He’s whistling while you work
“PUNCHING In: The Unauthorized Adventures of a Front-Line Employee” is a title that promises risk, an expose of corporate shenanigans. In his introduction, Alex Frankel describes himself as someone “hardwired with wanderlust,” who sees journalism as an opportunity to “send dispatches back from expeditions as life-altering and character-testing as Ernest Shackleton’s. . . .” With the bar set high, he strikes out on his own and bravely . . . gets a day job!
Well, actually, he gets five day jobs in the course of two years -- at UPS, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, the Gap, Starbucks and the Apple Store. Hiding his notebook in his uniform, he seeks to find out “whether the strong corporate cultures that companies bragged about were really as great as advertised, whether the foot soldiers serving vast brands were somehow made more of plastic than flesh, and how front-line employees are molded into certain ways of thinking, acting, and working. . . . The only way to understand the pervasive world of commerce was to explore it as if it were an untouched stretch of wilderness. By going native, I could see how a handful of companies turned out good people as efficiently as widgets. . . . “ What he sees is what most of us already know: Working for the Man can be boring, exhausting and, yes, a tad soul-sapping.
He begins at UPS in the pre-Christmas season, delivering packages in the Bay Area. Putting on the brown is enough to make him feel part of a team: “Wearing the uniform sped up my own process of inculcation into the UPS culture and served as an indicator of a special bond with the group.” So does delivering upward of 150 packages a day and the camaraderie of the drivers. He sees himself as “part of the thumping, beating heart of capitalism.” His experience at Enterprise is less fulfilling. After a rigorous training program in which he’s drilled on lingo and learns how to push insurance, he’s sent to a branch office familiar to any American traveler as “a timeless, placeless industrial space.” The days crawl by as, chained to RALPH, the company’s outdated computer system, he tries to “get trips” -- full-ticket, insured rental contracts. At this point, you realize that the only thing more boring than being an Enterprise rental agent is, perhaps, reading about one.
It doesn’t take the free-spirited Frankel long to acknowledge that he has “a hard time sacrificing myself for a cause I don’t believe in.” So it’s nice that he gets to quit before the dullness becomes unbearable. It’s less good for the book, though, because there’s little at stake (“I had the luxury of knowing that I could leave at any time”). After “Nickel and Dimed,” Barbara Ehrenreich’s harrowing account of subsistence wage-earning, this kind of shallow dip into the job pool is almost shocking. It’s also somewhat insulting to the millions of hourly-wage earners who aren’t lucky enough to parlay university degrees into exciting free-lance careers and for whom the drudgery of clock-punching is all too real.
Frankel catches some amusing details, but his essentially humorless approach slows things down, as in this description of organizing the denim wall at the Gap: “When you had all the pants folded and stacked in ascending order, you scrunched each six or seven pairs of stacked pants so that the stack assumed a semi-messy look . . . that would invite customers to approach and interact with the merchandise. . . . [A] scrunch was an invitation to touch.” It’s interesting stuff, but Frankel shares so little of his own life that we don’t get the absurd, fish-out-of-water perspective this material sorely needs. He’s diligent in relating the facts but short on nuance. On a visit to Worldport, UPS’ gargantuan mother ship in Louisville, Ky., he tells us of watching the planes come and go but not what he actually sees. You long for the specificity and scope of John McPhee’s New Yorker piece on UPS.
Secrets of corporate control are always interesting, and Frankel offers some juicy tidbits. We learn that the Gap’s “treating the employees as live mannequins is called wardrobing by the industry” and that when an Apple Store clerk says, “I don’t know; let’s find out,” it’s not just friendliness but a sales ploy. But if you really want to know how workers and customers are manipulated, read Paco Underhill’s “Why We Buy.” Frankel barely scratches the surface. He concludes that “many of the best companies have not only realized that humans matter but have also moved ahead of competitors by finding, hiring, and training great people to work for them” -- no surprise in a service economy. But it’s comforting to know, next time you’re ordering your double decaf macchiato, that the guy in the green apron has been carefully trained to treat you right.
Erika Schickel is the author of “You’re Not the Boss of Me: Adventures of a Modern Mom.”
