The Running-Shoe Radical by Elizabeth Knight

The company I work for is weird. On the one hand, it's possibly the best place I've ever worked, with the exception of my first-ever job, where the people were great but the work itself eventually got me down. On the other, it's no different from anywhere else. Same dynamics, same kinds of people, same weird social behaviors and general interest in the wrong kinds of things.

When I first started there the place made me uneasy. Everyone was so nice. Nice little clean overpaid people, nice laid-back atmosphere, nice shiny hyper-powered candy-colored Macintosh computers (does it bounce? asked my sister via email) on every desk as well as the usual spiky, spiny, four-cornered crash-in-your-face PCs. Nice place. Nice atmosphere. Nice people. Nice work, if you can get it. Just something about it all didn't feel right. When I changed teams and got an even shinier IMac G3 as part of my induction into fulfilling new testing duties, I started to wonder a bit about them, as everyone who heard about it seemed to want to come round and peer through the transparent case for a minute or two. I don't know if they expected to be able to see the little electrons dashing around inside there, going about their business of making ones and zeroes, but I'll tell you, it worried me, considering that these people are supposed to be technical.

But it was the running-shoe radical who did me in. This was a guy who doesn't work for us anymore; he's gone on to something even more profoundly high-powered in whatever he does, but I used to come across him periodically on the patio which is where we renegades always gathered to smoke. He made me alternately uneasy and bored right from the start, since his niceness seemed to sit on a bed of tiny little unresolved angers so petty that he wouldn't even fess up to them, and his only interests in life seemed to be golf and the progress of his NASDAQ shares, so I never talked to him much. But he was one of those people who feel like they're expiring if five minutes go by without getting a 'ping' back from someone else, so I sure heard a lot of his conversation.

There were three serious topics of conversation at work when I started there. Golf, day-trading, and the parking situation. I got extremely tired of people approaching me and trying to whip me into a frenzy of self-righteous activism about the fact that there weren't enough parking spaces to go around - especially those who had been there long enough to have spots of their own right in the onsite parking. I kept getting sympathy I didn't want, and little leading overtures inviting me to say it was stupid (a favorite word of the emotionally stupid, ever notice?) and castigate local city hall for sending officers out to ticket cars parked all day in the neighborhood, just as if everyone was regular folk. I think these people see themselves as an essential service, and seriously question anyone else trying to live where they have to work.

The running-shoe radical was very loud about it. He had his own space, of course, but what really got up his nose was this communique that came out after I'd been there for a couple of months, saying that the company would reimburse bus fare for anyone who didn't drive to work every day, and that they were no longer going to subsidize the onsite parking spots. The chip on Mr. Running Shoes' shoulder grew into a log.

It seems he felt this was discrimination, persecution, unfair penalty, and a host of other things. How was he supposed to, did they think he could just, why should anyone else, dot dot dot. Bussing wasn't an option for him, and not because he had children to ferry around or an essential job or anything, but because it just wasn't. It wasn't fair that he should have to pay an extra twenty dollars a month to park his over privileged sport-utility vehicle ten steps from the front door, because what else, he asked rhetorically, was he supposed to do?

I thought it was stupid and mean-spirited and juvenile at the time, but I wasn't prepared for what came next. I thought he had some degree of moral intelligence, but the following week I heard him talking to someone from tech support who asked him in an offhandedly needling way if he was still boycotting Nike products.

No, it turned out, he wasn't. In fact, he'd just bought himself another cool pair of 300-buck running shoes. Why not? Well, see, those kids have a choice. Nobody's forcing them into those sweatshops, and besides, if they don't like the conditions they should just work somewhere else. It isn't his fault, so there's nothing wrong with buying their shoes. In fact, said the great arbiter of employment justice, it's not my problem and this whole thing is just blown out of proportion, if you ask me.

I watched him for a moment or two, and I saw that he really meant it, just as sincerely as he'd meant his passion about the parking spaces. That's quite frightening. He didn't actually have a concept of justice and human rights at all - except as defined by what he wants. His definition of a crime against human rights was him having to pay an extra six-thousandths of his monthly income for the privilege of not walking an extra four blocks every day. But in his moral structure, the same fraction of cash is fair payment for a life spent in truly inhuman working conditions - so long as it's happening to someone else. You can only conclude that his life is worth so much more than that of a child in the Third World that one moment's inconvenience for him has the same ethical weight as that entire life.

Mr. Social Justice has moved on to some other company - doubtless some place that he considers fairer in its treatment of its employees. I hope the company relocates to Malaysia and takes him along, and fires him if he doesn't go. After all, everybody has choices, don't they?

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