Low Class Pride

I sit in what would probably be called the interrogation room of the Washington, D.C. police station. I’m reluctant to call it an interrogation room because I don’t want to over dramatize my situation. It’s just a room. And the police are just about to ask me a couple of questions. The room looks like how you’d imagine it, largely thanks to the images in Hollywood movies. I wonder if maybe a lot of movie producers have found themselves in a similar room. But like I said, I don’t want to over dramatize my situation. Though I am by myself, under fluorescent lights, in front of a voice recorder and bleeding.

Officer Graves walks back in—I swear that’s his real name.

“Well, congratulations. I’ve been told to tell you that you’re fired.” Figures. “Want to talk about what happened?” Yeah. I can do that.

I work, er, worked at Mooven Group directly under CEO Preston Sterling. It’s the third biggest bank in the United States. So big, in fact, we hardly do any direct banking at all. Money is measured in the billions, that is, except for my paycheck.

“Enough jokes. Just tell the damn story.”

Fine. I was one of four personal assistants to Mr. Sterling. Actually he has a Ph.D. in economics so I guess he’s actually Dr. Sterling. He rose to the top by bundling thousands of poor-mortgages and selling them off, knowing they were toxic. He’s a genius. He turned down offers to teach at Yale, MIT, you name it. Anyway, the Mooven Group has diversified and changed not just the banking industry, but, well actually you’ve probably seen the commercials and slogan: ‘We’re Mooven the industry.’

“Yeah, those commercials suck.”

Well they worked. Business has been great. But because of the financial collapse, we were obviously one of the many banking companies to take the federal loans--which will be paid back to the taxpayer with interest. Earlier this week all of the major CEOs were called to testify before Congress as to why they needed more time to make the next quarterly payment. Mr. Sterling graciously brought along myself, Cooper, Sitton and Perry. We took the company plane but only because it’s a time-saver. The less time Mr. Sterling is traveling, the more time he can work on fixing this financial mess and getting money back to the taxpayers. Mr. Sterling isn’t going to succumb to some impractical inconvenience just because it sounds good for the cameras and Washington fat cats.

“Oppose to Mr. Wesley’s boys?”

Wesley and his…gang of assistants—it’s basically an army that follows him around—are total camera whores. He testified that he and his people ate food from a gas station on their drive to D.C. But that was only because he didn’t eat at the Wendy’s they first stopped at. An hour later though he’s starving to death and they have to pull into some Plug ‘n Chug and buy a packaged sandwich and bag of Doritos! So when Wesley’s lackeys start bragging about how their boss is in touch with real Americans, you can understand why I got angry.

“No, I don’t understand. Would you say Mr. Sterling, your former employer, is a nice man? Or pays you exceptionally well?”

He doesn’t need to be nice, he’s my boss. And it doesn’t make sense to pay me more than I’ll work for.

“Why would you get into a street brawl with employees of a person you don’t know because they are employees of a person you don’t know? You’re a personal assistant, not a best friend to Preston Sterling. So why did you really fight those other boys?”

You’ll never understand. Unpopular CEOs of unpopular companies have their biggest fans, not amongst stockholders, but amongst their secretaries, assistants, servants, maids and janitors. It doesn’t matter how the personal employer acts or treats you. If you’re going to be a mistreated assistant, you want to be the mistreated assistant to the richest and most powerful. It’s bad enough having this job, but no one wants to be a nobody to the poor or weak.