John Butleron charity beginning at work
Many years ago I worked at the California headquarters of a multinational accountancy firm. It was my first job after college, and I was employed as a temp. The company occupied the top 10 floors of a gleaming 50-floor skyscraper, from which you could look out over the San Francisco Bay bridge and pray the earthquake retrofitting would hold.
My job was to take an inventory of all the company's computers, which involved knocking on the doors of consultants, then asking them to take an early lunch while I crawled under their desks and checked some serial numbers on the backs of their CPUs. Very often they refused to stop working, which made the ignominy even greater. If the number matched the one I had on my clipboard the computer was dismantled and taken away to be replaced by a new one. As work it was both back-breaking and easy. We were paid $8 an hour.
Being a temp was a total crapshoot. My friend temped in the same office but landed a desk job in tech support, because he had a nice phone manner. I would have to wheel my blue mail truck piled high with old computers past the cube, within which he would be hidden, smirking and playing solitaire. It could have been worse. Another temp had been given the job of straightening the chairs in the conference rooms, every hour, on the hour.
I worked with a heavy-set Italian guy called Sebastian, who earned $1 more an hour than me on account of having temped there for a year. Sebastian was partial to cinnamon rolls in the morning. While queuing downstairs for my morning coffee I would bump into him, and he would stand with me and pitch the idea for his movie script, about a blond cheerleader who falls in love with a heavy-set Italian guy called Sebastian. Sugared dough would collect at the corners of his mouth as he followed me out of the shop, into the lift and all the way up to 40, pitching, pitching, pitching all the way.
The company had decided to hold a charity auction for the obsolete computers that Sebastian and I had taken away. We would wheel them into an elevator, push the button and ride the elevator down to three. The third floor was more or less unoccupied, and we'd wheel our mail carts full of hardware into a large windowless office. If any software or confidential content needed to be uninstalled from any computer, Sebastian and I would do it. We graded which ones worked and which didn't, which monitors had cracked screens and which laptops were in perfect working order.
The computers were then priced, and the price list was circulated among the employees as a starting price, after which the bidding would begin on a certain date. The auction generated money, and the charity would benefit in greater and greater amounts. This seemed an inventive way to deal with the problem of discarded electronics, particularly considering how wasteful Americans are with second-hand goods. All it cost was the wage of one overweight Italian and one underfed Irishman.
I liked Sebastian, but he was heavy going. Often I would sneak out to lunch on my own to avoid hearing about the latest rewrite of the cheerleader script. On these days I would lie in the sun in the small park beneath the building and look up at the 40th floor, praying for an earthquake - and faulty retrofitting.
One day, after one such lunch hour, I returned to the third floor to find Sebastian waiting for me at the elevator. He was ashen. Apparently, he had come back from lunch at the cinnamon-roll store and run into one of the most senior management consultants leaving the large windowless office with one of the best laptops under her arm.
She paused, pointed at him accusingly and stated, with impeccable force: "I need this. To work at home." She then swept by him, punched the elevator button and stood, apparently, waiting for the elevator to come down from 17, while Sebastian stood, looking at her in amazement. He couldn't believe that she didn't take the stairs, but it was obvious to me that taking the stairs would have been an admission of guilt. Sebastian agreed that he too would have waited for the elevator if it was coming down from, say, 32, but to wait for it when it was coming from 17? That was only 14 floors. She probably paid $200 gym membership every month to get that kind of exercise. The truth was, if you felt you were allowed to steal a laptop from charity, you would take the elevator, even if it was on the 1,000th floor. Nothing needed to be run away from. Plus she was wearing heels.
I can be Bolshevik about matters such as these. "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs," goes the phrase attributed to Karl Marx, used as a defining principle of communism. The phrase might be equally apt as a description of charity, if everyone's needs were objective. The executive might have thought she needed the laptop badly - and indeed she might have done, because she stole it. So the fact that she, and not someone in desperate need, was getting the laptop didn't change the fact that it was an act of charity. The problem is that, objectively speaking, other people needed the laptop more than her.
Within two weeks our stock of restored, cleaned, second-hand computers had been decimated by consultants who would storm into the room and demand item number 29 on the list without ever looking us in the eye.
Sebastian thought it was somewhat dismissive of them not to give us eye contact, but I took comfort in that.
John Butler blogs at http://lozenge.wordpress.com