by Awl Staff

Thomas Morton heads to Syria to take a look at the front line of the battle for a Kurdish state; Vikram Gandhi traces the illicit trade of rhino horn from southern Africa to Vietnam.

by The Concessionist

Hi,

I like my job a lot: the people are great, the work is usually fun, and I have a lot of freedom to do things I want to do in a lot of different areas. For the more than three years that I’ve been working at this company, I’ve operated under the assumption that everyone, like me, was making a low-but-not-scandalously-low salary. But a few months ago, I found out through conversations with other under-30s in my office that several of my peers — people with similar titles, similar responsibilities, similar work experience; people who were hired more recently than me — actually make quite a bit more money than I do. (What’s the fun in anonymous letters about money without numbers? My salary was in the low/mid 40Ks; other people’s ranged from the low/mid 40Ks to the low/mid 70Ks, with the median in the low/mid 50Ks.)

This discovery upset me. I’ve always gotten solid reviews from my boss, I am a “top performer” (so to speak), and in the past year and a half I’ve taken on an annoying additional responsibility that makes the company more money, just because I am a loyal and obedient staffer. So I asked for a big raise, citing all the stuff you’re supposed to cite when you ask for a raise: my stellar track record, both in terms of the quality of my work and my statistical performance, my additional responsibility, blah blah blah. I did not mention what I’d found out about salary ranges at my company, but I figured that my boss would silently acknowledge that I was being underpaid and seek to rectify the situation.

I didn’t get the raise. More accurately, I got a very small raise, and I was told that money was tight this year but that I was getting a higher percentage increase than most people. (Which, you know, great, but it’s going to take a lot of 6-percent raises to bring me up to my colleagues’ level.)

So I know what I need to do next: Apply for other jobs, get an offer, and bring it to my boss to see if he’ll match it (and if he doesn’t match it, leave). My question is: How do I manage my resentment in the meantime? I have been feeling incredibly angry that I am doing the same work as other people but making significantly less. Instead of taking pride in my accomplishments of 2015, I just feel pissed off that I am doing this great work and creating lots of value for my company but not being compensated fairly for it. How do I prevent this anger from corroding my soul and ruining my relationships with my colleagues and my boss (all of whom I really like on an interpersonal level)?

Yours,

Feeling Undervalued

Dear Undervalued,

I had a hard time choosing a question for the first installment of this column. There were a few that were rather macro, and those made more sense for us to start with, so as to put down some Fundamental Principles and such. But there’s an urgency here that I can’t ignore. That is: Monday is coming, and you have to go back to that heinous thunderdome of inequity and churlishness.

You have the right by-the-books stuff here. It’s instructive that you brought it up! So let’s just first reiterate that you are doing totally what is to be done when one discovers, to one’s totally righteous and accurate horror, that each of us is likely actually not a valuable member of the team, that you and I alike are actually sorta tarnished or maybe just thought of as a cog or someone who is replaceable or “just so-so,” and we are being paid with that in mind.

What you then do:

1. The meeting where you say “you should pay me another $25,000 a year, and here are four exhibits explaining why.” (Yes, start high.)

2. The job offer, which you go out and obtain, and then return with and say “Hello! I have an offer for a great job at Exxon/Fusion/HBO/GlaxoSmithKline [or whatever additional company is actually hiring in this crazy world] but I’d like to talk with you before I accept it.” [N.B. As in all negotiations, you must be absolutely willing to quit your job and take this new job before having this conversation.]

There is but one other component, which you have probably considered privately. Let’s back up a little to the “sharing salary information in the workplace” part. I’ve heard both sides, and yes, there are times when you may not want to share said information, but in general, my experience has been that more workers overall benefit when employees compare salaries and benefits. You will learn things. This is essential in basic workplace organizing. SO DOX AWAY. And then you have the information to ask:

3. Did you stop and evaluate gender and other types of differences between people when looking at your income disparity? It’s worth it, and it’s worth getting a second opinion after gathering the facts, in case you’re doubting yourself. You may or may not be surprised that women with the same titles as men crop up with a really different paycheck!

SO. You already knew all this, my Undervalued friend. Feel good that you’re being a pro, and taking yourself seriously in the absurd capitalist house of job-cards that we somehow don’t light on fire.

Now you are in the burning-face rage part. The walk of hallway anger. The break-room sulk-out, the bathroom Hulk-out. This part is TERRIBLE! Me and a bunch of my friends once all worked at a place that cyclically changed starting salaries, so, literally some people were making $85K a year and some people were making… like… $34K??? It was crazy. Mostly this was based on date of hire. And we knew it was because management whims and needs had changed over time, seemingly quite randomly. It helped a bit to know that all the people in charge were not good at their jobs, and were making bad decisions, and were incapable of making wise decisions. It didn’t help all that much at rent time though, hello.

And it didn’t get easier or better-feeling when one of us tried to rectify it. The 2% raise wasn’t, go figure, all that satisfying!

Honestly, I’m still kind of broke from this job. Getting underpaid has a trickle-down effect through space-time: you’re starving your future self. Money you don’t save in your 20s means the street you’re sleeping on in your 60s. Money doesn’t care — but you will.

So, in relation to your current BURNING FEELINGS, there are two ways you can go from here.

1. TAKE IT PERSONALLY.

Yes. Your boss did this to you! The place you work at did this to you! They don’t give a fuuuuuck about you. They care about paying someone else more, and they’d rather order shitty sandwiches for everyone on Tuesday than give you an extra $400 a month. WHAT ASSHOLES. It’s fine, the rage will pass, and you’ll realize they made their choices like the rest of us. But, honestly, fuck them, and the sooner you get out the better. Unless you want to stay and destroy them from the inside! Either way! That’s cool.

2. DON’T TAKE IT PERSONALLY.

Gratitude makes getting up every morning possible. You are so lucky to have a job that you love, it’s unreal. Jobs SUCK. That is so rare. You should be getting down on your damned knees and kissing the threshold of your office at least every Monday, Thursday and Friday. You will have other jobs. You have so many limbs, and so much willingness, and it is all going incredibly well for you. This situation? Well, it’s bullshit. But you’re gonna get it fixed and you can do it with grace, respect and admirable grown-up silence. And you can choose to laugh and pick berries all along the high road.

So make a choice. How you choose will depend upon your natural constitution, and how much righteous rage you can keep kindled in the course of a day. You may of course change your mind after committing to a course of action! But….

3. WHEN ALL ELSE FAILS.

When you become befuddled and confused and pissed off, you may only have one thing left. That will be that pure Superman’s-palace of crystal deep within you, that furious desire to be the best, the most arid, the purest, the most righteous in vengeance. Whether we remember all the time or not, inside each of us is the kind of passion that leads to the creation of the best article ever published by the New York Times or the kneecap-hardness of a track like Tei Shi’s “Bassically.” Would you make anything like that for anyone else? No, you would not. You would do it either for yourself or for the selfless act of doing it. You would do it because the world needs it done, and no one else can. Are you doing your best work imaginable right now? Are you destroying everything in your path? When the chips are down, sometimes you must perk yourself up by temporarily putting on the narcissist’s outlook on life. Look, here is some handy rage and sadness to channel into making something incredible. Get on it! Sometimes the only way to survive the day-to-day bullshit is to do it for distant posterity.

Image by Heather Buckley.

Questions about life in this bleak universe? The Concessionist answers one each weekend. He has seen some things. It’s Concessionist at theawl.com.

★★★ The sky was clear, the cold correspondingly more piercing. The vapor blew straight sideways from the pipe on the new building, pointing uptown. All the brightness out the window made it tempting to duck out for the first school pickup with a short-sleeved shirt on under the down coat. That was an error. Over by the river, after the sharpness and brilliance inland, the water was a delicate blue, the whole scene blurred by a late-day golden mist.

The Awl’s Weekend Companion, a digest of the best stories of the week, has been updated. The people at 29th Street Publishing have done a really nice job with it: It looks and feels great, lets you change font sizes, and is fully compatible with all the newest iPhones and iPads.

The basic idea remains unchanged: The Weekend Companion is a way to read the best Awl stories of the week in a pleasing, ad-free format, safely isolated from the churning hell of the Content Web. (It is also a channel through which you give us small amounts of money: Issues are available through subscriptions or a la carte, thank you, and please.)

If you’d like to try it out, we’ve added a free sample issue compiled from our year-end package, Never Better, which features more than twenty essays from some of our favorite writers. You can find the app here.

No, no, no. This will not stand:

1/8 This tweet is a goddamn outrage and it’s wrong https://t.co/eAAjgkTiCr

— Matt Langer (@mattlanger) January 16, 2015

2/8 The White House doesn’t know it’s own history! Because Aaron Sorkin is not a history teacher and The West Wing is not a civics textbook!

— Matt Langer (@mattlanger) January 16, 2015

3/8 The tradition of a giant block of cheese does not date back to Andrew Jackson, it dates back to Thomas Jefferson.

— Matt Langer (@mattlanger) January 16, 2015

4/8 I would encourage every enthusiast of White House cheese to consult the “Correspondence of Sylvanus Urban” https://t.co/m8uopJ7vwU

— Matt Langer (@mattlanger) January 16, 2015

5/8 Elder John Leland, a Calvinist pastor from Cheshire, MA, prepared a massive block of cow cheese for delivery to the White House in 1802.

— Matt Langer (@mattlanger) January 16, 2015

6/8 Everyone in town brought a bucket of milk to the mill, save for the Federalists, whose cows would’ve conveyed a “distasteful savour.”

— Matt Langer (@mattlanger) January 16, 2015

7/8 The result was a 1600lb wheel of cheese, which Leland had to wait for winter snowfalls in order to carry 500 miles overland by sleigh.

— Matt Langer (@mattlanger) January 16, 2015

8/8 Jackson supporters only later adopted this tradition because “every honor which Jefferson had ever received should be paid to [Jackson]”

— Matt Langer (@mattlanger) January 16, 2015

Shameful.

A man saw a Ouija board for sale at a department store and bought it because he and his wife had been thinking about their son, who had been killed in a car accident almost a year before. They were very sad, of course, and they missed their son. And they liked a song the singer Lou Reed sang about using a Ouija board to contact the spirit of the late poet Delmore Schwartz, who had been Reed’s college professor and mentor. Reed sang about how he and his wife got the out their Ouija board and were happy and amazed when the pointer zoomed around and spelled the word “Delmore.” The song is called “My House.” Reed was comforted by the thought that the ghost of his old friend lived in his house. It made everything perfect, he said.

A year to the day after the death of his son, the man took out the Ouija board and put it on the kitchen table. He and his wife lit candles and cried and turned the lights off and sat down at either side of the Ouija board.

They rested their fingers on the edge of the plastic triangular dial that came with the board — gently, holding their palms aloft like it said to in the instructions — and looked into each other’s eyes without blinking. Together, carefully enunciating in one voice, they recited the questions they’d agreed upon. They called their son by name and asked him if he could he hear them. They asked where he was, whether or not he was happy where he was, whether or not he was any longer in pain.

Nothing happened. The dial didn’t zoom around. It didn’t move much at all except for a few times when one or the other of them flinched from the tiredness of holding their hands aloft — the instructions recommended waiting five minutes per question.

After half-an-hour or so, they stopped. Their wrists hurt. The man put the board away. The woman put a big glass pan of lasagna in the oven. Lasagna was the boy’s favorite.

Later that night, as they were lying in bed, not sleeping, they laughed to themselves at the idea of trying to contact their son.

But the man found himself feeling a strange, wordless sort of anger. He was angry at himself. For letting even a little bit of hope rest in such a silly idea. And he was was angry at Lou Reed, he realized.

But not just that.

(Previously.)

by Casey N. Cep

Country music has its share of happy-go-lucky, love-struck tunes, but heartbreak has always ruled country radio. Sweet and sad like a sugar packet, some of them are about how a barstool can be your best friend; the better ones are revenge-fueled fantasies that burn your lips like Caroline reapers. They come and go like heartache itself, but there’s almost always a song about lost love somewhere near the top of the country charts.

The great country muse of the broken hearted is and always will be Patsy Cline. Crazy or not, she fell to pieces with the best of them. She’s on every one of my busted and broken playlists (“Gone Girl,” “Nor Hell a Fury,” “Camelot in Flames,” even “Fare Thee Well”) and I’ve sent her songs around like casseroles whenever heartbreak finds my friends. There’s just nothing better for a broken heart than Patsy Cline. Maybe it’s because I bought a class ring or maybe it’s because photographs are some of my only souvenirs, but my favorite of all her songs is “She’s Got You.”

It’s an easy enough story: the singer loves someone who no longer loves her. But the song has the economy of a sonnet: a signed picture, records, and a class ring are the only objects; me, you, and her are the only characters. The back and forth of the song isn’t between Cline and the one who left her, but Cline and the objects that person left behind.

“I’ve got your picture that you gave to me,” Cline begins, “and it’s signed with love, just like it used to be,” which would be fine, of course, if it weren’t for the fact that “I’ve got your picture, she’s got you.” The same sad fact is true for the records and the class ring: They’re still here, same as always, but the one who wore them and the one who gave them is gone, gone, gone.

A gospel group called the Jordanaires sings the backup ohs and ahs, bops, and why oh whys as “the Cline,” as Patsy liked to call herself, sings her anguished inventory. “I’ve got your memory,” she says, but then wonders, “or has it got me? I really don’t know, but I know it won’t let me be.” That little refrain grows and grows until it’s a desperate plea to “let me beeeeeeeee.”

It’s not surprising that the song first appeared on an album titled Sentimentally Yours, or that singer-songwriter Hank Cochran wrote it just for Patsy Cline. She sings every single syllable of it so perfectly that you can just see the embossed, wallet-size yearbook picture and the bright, gaudy Jostens class ring. It’s the Romeo and Juliet of country music: young love that ages and matures into something much more than itself. In only three minutes with only three “little things,” Cline convinces you that she’s had and then lost the greatest love of all time.

Roseanne Cash did a beautiful, smoky cover of the song a few years ago when she made a record called “The List.” Patsy Cline’s “She’s Got You” was one of the one hundred essential country songs that Johnny Cash listed for his daughter when she turned eighteen, and it made the cut of the twelve that Roseanne Cash covered for her record honoring her father’s list. Hard not to agree with them both that it’s one of the greatest songs in country music.

Country Time is an occasional column about country music.

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4. WebMD
5. TVTropes
6. Wikipedia
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8. Encyclopedia Dramatica
9. Rotten Library
10. Discogs
11. The Game of Thrones fan wiki
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13. Wookieepedia
14. Yahoo! Answers

This post has been updated numerous times.

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