What You Reap
by Nikki Little
I hate my job. I hate my fucking job. Now you might wonder what I do that makes me say that. Perhaps your first thought is that I'm a burned-out teacher. I was a teacher. Once. I quit that for good reason only to land in something equally bad. Sometimes I wonder why I don't just shoot myself and get this fucking life over with. Seriously. I hate to wake up in the morning. What is my problem? It's that I have come to wonder if there is any way to make a living that does not involve flushing your soul down the toilet. Is there any way to make a living that does not involve either being a human doormat for everyone to piss on, or being a vampire that sucks the blood out of everything it sees? Must I choose between being a victim or a victimizer in order to earn a living? It seems that indeed I must make that choice because no third option exists. There is no honest way to make a living.
I buy clothes for a living. I'm a purchasing agent. My job is to scour the globe and find the cheapest "sourcing" for the production of Cheap-Mart's store brand of clothes. All of Cheap-Mart's store brand of clothes are aimed at the poorest sector of the American clothes market which nowadays is just about everyone who isn't rich. The primary facet of my job is to get a bunch of third-world factory owners into a single conference hall and pit them in a bidding war against each other. Low bidder gets the contract and wins the great privilege of making clothes for Cheap-Mart. God help the winner. I close my eyes every single day I do this fucking job. I've been looking for an alternative for two years, but can't find anything that doesn't involve saying "Hello, my name is Renee and I'll be your waitress this evening." Yeah, that's a living alright. I'd be lucky to pay the rent, utilities, and gas with a waitress' earnings. I'm stuck. I'm screwed. I'm totally fucked. I hate my life.
My last assignment was to find a "source" for a new line of no-frills dresses for women whose only real option is the faded near rags that you find nowadays in the charity shops. When you consider that there is virtually no middle class in the U.S. these days, the charities just don't get what they used to. The middle class these days ARE the working poor. Anyway, I did my job. I went to Central America and did my usual fuck-over job of pitting a bunch of small, local factory owners who are far from rich themselves against each other in the usual bidding war. The low bidder was obviously desperate. Usually the low bidder is a representative of some state-owned factory in China. They're almost always the low bidder as nobody, not even the sweatshop owners in places as poor as Nicaragua, The Dominican Republic, and Jamaica can compete with the institutionalized slave labor of China. This time, however, the low bidder was a factory owner in Jamaica. He was clearly desperate, and I followed my policy manual of not asking questions about how he planned to do it. Cheap-Mart made a great show of sending out inspectors to investigate working conditions in the factories to ensure humane working conditions as a sop to the fake liberals in the Democratic Party who just wanted some window dressing to cover up their complicity in the great global race to the bottom on working conditions. Of course the factory owners always got advance notice of an inspection. A soulless, immoral bastard. That's me. Why hasn't God struck me dead?
What is the great crime that I committed? Why do I have a death wish? If you knew what I had done, you would shoot me yourself. I did not know what I had done until after I had done it. I unleashed the whirlwind upon the United States. The factory owner in Jamaica was desperate because a new form of tuberculosis that was resistant to all known antibiotics had appeared on the island. His factory was considered a purveyor of death in Jamaica as all of his doomed employees were sick with the new strain. There was no cure. Clothes made by his employees were sanitized according to Cheap-Mart company regulations before being packaged and thus I did not worry about the prospect of spreading disease with clothes manufactured in third-world hellholes. This new strain of tuberculosis, however, was more virulent than anything ever seen before. Catching it was a slow-motion death sentence. Once you started to show symptoms, you had about three months to live. Cheap-Mart's sanitization procedure did not eliminate the new tuberculosis strain from clothes that had been coughed on. All of the dresses from the factory were infected and all became hanging death traps in Cheap-Mart stores. I didn't know. None of us knew.
The new strain of tuberculosis spread quickly in the United States, and the government's first inclination was the usual: blame illegal immigrants. The U.S. government set up concentration camps for illegal immigrants and began scouring the entire country rounding them up for high-security incarceration. Of course the illegal immigrants often wore Cheap-Mart clothes, and some of the women were wearing the infected dresses from Jamaica. The concentration camps became the equivalent of Hitler's gas chambers. Once you were incarcerated in one of the overcrowded camps, it was only a matter of time before you became infected from the original source of a Jamaican Cheap-Mart dress. The illegals in the camps died by the millions. The infection spread into the general population of the U.S. and, since we don't have any national health program, people who became sick often sought no treatment. Instead, they usually attempted to hide their illness as a single cough in public was sometimes enough to land someone in a quarantine camp, so great was the paranoia. The rest of the world embargoed the United States and refused entry to our citizens. No one seemed to have the faintest idea where the infection had originally come from. I learned the truth because I was in Jamaica at the time trying to arrange for the production of more of the deadly dresses for Cheap-Mart. Have I been rambling incoherently? I hope you'll forgive me. I'm feeling a bit stressed.
When I went to the factory with my purchase order, I found the factory closed and Cuban government health inspectors were scouring the place. The Cubans had pieced together the mystery and had traced the original source of the new strain of tuberculosis to one employee at the factory. Ground zero. Every single employee in the factory and the owner himself had become infected. The Cubans all wore biohazard suits and the factory itself had been fenced in. Government cars, trucks, and make-shift lab equipment were everywhere. The clothes from the factory had become the vector for the spread of the disease. Cheap-Mart's unending commitment to finding the cheapest "source" for the production of all their products had become the undoing of what was once the world's wealthiest nation. And one naive schmuck doing her job--me-- had unleashed the horror.
I went straight to an internet cafe in Kingston and posted my story on as many news blogs as I could. I also posted a video telling my story while showing my face on YouTube. A friend of the factory owner has told me that local thugs hired by agents of Cheap-Mart are looking for me with a contract on my head. I intend to do nothing to escape them. Here I sit on a park bench in Kingston scribbling away and awaiting my fate. I have nothing to lose. Cough.
The End
This story is completely original and is entirely mine. --Nikki Little