Pork Chop Hill

Unofficially, part of my job description is Morale Officer. I say unofficially because I work for a company run by adults and staffed by adults, so nobody is going to pay for anything as insultingly stupid as an actual "morale officer" for any kind of work environment that doesn't involve the regular potential for being shot at. If your biggest problem is Brenda is microwaving leftover tilapia in lemon-caper sauce in the break room again, you handle it like grown-ups by propping open a door for a while and then forgetting to include Brenda in group emails when there's birthday cake. See if Brenda doesn't fucking learn.

The complicating factor is that more and more companies are required to go out of their way now to remind you that, even if you're decidedly not in the military, much like myself, you still run the risk of potentially being shot at. If you're a working person, I'm fairly certain you've experienced the phenomenon of Active Shooter Training, especially here in the United States where, even after the nauseating, irreconcilably evil human tragedy of Sandy Hook, we're (at least officially) convinced that bullet-vomiting death machines have a place in our society.

When I interviewed for (more or less) the job I have now, which is holyfuckingshit almost ten years ago now, I was informed that the facility in which I worked could be classified as a "terrorist soft target." Naturally my mind could only really conjure images of bouncy castles, ostensibly fortresses in design and name, sure, but with an architecture forgiving enough for the occasional adult to work on his backflip. Turns out no, what they meant was our tangential involvement in a vaguely governmental enterprise meant we might be a target of opportunity less troublesome than, say, a Marine Corps base, where shooting back is not only guaranteed, but likely to start ahead of your actual planned attack.

Over the last three months, our building has been undergoing an overdue, overpriced and ultimately unnecessary cosmetic revamp, complete with a new floor layout and all new, modern cubicle designs, with lots of stainless steel and smoked glass where we used to have drab, padded, upholstered gray walls. And it will all be arranged in a very modern* semi-open-office design. This means the walls are lower, to the point of barely being walls at all. If a wall fails to divide you from the people around you, is it still technically a wall? And if its only practical function is to hold up other segregationally inadequate barriers, you don't have a wall, you have a tautology, devoid of meaning or purpose, an architectural ouroboros locked in its own happy, self-satisfied loop with no regard for anything else around it.

So now we work in a space where all of us can see all of everything all of us are doing at any and all times. Which is creepy and upsetting. But at least it's also loud, distracting and freezing.

Suffice it to say, morale has taken a slight hit. As the supervisor, it's my job to make sure nobody freaks out and starts planning to do the thing we keep being warned about as the stress of constant surveillance wears us down. On top of that, we all feel quite a bit more exposed, especially the more detailed and urgent the annual active shooter training gets.

I brought this up to my superiors who assured me that the low walls with no cover is actually a benefit in the worst-case scenario because it meant on-site security would have a better shot (no bloody pun intended, with "shot" or "bloody") of taking down a potential shooter quickly.

I of course pointed out that taking down the shooter is typically the second thing that happens in a situation like this. After the, you know, shooting. And this is where it dawned on me that contingency plans factor in a certain number of expected casualties in order to keep the overall numbers as low as possible. It's basically the anti-North Korea military strategy: sure, we expect horrific losses at first, but eventually we'll bring enough firepower to bear to neutralize the threat. So far there's only one area of our building with the competed low-wall "upgrades." The plan of action kind of lays itself out, doesn't it?

So, you know... morale officer. I try, but birthday cake only fixes so much. I'm not a goddamned magician.

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*if this were 2001 and we were Google