Dionysus: Death [part1]
Prologue
On the night of June 10th, 2024, I was on top of the world, literally amongst the clouds, on a rooftop bar, toasting a glass of cabernet to the neon below, feeling like a modern-day Dionysus – a real god of wine and whimsy and witlessness and just getting as loaded as humanly possible. And by the next morning, I was dead.
This is the story of how I died.
Chapter I: Prelude to the Sheer Excitement of Golf
“Dionysus mingles in the wine new powers, sending high adventure to the thoughts of men.” –The Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation. 1938.
Roughly nineteen hours earlier, on the tail end of June 9th, 2024, during those wee hours when the sun is barely birthed from the horizon and the dawn is covered in damp, I woke up from a half-sleep stupor wondering if I had gotten any sleep at all, as one does when they only get one hour of light sleep and absolutely no Michael Stipe#1 sleep the night before. I had to wake up early – four-in-the-morning early – to catch a flight to the fairways#2 of Maine; I was expected at a golf charity event the next day, for a client that I managed. At the time,#3 I worked as a Customer Success Manager#4 for a Contact Center as a Service#5 company, and I managed a “portfolio of clients” (as they say in sales world), and sometimes these clients wanted me to attend their company events or travel to their headquarters to present some pretty-but-ultimately-meaningless slides or wine-and-dine them in some weird corporate courting ritual, all in an effort to convince them that they should continue to do business with us because everything they want and more is coming soon next quarter as indicated by our product roadmap on this slide but please note that the product roadmap is not set in stone as development priorities can shift due to market forces and client demand so please just renew your contract for another year or three because my job literally depends on it.
The client – Beckham, Inc., a government-funded call center supporting everything from military toilet paper recalls to passport renewals – wanted me and three of my coworkers to participate in eighteen holes of golf at their annual Beckham Golf Charity Event. The chosen few from my organization formed a foursome#6: Anders, the Account Executive handling the overall sales relationship with Beckham, Inc.; Jordan, the Project Director overseeing a major move-to-cloud project for Beckham, Inc.; Doug, the Southeast Regional Vice President of Sales with a vested interest in maximizing profit from all clients; and myself, the Customer Success Manager responsible for securing Beckham, Inc.’s eventual two-million-dollar contract renewal.
The Beckham Golf Charity Event’s stated goal was to raise money for people with disabilities. So, on the surface, we would be golfing for a good cause. This was certainly one of the less demeaning things I had been tasked to do in the name of chasing those ever-sought-after capital-B capital-D Big Deals. However, as with any company expense, the trip was wrapped in several layers of corporate complexity that any barely tenured salesperson would pick up on immediately: not only were we golfing to raise money for people with disabilities, but also for the assurance of a multi-year contract renewal (which I was responsible for), a potential upsell of software licenses ranging somewhere within the three-million-dollar range (which Anders was responsible for), the success of an ongoing move-to-cloud project (which Jordan was responsible for), and the we-actually-love-our-customers-it’s-not-all-about-the-money brown nosing present in all vendor-client relationships (of which we were all responsible for). The people with disabilities were only a proxy for our company’s bottom line; if we refused to go to Beckham’s Golf Charity Event, we would be hearing about this refusal on every video call and in every email for the next two years, after which Beckham, Inc. would likely decline to renew their contract with us; thus losing their business, thus losing our jobs. And you can replace the words “Beckham’s Golf Charity Event” with literally any other client request, because this is the crux of all corporate relationships: the product is far less important than the asses being kissed. Sellers display faux care only for the benefit of their quarterly sales goals, and the bigger the potential deal, the more faux care they muster. This means doing whatever the client wants to secure those Big Deals. I’ve had salespeople tell me, straight up, “If a client told me they’d sign this five-million-dollar deal if I killed someone for them, I would do it no questions asked, and I’d bake the liability into the Ts and Cs.”#7 (Whether this particular salesperson was joking or not, this writer couldn’t tell.) The point being, if you want to be a quote-unquote Good Salesperson (oxymoron), you have to demean yourself, it is quite literally baked into the role.
*golfing for people with disabilities – and money.
What this whole golf thing meant for me, having never played before in my life,#8 was that I needed to get familiar with the sport, and fast; and the only way I knew how to do that was by playing computer games or by reading books, and the prospect of reading a book with the words “All About the Sheer Excitement of Golf!” somewhere on the cover made my stomach turn, so computer games were the only viable option.
Since the Game Boy Color was (and still is) my favorite console ever – primarily driven by 8-bit-pixel-perfect summers at grandma’s house – I naturally gravitated toward the classic Game Boy Color version of Mario Golf for my crash course in the Sheer Excitement of Golf. I downloaded the ROM file#9 and moved it into some folder within a folder on my cheap Chinese handheld emulation device’s SD card, and just like that I was ready to learn every little technicality of this legendary Scottish pastime,#10 and familiarize myself with all the golf lingo (I’m going with “glingo” going forward). In fact, part of the reason I didn’t get much sleep on the night of June 9th was because I was lying on a mattress in my living room playing digital golf. This living-room-mattress-computer-game dynamic was necessary so as not to wake my infant son from his precious baby sleeps when the time came for me to gather my wings and fly. Suffice it to say, the mattress was not comfortable, Michael Stipe did not visit me that night, and I didn’t learn very much about golf. I did learn, however, that Mario Golf for the Game Boy Color was developed by Camelot Software Planning (of the famed Golden Sun series); and that the game was a surprisingly competent companion to Mario 64 (which was also developed by Camelot and released earlier that same year, 1999); and that the game included a full glingo dictionary with over 50 glingos, on-point golf-ball physics with seemingly perfect gravity-wind interplay, an eminently satisfying golf-swing power bar that requires perfectly timed button presses to land those highly coveted hole-in-ones,#11 a traversable overworld a la Japanese-role-playing games dotted with country clubs just waiting to be conquered, and (as if this run-on sentence wasn’t long enough) it played the Super Mario Bros. “Underground Theme”#12 on potential birdie putts#13; all this and more was wrapped in a charming pixel aesthetic that took full advantage of the Game Boy Color’s 32,768 colors in a way that was quite pleasing to my very tired eyes indeed.
Before I knew it, I had driven many a ball down many a fairway and, on one hour of sleep, it was time to drive to the Jacksonville, Florida Airport to catch my six-o’clock flight to Maine aboard an American Airlines A319 Airbus.#14 On the flight, I started reading a collection of essays by David Foster Wallace – Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (many of these essays I had read before) – while sitting next to an older woman who kept twirling long strands of brown hair around her fingers and occasionally asking me things like, “So, are you from Jacksonville? What are you reading? What’s it about? Do you know if they serve alcohol on this flight? Do you drink?”
And while I mostly nodded and tried as politely as possible to blow her off, I wanted to say …
“Hell yeah, lady. I drink.”
Chapter II: The Software Pantheon
“The divine madness … prophetic, initiatory, poetic, erotic, having four gods presiding over them … Apollo, the second that of Dionysus, the third that of the Muses, the fourth that of Aphrodite and Eros.” –The Dialogues of Plato, 3rd ed. 1892.
II.I: Shakedown, 2022
But I really shouldn’t.
Flashback two years earlier. I was, curiously enough, on the same trip to Maine for the same annual Beckham Golf Charity Event, staying at the same luxury Marriott hotel#15 right smack dab in the middle of downtown Maine. I was not playing golf this time, only helping the volunteers pass out drinks and snacks at hole nine. I was there with a Sales Executive, not Anders but a different guy named Jeff, and accompanying us were some other bigwig sales dudes; these guys were standoffish with several Big Deals under their belts, full of sales-snoot, and they were big into partying; I’m talking three-in-the-morning-hotel-room-balcony-cocaine-snorting-tequila-shots-flowing-hotel-security-being-called-because-people-are-trying-to-sleep partying. After dinner, Jeff and I somehow ended up in the room of one of these bigwig sales guys. I was already two glasses of cabernet in from dinner; and once I start drinking: I. Don’t. Stop. Under any circumstance, I just do not stop. So I had one or two or seven shots of tequila, passed on the cocaine because I did that once in high school and ended up wanting to throw myself off a very similar balcony to the one I found myself on in this bigwig’s hotel room. The bigwig I ended up talking to most was literally named Steven Brag, he was a Vice President of Sales of Some Sort, and his attitude fit his last name to a tee. Your not-so-humble narrator here had seven shots too many and found himself in a pretty deep conversation with this Brag guy about climbing the corporate ladder and what I described as (I’m ad-libbing a bit because the whole night was whirlwind heat and flash) “a hamster wheel with little spikes that tear away at your personality over time and leave you bitter and dead and eventually forgotten because sales doesn’t impart one goddamn meaningful thing on anybody other than the evils of the perpetuation of money as a proxy for love and an economy of suffering,” and this Brag guy looked me dead in the eye and said, “then why are you here?” And I said something like, “because my friend referred me, but I would literally work at McDonald’s if it paid enough, that’s how little this job fulfills me. This job is just a means to an end. That’s it.” And I likely went on like this for quite some time indeed before Brag – between organizing a line of cocaine with a gold-plated debit card and snorting it off the table – with a manic calm said, “Alright, then I’m going to tell David about this.” David was my boss at the time, a good guy who probably would have laughed and shrugged it off, but I thought: what if he didn’t laugh and shrug it off? I then became very nervous and quiet after it clicked that this guy could certainly get me fired if he wanted to, and Brag sensed this nervousness and doubled down; he said something like, “what, don’t you want to work at McDonald’s? It’s no different than this job, right?” This guy was trying to prove me wrong – put me in my place beneath his Louis Vuitton Men’s Designer Sneakers, and maybe he was right; maybe he called my bluff. It became clear that I had offended Mr. Brag, because after what must have been a whole three minutes of death stares and silence, he stood up, walked into the main room, and started talking to someone else. At that point, I felt it was prudent to leave, and when I passed Brag on the way out he didn’t say a word to me. I made it back to my hotel room by around four in the morning with a cloud of anxious is-this-guy-going-to-get-me-fired-what-am-I-even-doing-here-is-my-life-a-total-joke dread hanging over my head, and I had to wake up for the golf event by six, which was in two hours.
But it was OK, I could make it, I told myself. I prided myself on never having blacked out. I saw myself as a modern-day Dionysus. Yes, I could get really really wasted, but I never blacked out. Yes, I may be doing and saying incredibly questionable things, but I am in complete control, I told myself. I can be a complete wastrel whilst still attending to my adult responsibilities, I told myself.
So of course I was awakened by my wife after she had tried to reach me on my cell phone several times (which was on silent, of course) and then called the hotel I was staying at to get my room number but the hotel receptionist wouldn’t give her my room number for security reasons or something and she eventually contacted Jeff who happened to know my room number and then she was finally able to call my room directly, and I woke up to a stern, “Forrest – it’s 10 AM, aren’t you supposed to be at the charity event?” May all the gods bless her beautiful soul.
I got out of bed faster than anyone ever has, put on my stupid polo shirt and khakis, called a taxi, and made it out to that golf event several hours late faster than anyone ever has. And somehow, I wasn’t fired; there were no real lasting consequences at all. And eventually Steven Brag “moved on”#16 from the company, so the threat of him getting me fired evaporated like the morning dew that I so irresponsibly missed that hazy golf morning. If there was any real consequence, it was that I had forgotten to take my acid reflux medication, so I had excruciating wine-induced heartburn during the entire charity event.
“Forrest was late for the golf event because he drank too much,” became a meme in both my company and within Beckham, Inc. At the time, like every other time, I told myself, “OK – that’s the last time I’m doing that, for real this time.” But I would do it again. I would rationalize myself straight into another drunken stupor weeks – sometimes days – later. Every time. And this wasn’t the only time something like this had happened. I can count at least seven other equally embarrassing drinking stories in which I was either late to a serious meeting, broke something important, said something insensitive to the wrong person, flat-out hurt myself, or did all of these things at once after imbibing one too many glasses of cabernet.
*The Fool? Nay – Dionysus.
I saw myself as a modern-day Dionysus. I was part of The Software Pantheon. People treated me like the god of revelry and ritual madness. “Forrest’s going out with us tonight – he may seem quiet now, but this guy is funny as fuck after a few drinks!” They would say. I was part of The Software Pantheon. I was no Fool. I was a real modern-day Dionysus. I could do no wrong. I was a god.
That’s what I told myself.
I guess this is the part where you want me to say something real introspective like: Hi, my name is Forrest and I am an alcoholic. I haven’t been formally diagnosed#17 or anything, and I haven’t gone to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting; and frankly, I’m a little too proud to go to one. I don’t need this “higher power” rigmarole to abstain from drinking; I can do it through sheer force of will, I think. I am not emotionally manipulated by liquids, is what I tell myself. I know I might maybe be an alcoholic, that’s the most important thing, right? The first step: I am self-aware! I am intelligent! My brain can fight the poison! I was late for the golf event, but everyone had a good laugh and there was no real harm done. I don’t need to drink, but if I do I’ll be OK; I always have been. I have never blacked out; that’s what I told myself. Never blacked out, not even once. Yes, sometimes I slip up, but I have never blacked out – just ask Wanda.
II.II: Dionysus Rising, 2024
Wanda remembers. She was there to witness Dionysus stumble out of a golf cart into the volunteer’s booth four hours later than scheduled. In fact, days before flying out to the 2024 Beckham Golf Charity Event, she told me on a Zoom call, “Don’t forget – you actually have to golf this time. Don’t drink too much! And don’t be late!” Wanda remembers.
Wanda was an honorary member of The Software Pantheon. She was our main point of contact over at Beckham, Inc. She was#18 a fifty-something-year-old Workforce Director with a perpetual chip on her shoulder. She enjoyed drinking Rolling Rock beer while listening to classic rock because, in her own words, “they just don’t make music like they used to,” she also enjoyed Prince’s music because, in her own words again, “I have very varied taste in obscure music.” She spoke with a gruff cigarette-stained lisp and her right eye would twitch slightly every few words. She would blow up on anyone who dared question her hyper logical but very draconian workforce edicts while simultaneously escalating even the most basic support cases because she felt Beckham, Inc. was more important than any of the other 1,000-something clients my company handled. I got the impression that she was feisty even outside of work, as her last name changed at least three times since I met her. Her raucous attitude surely contributed to the streaks of gray in her carrot-colored hair, but this was also a consequence of the endless stress that she put on herself by taking her job way too fucking seriously – and the expletive is absolutely necessary here: she literally had a cardiac arrest while presenting her 2023 Company Objective slides on a Zoom call to me and twenty other people; we all watched in horror (and myself in some sort of deranged amusement) as her second (late) husband frantically rushed through the door in the backdrop of her webcam, lifted her up from her toppled chair, and then rolled that chair – with Wanda convulsing in it – out the door and straight into an ambulance (one would hope). Needless to say, that meeting was cut short. Wanda’s doctor ordered a leave from work for three months, but Wanda returned in two weeks, nearly always faint of breath and needing constant breaks, but she would “not be stopped” (her words). She told me weeks later that both her doctor and her husband were “overreacting and it wasn’t that big of a deal, but I did stop smoking cigarettes and now I only have three glasses of wine a day instead of four – doctor’s orders.” And in this writer’s opinion, if it takes a serious heart attack to quit smoking, drink less wine, and maybe chill out a little bit – then thank god for fatty artery buildups.
I would be getting even closer with Wanda, because after I touched down in Maine on June 10th, 2024, I found out that Doug – the Vice President of Sales – couldn’t make it to the golf event, which turned our foursome into a threesome. But Wanda, despite her propensity for cardiac catastrophe, was more than willing to take Doug’s place within the marble-columned halls of The Software Pantheon.
The rest of The Software Pantheon included Anders and Jordan. Anders was an alright guy. He was on the portly side, buzzed his head because his hairline was Sahara barren (and you could tell), around fifty or something, lacked a memorable personality, and didn’t know how to hold a conversation so ended up just repeating back everything you said to him in the form of a surprised question which he must have thought was some sort of conversational momentumizer#19 but actually came across as slightly condescending – “Do you really have two kids? What do you mean you don’t watch much TV?! How can you not like mushroom pizza?!” – and he had been divorced twice but was also a real family man, so if he were to hold a conversation, it would likely be about his kids. Jordan, on the other hand, was a bit more intriguing. Jordan was tall, like 6’5” tall, real heavy set guy, forties, decent sense of humor, and had this prankster attitude that you could tell was never corrected from childhood – granted, most of these “pranks” were just straight-up lies, literally stuff like “hey, that woman over there said she wanted to talk to you,” when no such thing occurred, all in an attempt to make a fool of the person he was pranking, which was often me; and he was quite good at this, as he was able to keep a straight face in nearly all prankster situations, making him the type of person that you can never fully trust. The most interesting thing to me about Jordan, however, was that he had an ear piercing but no earring; I could tell from the obvious hole in his ear.
Both Jordan and Anders were everyday guys with everyday interests. Their taste in music was dictated by 107.5 The Hits, their knowledge of cinema was only Disney movies that their kids wanted them to watch, and they spent all of their free time “watching the game” either on TV or in a stadium. They absolutely never played computer games and thought everyone who did was a never-grew-up person that attracted Cheeto dust like the strongest magnet attracts metal filings; and none of that stuff mattered to them much anyway, because they firmly believed that the most important thing in life is making enough money to support their families – everything else is a distraction. In short, Jordan and Anders were two of the most unpretentious people I had ever met.
There was one thing that both Jordan and Anders loved more than anything else (besides their own children, one would hope; and money, I guess), and that was drinking alcohol.
*Bacchus, oil on canvas by Caravaggio, 1596–97 + original hotel room photography; note: Bacchus is the Roman name for Dionysus.
On June 10th, 2024, when I arrived at that same Marriott hotel from two years prior – as the only and oh-so-unlikely survivor of the 2022 Beckham Golf Charity Event (considering both Jeff and Brag had “moved on” by this point) – and Jordan called me on my cell phone, asking me to meet him and Anders at the rooftop bar on the 11th floor, I just had to oblige. These were my colleagues after all, and I wouldn’t want to be seen as some pretentious weirdo, right? That could hurt my own bottom line (an irony that I am all too aware of). Knowing that I had been up for almost eighteen hours on one hour of sleep, I told myself that I would go to the rooftop bar real quick, say hi, then duck out of there and get some sleep.
In the Roman column adorned lobby of that hotel, I swear, I was not thinking about drinking – the experience in this same hotel two years prior was playing out over and over in my mind, and I truly did not want to repeat the sins of the past. I would go up to the rooftop bar, I would say hi, and then I would duck out – that’s what I told myself.
The clock read 8:30 PM. After getting checked into the hotel and settling my bags in my 9th floor room, I video called my wife to let her know that I made it and gave her my room number and made goofy faces to my infant son who was just about ready to go down for bed. I then headed up to the rooftop bar.
When I got to the bar, I went to the outside portion and looked down at the neon below. Memories from my previous 2022 dalliance started racing through my mind. I started to wonder if Steven Brag was right about everything; if he had really called my bluff; if all that working-at-McDonald’s stuff was just posturing a superficial morally superior viewpoint in some vain attempt to appear better than the salespeople I was surrounded by; I could feel Brag’s Louis Vuitton Men’s Designer Sneakers pushing into the side of my head, and the pressure was building up. I was grateful that Brag was no longer with the company because I’m pretty sure that guy hated me more than anyone has ever hated me in my entire life. Was I that contemptible? That transparent? That foolish? That hypocritical? Should I quit my job and pursue what I really love doing instead? But wouldn’t that hurt my family, who depend on me? If that’s the case, then is the accumulation of wealth the be-all and end-all goal in life? THE MOST IMPORTANT THING? After all, more money means I can buy a bigger house, put more food on the table, get a pool in the backyard, not have to worry about mortgage payments, save two shelter dogs and see the look of joy on my son’s face as I bring those pups home, and just provide an overall more comfortable life for my family in general; but if money is a proxy for well-being, why do I feel so sick chasing after it? Isn’t my family comfortable enough already? Why do we need an even bigger house, or a pool? Or is this a defeatist attitude? Why should I have to anguish over these questions at all? I didn’t choose to be born into this endless hamster wheel. Should I just jump off this balcony? I have a life insurance policy. Why am I really here? Am I a fraud? Am I Dionysus or am I The Fool? Or is it OK because compromised values are just part and parcel of the quote-unquote American Way of Life? If everyone else is compromised, maybe I shouldn’t even worry about it? But I am worrying about it. How do I stop worrying about it? And just as I was about to completely spiral out of control on my psychic bullshit, a tap on the shoulder snapped me back to reality.
It was Jordan. He was carrying a glass of deep purple; he said, “Hey man, I heard you like to party – you still drink, right?”
I wanted to make the questions go away, so I turned to him with a wide grin and said,
“Hell yeah, man. I still drink.”
Footnotes:
#1. Lead singer of the alternative rock band R.E.M., a guitar-pop group inspired by the accessible psychedelia of The Soft Boys and the jangling guitars of The Byrds. R.E.M. was at its peak during the mid to late ’80s and throughout the ’90s and has effectively retired as of 2011. (Per Peter Buck, lead guitarist for the band, “It was the money, the politics, having to meet new people 24 hours a day, not being in charge of my own decisions.” Thus solidifying this publication’s insistence that money corrupts with no exception.) I don’t think the band ever topped “So. Central Rain” and “Radio Free Europe,” two of their earliest singles, but they occasionally came close. The joke within the main text, at this point, should be obvious, but I feel the need to explain it for the sake of thoroughness: the band name stands for Rapid Eye Movement (sleep), which is “a sleep phase in mammals characterized by random rapid movement of the eyes which typically happens 90 minutes after you fall asleep” (per Wikipedia). On the night of June 9th (/morning of June 10th), I got less than one hour of sleep.
#2. In golf lingo (glingo?), “fairway” refers to the part of the golf course between the tee and the green. The green is the area around the actual hole – the hole that you’re supposed to hit the golf ball into: the one with the flag and whatnot. Golf courses have at least eighteen holes and follow the same general format: each hole has a tee-off location (where you put your ball on the miniature wooden stake and then whack it with a golf club); each has a long stretch of pristinely kept but incredibly artificial-looking grass (the fairway); and finally, another separate patch of fake-looking but slightly off-colored grass (to distinguish it from the fairway) around the hole (the green). Got all that?
#3. As of writing (and publishing) this piece, I still work for the same unnamed company. However, I wanted to future-proof this piece by writing most of it in the past tense. Jobs don’t last forever; I’m just a quarterly sales goal on some executive’s spreadsheet, after all – and if I don’t hit those goals, I’m gone. To be honest with you, dear reader, as of writing this, I have kinda “quiet quit” from the whole work thing (and this is expanded on in the next footnote). I would work at a McDonald’s if the pay was livable (and this is expanded on in the second chapter); homeostasis being what it is. I am thankful, however, that my current position is work-from-home, which affords me ample time to pursue my true interests (and write this massive piece). And, look, I’m not stealing from the company, I do put in effort to maintain my work, just not very much effort.
#4. The role of a Customer Success Manager (CSM) lacks a solidified job description, making it nebulous and weird across different industries. It’s somewhere between middle management and executive level; middle-middle management, if you will. CSMs are authorized to speak and act on behalf of the company when dealing with line managers, junior staff and customers. Generally, a CSM builds a trusted relationship with a customer (or “client”) after the sales process in an effort to drive retention and upsell (upsell being: selling more stuff to already existing customers). For a client, this process might look like buying software from a company, getting it implemented, and then, once everything is up and running, being handed off into a support contract that includes a dedicated CSM that tends to their every beck and call. This means that CSMs are often the closest to a company’s customers and know explicitly what those customers love about the product; and they especially know what those customers hate about the product too, as an almost mandatory CSM job requirement is the ability to Shut Up and Listen and Not Take Things Personally. In some software companies, CSMs are part of the support team: if something goes wrong with the product, the CSM is the customer’s main point of contact to escalate and resolve the issue as quickly as possible. In other companies, a CSM might function within the sales organization as a relationship builder, an arm of support, and a driver of revenue by selling add-ons and other products to the clients that they manage. This dual-sales-support approach is contradictory in nature because a CSM is often seen as the customer’s trusted friend within the company, “an extension of the client.” Sales, however, requires a level of duplicity that could potentially undermine this trusted relationship; for example, if a new product is added to the company’s software suite and this new product is still in a very-green-and-barely-functional state, the Executive Leadership Team might have a sales goal of $11 million riding on this new product, with your own yearly goal being $500,000, so you are wink-wink-nudge-nudged into selling this half-working-borderline-bait-and-switch product to clients, which means you’re not going to tell clients that it’s a half-working-borderline-bait-and-switch product to begin with, which means you are a fucking liar simply by virtue of trying to keep your job; but being a CSM, you’re expected to be the client’s trusted friend, yet you are simultaneously encouraged to lie to the client in an attempt to penny-pinch their every last cent. This causes a certain level of cognitive dissonance, anxiety, and madness in the CSM that results in one of three things: 1) The CSM embraces the corporate duplicity and revels in the sales process; in which case they were already a psychopath to begin with (psychopathy being one of the main prerequisites for being a successful salesperson); 2) The cognitive dissonance builds up to the point where the CSM is forced to accept that it’s “just business,” and, when they turn off their work computer for the day, the computer screen functions as a benign demon-summoning circle, effectively locking the corporate hellworld away until the CSM is begrudgingly forced to unlock the seal the next day to continue supporting their family while perpetuating the hellworld by allowing themselves to be one of its little demon spawn (this is where I’m at); or 3) They quit and move on to greener pastures, but only the truly privileged can do this option because it’s not as if people want to become CSMs or salespeople, they do so because (causality being what it is) their bad choices led them to these positions as the only realistic options at the moment. It’s safe to say that if someone has one of these corporate-hellworld job titles, they probably didn’t grow up telling mommy and daddy that they want to be a CSM when they grow up, and if they did then I hope I never have the displeasure of meeting that person.
#5. A “Contact Center as a Service” (or CCaaS) company is one of the many variations of the modern CaaS company (which stands for both “Content as a Service” and “Container as a Service,” and I’m sure there are other names too). The “Contact Center” bit refers to selling software specifically targeted at call centers; call centers are like the nebulous place you would reach if you called your internet provider’s customer service line; it follows that my company sells stuff like call recording, desktop monitoring, workforce management, things like that. All CaaS companies sell software that is located within what they call their “cloud”; and “cloud” is a fancy (and tricky) way of saying “physical off-site servers located in a warehouse somewhere that we may or may not rent from another company.” These CaaS companies are nearly always pay-as-you-go cloud-based services with a subscription model. Before 2010, many software solutions were “on-premises” (or “on-prem”); a company would buy software, deploy it locally with their own hardware, and maintain it locally with their own IT and support teams. Starting around 2010, the technology for putting things into “the cloud” started taking off, and seeing this as an opportunity to siphon more money out of customers, many companies that offered on-prem software solutions started moving their product to cloud-based CaaS models; this allowed the company to charge customers not only setup and integration fees but recurring subscription fees; think of it like Netflix or Spotify, but with enterprise-level software like Microsoft Office or whatever. Companies that made the switch from selling on-prem to selling cloud often pitched their new cloud service as a way to “get continuous software updates in real time” and “get 24/7 support without having to rely on a smelly IT team within your own organization” and “ditch your physical hardware and let us do all the processing for you.” But the reality is, cloud software solutions take control away from the customer and put it all in the hands of a soulless corporate entity that is governed by sketchy legal immunities and weird MSAs (Master Service Agreements) with hundreds of stipulations like, “if your data gets leaked or hacked, we are totally not liable.” It’s no mystery why every software company – including game publishers – is trying to move to cloud models: it provides them with more customer data, which allows them to more effectively advertise to you, sell you more stuff, and the subscription model is more profitable long term than selling a product that the customer can keep indefinitely. Cloud models keep you paying for the same thing over and over again while never truly owning or controlling your own data.
#6. Foursomes, also known as Alternate Shot, is a golf format where two partners play together as a team, using a single ball. In this format, the partners take turns hitting the ball on each hole, whether in match play or stroke play. HOWEVER, even though both the Beckham representatives and my own co-workers said we were “playing foursomes,” we weren’t actually playing foursomes in a strict sense; we were to play a casual version where we hit one ball after another and just kept going from the ball closest to the hole (this is explained in greater detail later in Chapter 6).
#7. “Ts and Cs” is the corporate-email-speak shortening of “Terms and Conditions,” which is a clause in a document (or an entire document itself) that outlines the contractual obligations of both the seller and buyer if the contract is signed. For example, common T&Cs verbiage on a renewal contract will state something like, “if the customer does not provide written notice of refusal to renew within 30 days of their contract end date, the contract will auto-renew with a 3% increase from the previous contract value.” Oftentimes, the important T&Cs that have far-reaching implications are buried in paragraphs of meaningless legal speak, which makes sense because companies hire lawyers to write very specific T&Cs that are often reused over and over depending on the situation. “Ts and Cs” and its variants is also fun to say, just sorta rolls off the tongue. Its pleasurable pronunciation belies its often-terrible implications.
#8. This is not necessarily true. I have played golf before, but it was when I was nine or ten. I used to visit my grandpa’s house as a kid, and he would take me to the country club, and we’d hit balls. I hated it. According to my mom, I would refuse to get in the car whenever we were going to my grandpa’s house because I just hated golf so much. This hatred of golf is now a running joke in my family; whenever I talk to my grandpa, he says something like, “Hey, you should visit soon – I won’t force you to play golf this time, I promise!” When I told grandpa that I played golf with a client (see: this story), he sent me a huge box of golf paraphernalia (which included a putter “used by the pros” [his words]) that is now languishing in my garage. I can’t imagine the shipping he paid on that.
#9. Read-Only Memory; a ROM image, or ROM file, is a file that holds a copy of the data from a read-only memory chip (like one you would find in a Super Nintendo or Sega Mega Drive cartridge.) Emulation is then used to let you run these ROMs on modern devices, effectively mimicking the old hardware through software wizardry. I played Mario Golf on a Miyoo Mini+, a compact device designed to resemble a Game Boy Color.
#10. Boring encyclopedic stuff easily found online, but for the sake of thoroughness, here you go: “The modern game of golf originated in 15th century Scotland. The 18-hole round was created at the Old Course at St Andrews in 1764. Golf’s first major, and the world’s oldest golf tournament, is The Open Championship, also known as the British Open, which was first played in 1860 at the Prestwick Golf Club in Ayrshire, Scotland.” Per Wikipedia (lol).
#11. More glingo. A “hole-in-one” is when a golfer sinks the ball into the hole on their tee shot (the first shot); this is incredibly rare, and many professional golfers go their whole careers having never achieved this feat; I did it once in Mario Golf. More swing-related glingo: “pin high,” a shot that lands on the green from the tee; “up and down,” when a golfer gets their ball onto the green then into the hole in just two strokes. A “stroke” is the forward movement of the club made to strike the ball, or fancy glingo for “swing”; a “stiffed shot” is one that lands very close to the hole off the tee shot; “pure shot” is one that is perfectly struck with clean, solid contact (this may also be called a “flush,” which also refers to the solid contact made between a golf club’s face and the ball); and a “check up” is when a ball lands on the green but stops quickly with minimal roll, usually due to “backspin” (which is, coincidentally, another shot type in golf that makes the ball spin backward; I am entirely unsure how to achieve this and don’t really care enough to find out – if I do one day care enough, you have permission to kill me).
#12. You already know this jingle; and if you don’t, what are you even doing here?
#13. The term “birdie” refers to when a player takes one swing less to get the ball into the hole than the par of a hole itself. “Par” is the set number of strokes that a golfer, typically with a zero handicap, is expected to need to complete a hole. A “handicap” is kind of what it sounds like but is far too complicated for me to fully explain here (and I don’t want to explain it), so I’m going to point you to this article, which covers every little detail about handicaps.
#14. One of those white narrow-body, medium-range things. Airplanes look kinda like elongated diet-soda cans with poorly glued-on attachments to me – real unnatural abominations that just shouldn’t be up there in bird airspace. Some real avian heresy. It doesn’t help that American Airlines airbuses feel like they haven’t been renovated since the early ’70s; while most airlines now have little monitors on the back of the seats or maybe a USB plug or two to keep your stuff charged up, the American Airlines A319 airbus has one foot of legroom and a back-seat pouch that literally nothing can fit in except the thinnest magazine – that’s it. When the flight attendant tells you to “place your electronics in the off position and stow them away safely,” what they really mean is, “just throw that shit on the floor.” Don’t get me wrong, airplanes are technical marvels that help keep us connected to friends and loved ones, but maybe – just maybe – we wouldn’t need to take airplanes to see our friends and families if airplanes didn’t exist to take those same friends and family away from us to begin with.
#15. The hotel, including all travel and food expenses, was (is) covered by the company. If it were up to me, I’d stay in a motel – I don’t care. In fact, I find cheap motels have more character than the typical company-preferred Marriotts and Hyatts. Regardless, you best believe I splurge on junk food – pizza, sweet candy, pretzels – during these trips, and I expense every last cent of it.
#16. When someone has “moved on from the company,” this means (9 times out of 10) that they were fired. “Moved on” is clever corporate speak to cover up layoffs and keep morale up without outright lying because technically getting fired is “moving on from the company.” Example: “John has moved on from the company; yes, I know he was your boss and you talked to him every day; I know it’s weird he didn’t even say goodbye and that he just kind of vanished, but that’s because he has moved on to different opportunities. We are all sad to see him go. He was a great asset to the company.” (Note: I’ve heard people say that companies can only do this if they laid off less than 10% of the workforce; there are supposedly legal requirements for companies to announce layoffs of 10% or more, although I have never seen this claim substantiated and it probably varies from state to state.)
#17. According to the Mayo Clinic, alcoholism is: “a chronic disease characterized by uncontrolled drinking and preoccupation with alcohol.” Doctors can diagnose alcoholism (or “Alcohol Use Disorder” if we want to get technical) using diagnostic manuals like the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). But my question is, can you be diagnosed with alcoholism if you have never taken a sip of alcohol in your life? Do you just have alcoholism from genetics or whatever? Or is alcoholism more like a predisposition to a lack of impulse control, which lends itself to addiction and substance abuse of all types? Perhaps “alcoholism” is this lack of impulse control manifested through alcohol, hence the practicality of calling this particular diagnosis “alcoholism”? Ignore me. I’m not a doctor.
#18. And still is, as of the writing of this footnote. Remember, the past-tense thing?
#19. I wish I could take credit for this word, but alas … I stole it from David Foster Wallace: “The doctor’s small nods were designed to appear not as responses but as invitations to continue, what Dretske called Momentumizers.” (Infinite Jest)*
(Originally published on 7/19/2024)
*it’s true.
*death and his brother blackout.
*leaving the White Zone. (the kid from Mario Golf looks way more presentable than I ever did).
*pictured: yours truly (floral aloha and all), glingos.
*while neglecting all worldly responsibilities, you may be charged telephone and provider fees
*character creation in utero
*psychic ragnarok in the dream within a dream
*David finds great comfort in the magical techno elf pinned to his cubicle wall
*David dreams once more
*the Holy Grail; the Psycho Wand
*you could not be connected to the server
*in the Roman Quarter, you will Pay-to-Piss and you will like it
*numbers go down when you kill your customers and don’t clean your park
*a window into Mason’s world
*the Cycle of Poor persists
*observe The Passionate Artist, who cannot resist the urge to paint, even when standing in The World’s Greatest Theme Park