwork at my desk, and then he paused a long moment. I was getting ready to say something snide, when he said, “Do you smell smoke?”

You can often smell smoke in the office, because a few of the senior executives still smoke at their desks, though that’s been against company policy for several years. I took a deep breath, expecting to taste tobacco in the air, but it was different — slight, but sooty, like wood burning in the distance.

With images of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire smoldering in my mind, the junior exec and I walked around, poking our heads into a few doors. Finding no explanation for the scent in the air, we knocked on Babs’ office door, and she made an executive decision to abandon ship.

“Everybody out!” Babs shouted as she came out of her office, "but do not take the elevators!" I don’t like Babs, and I’m not sure I respect her, but I respected that — it's a safety rule I had completely forgotten, so it's good that she remembered. She said it several more times, too. That was the only thing she said in all the commotion, now that I think about it.

Everyone from our side of the eighth floor (except two temps, who were on break — Darla left them a note) traipsed down the hall, past another office where people were still working. We tried to rouse them, but their manager said, “If there was a fire, the alarm would’ve gone off.”

Yeah. More about that later.

“It’s a job,” I said to him, “and not a very good one. It ain’t worth your life.” Boss Babs looked at me as if she disagreed, but I’m pretty sure she’s their boss too, and she didn't say anything. She didn’t tell them to come with us, so we left them to burn.

As we walked toward a fire exit, the smoke became visible, just barely. Seeing it, not just smelling it, we turned back toward a different exit, and walked past the same office where those people were still working. “It’s too smokey to get out that way,” I said casually, “so if your workflow allows it, take the exit down the other hallway,” and I pointed.

My eyes had naturally fixed on a pretty woman in that office, and she looked relieved when her manager said, “Everybody out,” and grabbed his jacket. Staff has been given permission to survive.

Their bunch joined our bunch, all of us marching toward the stairs, and Babs said again, “Don’t take the elevators!” When we reached the door to the stairwell, it had a big red bar across it that said something like, Alarm will sound if door is opened. Babs, leading the way, saw this and hesitated, so I reached around her and pushed the door open myself.

I am not willing to die for that company, and besides, I’ve always wanted to push those bars and set off those alarms. Sure enough, it started buzzing, but not very loudly — not like a fire drill. It was more like an alarm clock than an alarm, but any racket that might get people’s attention was welcome.

Peter turned around and shouted, “Fire!” behind us, which was smart. We were about to go down the stairs, but our little parade wasn’t everyone who works on the eighth floor, and the only alarm sounding was that door alarm, a polite little beep that sounded more like a dial tone than anything urgent. We should've been shouting earlier, but nobody'd thought of it.

Peter shouted “Fire!” several times, and some of us joined in, and then we walked down eight flights of stairs, with Peter and others opening the door on every floor and shouting, “Fire!” All the floors below ours seemed to be empty, though, like they'd already evacuated.

When we got to the ground floor and emerged on the sidewalk, hundreds of employees and shoppers and gawkers were staring up at the building, but the building just stood there, non-smoking.

Nine (9) hook-and-ladder trucks were out front, completely blocking the usually busy street. Yellow ribbon-ropes had been strung up to keep people back, and firemen had to lift them to let us pass. Other firemen were carrying hoses into the store.

Someone in a suit and a firefighter’s hat was bellowing into a bullhorn for people to walk in one direction, not the other. He was an SFFD executive, I decided, but his instructions were confusing to me. I didn’t see anyone walking in either direction, just hundreds of people standing around.

That’s when I started thinking, hey, I’ll have something interesting to write for the zine tonight, but that’s also when it stopped being interesting. We were all standing around, getting sore necks looking up at the building, which did not appear to be on fire.

We found out later that all the smoke and flames and real action had been on the other side of the building, where the first stairwell we’d almost used would’ve taken us. Not knowing that as we stood on the street, though, it just looked like a whole bunch of nothing happening, and eventually Mr Microphone announced that store employees could go back into the building, but not shoppers.

With the fire over, the elevators were safe to ride, which is good, because eight flights of stairs is six more than I'm willing to climb. Back on our floor, there was the smell of stale smoke for the rest of the day, and the next day’s paper reported that nobody was hurt, but tragically, there was almost no structural damage.

The fire alarm never sounded on the floor where we work. We have regular fire drills, so everyone knows what the building's fire alarm sounds like, and where the exits are. If the alarm had sounded, everyone would’ve been out of the building five minutes quicker than we were. Several workers on the eighth floor didn’t exit the building at all.

Now, get this: It wasn’t a malfunction. The fire alarm didn’t go off, according to my boss, because fire alarms sound first in the Security office, where the guards sit and watch shoppers on video screens. It’s up to the security guards to decide whether to trigger alarms all over the building, and some doofus with a badge decided to use the building’s public-address system instead of the alarm, “so as not to panic the customers.”

Well, that’s nice, but on the eighth floor, where I work, we have the store’s Muzak turned off, to preserve our sanity against endless Mantovani strings. Nobody ever told us that turning off the Muzak also turned off the public-address system, so we heard no announcement asking us to exit the building in an orderly manner.

That seems worrisome, don’t you think? It didn’t make me feel like “a valued employee.” It made me angry, so for the second time today, I knocked on Darla's door. I politely summarized the facts, hoping she'd come down on the Security Department for leaving us to roast, but Darla's response was a promise that she’d call someone ... to have the Muzak/public address speakers turned on again.

From Pathetic Life #6
Wednesday, November 16, 1994