Recognizing the Smell of Cat Piss When You Live in a Zoo
A lot of the work I've done for living expenses has been low paying but meaningful in some way. Public school music teacher didn't knock me up into the higher tax brackets but it was a noble profession. Running an off-loop theater company didn't even afford me a salary but it felt like I was contributing to the artistic community. Public radio was another meager living with benefits to my feeling of giving something vital to others.
I've been lucky that way.
This is not to say I haven't had work that made my skin feel a little greasy. The summer I spent doing cold call phone sales of credit cards to old people. The year I worked in a tobacconist retail store. The six weeks of selling windows in random locations throughout Las Vegas.
The year and a half as Operations Manager of an off-Strip casino wasn't a bad gig. I enjoyed the people I worked with and for. I enjoyed the bizarre nature of a dive bar casino a half mile from the street of neon. I didn't even mind the parade of low-end prostitutes, wild-eyed meth addicts, and sleep deprived truck drivers.
What made the day-to-day grind untenable over time was that my entire work day hinged upon my ability to keep people gambling even when I knew they could no longer afford it. Using liquor, free play points, cigarettes, food—anything at my disposal including my natural gift for gab—to keep them in their seats and pumping twenty dollar bills into the bill validators of slot machines designed to tease them but ultimately keep the cash.
I'm a dog person. I don't mind cats but I feel about cats the way I feel about kids. Love 'em if they live with you, not so much if they live with me. The biggest issue with cats is that they are feral creatures who shit and piss in a box inside your home. One cat and the smell is noticeable but still manageable. Three cats? Not so manageable. Five cats? You stop smelling the horror and get used to it. The stench seems normal until you bring over a date and she passes out on the floor, stiff-as-a-board face-planting from the overwhelming lack of oxygen.
The slow stain to the soul when working in a casino is like that putrescence. Long enough manipulating those with the hardest bad luck imaginable and you lose sight of the darkening edges. You start to see people differently. Everyone becomes a mark or a scammer. You find yourself justifying the fact that you are a scumbag, a huckster, a snake oil salesman.
I can't speak to what it may feel like to be a parasite upon others when it results in millions or billions of dollars. Hell, I cannot testify to how it might feel to prey upon the weak for even six figures. No, the casino was an experience in the selling of tiny pieces of the soul for pennies on the dollar which is almost a paradox in depravity.
My mom tells me a story on our once-a-week FaceTime call about working as an Accounts Manager for a real estate firm. Her job was to consolidate and record the receipts for upper management use of discretionary funds. One of the partners would receive the cash to do his off-the-clock business but when pressed for documentation would hand her receipts for home improvement and vacation expense. Mom knew this was not on the up-and-up. She asked the staff accountant what she should do.
"If you report it, you'll probably get fired. If you don't report it, you might not get fired but if someone else catches it, you'll probably get fired. You told me so you'll probably get fired."
Mom wrestled with the dilemma. She was single. She had two children. She was struggling as it was. The ethical thing would be to turn the cheat in. Surely, she would be seen as protecting the company from fraud. Of course, she would be commended for blowing the whistle on the unscrupulous partner. A truly ethical company would promote her for her integrity. So she reported it.
She got fired.
The story reminds me of the sheriff in Flint, Michigan in the documentary film Roger & Me. GM leaves Flint. The city goes into economic free-fall. Residents are taking to raising rabbits for sale and for food. Banks are foreclosing on homes. The sheriff's job becomes enforcing the evictions.
You can see in his eyes when the camera is rolling that he knows he is in service of the bad guys. He doesn't like that he is putting people out of their homes. He does it because he feels he has to do it or, soon, another employee of the state will come knocking on his door to evict him.
How do we do it? How do we make that devil's bargain to spend a third of our days working for money surrounded by the very human journey for graft, greed, and moral ambiguity? The woman who spends her every weekday working for a collection agency. The insurance adjustor whose job is made up of finding ways to deny claims. The police officer who sees abuses but does not blow the whistle because "If you report it, you'll probably get fired."
It's a simple answer when you don't have a cat. It's easy to smell the cat piss on others. Those young enough to have not been in those situations in life have the blistering moral clarity of the untested. It's a bit more complex when you have one cat because you have just a little bit of pee odor on your jacket yourself. Once you own five cats, locating your ethical boundary is nearly impossible because you no longer even notice.
Maybe that's a perk to remote work and the gig economy. You can't smell the cat piss through the computer screen. On the other hand, maybe that's not so much a plus because you might be working for someone who wears feline urine like it's a cologne and you wouldn't even know it.
