Teamwork

Teamwork has become the mantra in all kinds of business settings and organizational models.  No matter how lowly the job or how slovenly the jefes treat the workers, by golly we must have teamwork.  Everything is teamwork.  We must be good team members, we must.  It is a directive and a qualification.

We are taught in seminars and trainings to be part of a team.  We are told that a football player or a basketball player out for himself injures the team.  The team is priority.  The team is the way to fulfill destiny.  Go, team, go!  But lobby for a union?  Hell no.

We are robots.  We are automations.  Unfeeling.  Unthinking.  Dead.  Lifeless.  No passion.  No joy.  No individuality.  No sex.  Toe the line.  Here is the employee handbook.  Read it.  Devour it.  Absorb it.  It is nourishment.  It is the stuff of life.  

If we qualify for food stamps, we are told that is part of our benefit package.  If we have sick children, we are told that is our problem.  The team must come first.  We are required to work overtime.  We are not expected to have a life.  No identity.  No existence outside of the most sacred team.

We are a team.  We are a family.  The Conglomerate Company professes to care.  The Corporation is human.  That was on the news.  We are social.  We are polite.  We express satisfaction with the process.  We are uber loyals.  We want to be together at the staff parties.  We enjoy the staff meetings.  The mission of the business integrates itself into the very stuff of our being.  We have one mission.  We have one thought.  We serve.  The subservient team shall be first and the maverick shall be last.

There is no room for the mavericks.  No room for the hermits, geeks, nerds.  No room for the hackers.  No room to examine the process.  No room to take things apart, twist something here, eliminate something there.  No room for those who sense beyond.
None.  All for one and one for all.  Go team go!  Share and share alike.  Death to the freaks.  

The team will dominate.  This is the mandate.  The individuals will be culled and left to make their own way in the cruel, forbidding wilderness.  The team will prevail.  The jefes demand that this is so.  Screw thinking.  Screw the piteous papers folded up into thirds and put into the suggestion box.  The suggestion box is void of function.  The jefes will say that was tried and it didn't work so we aren't doing that again.  Those who dare to drop papers into the suggestion box will have their arms severed at the elbow.  We are a team.  No room for dissidents.  Disgruntled employees are dangerous.

We live with the fiction.  We forget the past.  We have no future.  We are a team.  We are never alone.  We are swallowed up into the oiled machinery.  And it is just.  It is right.  It is good.  Go team go! 

Then the revolution comes.  The team implodes.  Hope rises.

sapphoq and friends