Working After the Collapse

By Barry Pomeroy

Working After the Collapse is a series of interlaced stories set in the different provinces and territories of Canada in a vaguely futuristic time when the worst implications of Peak Oil have come to pass. Different characters for each story tell of the collapse of society from their own perspective. Mothers worry about their children’s future, entrepreneurs about their business schemes, kids about being left alone and defenceless in a brutal world, and workers try to balance their need for employment against the criminal acts they are called upon to perform.
The disparate portraits of this crumbling society show the growing debility of government when dealing with the oil industry as well as the increasing power of multinationals. Land ownership undergoes a radical change and Monsanto seizes vast tracts of land. Modified legislation allows businesses like Waymart, anxious as ever to capitalize on human misery, to exploit the cheap labour that is a result of mass unemployment.
These stories detail the disintegration of infrastructure, including hydro-electric power and telephone, train, truck, car and bus transport, and the growing desperation of the people. The representation of this era is not entirely a portrait of misery, however. The various narrators offer an inspiring view of our unwillingness to surrender our dignity even in inhumane circumstances.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barry Pomeroy
• Release date: Dec 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310700538

Barry Pomeroy

Barry Pomeroy is a Canadian novelist, short story writer, academic, essayist, travel writer, and editor. He is primarily interested in science fiction, speculative science fiction, dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, although he has also written travelogues, poetry, book-length academic treatments, and more literary novels. His other interests range from astrophysics to materials science, from child-rearing to construction, from cognitive therapy to paleoanthropology.

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Working After the Collapse

by

Barry Pomeroy

© 2006 by Barry Pomeroy

All rights reserved. Copyright under Berne Copyright Convention, Universal Copyright Convention, and Pan-American Copyright Convention. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the author, although people generally do what they please.

For more information on my books, go to barrypomeroy.com

Working After the Collapse is a series of interlaced stories set in the different provinces and territories of Canada in a vaguely futuristic time when the worst implications of Peak Oil have come to pass. Different characters for each story tell of the collapse of society from their own perspective. Mothers worry about their children’s future, entrepreneurs about their business schemes, kids about being left alone and defenceless in a brutal world, and workers try to balance their need for employment against the criminal acts they are called upon to perform.

The disparate portraits of this crumbling society show the growing debility of government when dealing with the oil industry as well as the increasing power of multinationals. Land ownership undergoes a radical change and Monsanto seizes vast tracts of land. Modified legislation allows businesses like Waymart, anxious as ever to capitalize on human misery, to exploit the cheap labour that is a result of mass unemployment.

These stories detail the disintegration of infrastructure, including hydro-electric power and telephone, train, truck, car and bus transport, and the growing desperation of the people. The representation of this era is not entirely a portrait of misery, however. The various narrators offer an inspiring view of our unwillingness to surrender our dignity even in inhumane circumstances.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Writing the Last Days of Oil

Psychological Assessment: Waymart Compound 17-B

Shipping and Receiving

I’m Not Sure How to Write this Letter

Minutes: AllShore Investments, Inc.

Strike-Breaking Police

Your Prospective Candidate

Dear Diary

Shipping on the St. John River

The Confessions of a Pipeline Thief

My Learning Diary

Half an Hour Later in Newfoundland

The Last Diamond Miner

Introduction: Writing the Last Days of Oil

This book is meant to be a collection of documents from the post-oil crash period. Although many written records remain from that chaotic time, and other anthologies from the period have been assembled, we contend that court records, government documents, and the more questionable newspaper boards do not give a realistic impression of the common people’s experience during the subsequent chaos. We have endeavoured, with the aim of veracity in mind, to collect personal texts which we argue are more representative of the Canadian experience in particular, and the post-oil crash world in general.

The various documents outline different time periods and in some cases recount events that postdate those of other texts in the collection; what is history in one document may be the present in another, but as a group they present the people’s misunderstanding or misinterpretation of the changes in the world around them

What makes this collection different than others, such as Wilmet Genderson’s wildly popular Oil Crash Narratives, is that we have made the editorial decision to ensure that they are all Canadian works and they have not—sometimes because of their incompleteness or quotidian nature—been previously published. We have chosen a text to represent each province and territory in Canada so that the historical period can be seen in reference to the country’s profound regional differences and vast distances.

It is hoped that these personal tales will round out our necessarily narrow view of that time by supplementing the other texts on the period and supplying personal reactions to what must have been a difficult and trying half century.

Alminer Dumontan - 2358

Psychological Assessment: Waymart Compound 17-B

Manitoba: Psychological Assessment: Waymart Compound 17-B outlines the life of a man who had been promoted by the international company Waymart only to find that his new job involved labour practices that he found ethically abhorrent. He worked on a compound in Morden, Manitoba, a closed free trade zone in which the company controlled its imported labour. Suffering from psychological distress, his emails to his Waymart-employed out-sourced psychiatrist endeavoured to explain his position and to make the therapist understand his reactions to his chosen profession. Interestingly—and for us fortunately—he avoided what was most germane to his psychological issues in favour of giving the reader a lengthy report on the resource scarcity of his culture and its impending economic collapse. Through him we see the profound consequences the curtailing of international transport has for the Caribbean, migrant workers, and the Aboriginal peoples in Canada’s north.

His emails were recovered from Waymart’s main office which was partially destroyed after the infamous arson case that preceded their disintegration and bankruptcy. The letters are part of the permanent collections of the Manitoba archives.

Psychological Assessment: Waymart Compound 17-B

Received: Thursday, April 23rd

I’m the kind of person who, when people dream about the end of the world, never gets top billing. I’m petty management, seventh person out of the bunker, wild eyes and a broken bottle instead of the decisive hand behind the machinegun. I add salt to a meal, I sit behind the major characters and provide background; I sharpen the machete.

In my dreams I usually live in one of a string of identical suburban houses, like we used to see on the outskirts of cities. I’m told my description of that neighbourhood is beautiful and peaceful, but for me there’s a malignity hovering just below its serenity. In the quiet, in the lulling breezes and planned rows of trees, I feel something watching, a patient cruelty, a child’s hand twisting the head off a doll, the shiny apples on the tree a trap for the unwary.

I’ve been at my new job for two months now and things aren’t getting any better. I feel like I’m spiralling down to an inevitable crash; I feel like we’re all on a jet from the old days which has run out of fuel but the stewardess is still serving drinks in business class, pretzels and packaged cookies in economy seating. The rousing sound of the engines that we heard upon takeoff is gone. We pretend not to notice the strained look on everyone’s face, their fingers gripping the armrests, the snacks saved for later.

I was at Corptech for three years, using inbound calls to try to pay my way through college, when Waymart snapped me up. At first, I was happy to have gone from telephone sales to supervisor to what I’m doing now, which is, to all appearances, management. Unfortunately, with my new job I had to move into one of the Compounds, so I’m living at Waymart 17-B, near the town of Morden, Manitoba. My job is part quality control and part human resources. That’s a kind way of saying that I keep the workers on their toes. If product quality drops, then I’m sent to inspect the line, to tread the narrow distinction between workplace safety and production.

The workers’ contracts are only six months long, but they’re encouraged to work two shifts a day—we call it Shift Realizing. But even while company productivity is going up, in terms of man-hours dragged out of exhausted workers, Waymart still fears losing money. I’m here to ensure that no one works beyond their capacity, beyond what can make money for the company. I use a supposedly complicated formula I was taught in college, which is a Waymart standard, but my job is not difficult. A worker slumping over the line, who lets a product go by without adding value, is a danger to the company’s profits, and their inattention is recorded and they are docked pay.

In actuality, I’m in petty accounting, for I keep track of who gets docked and for how much. A worker who cannot keep up the pace seven days a week, who falls behind when they are working two seven hour and forty-five minute shifts (just short of eight hours so that Waymart avoids the necessity of the legally guaranteed breaks and lunches), loses the company money. If they persist, they are shipped back at a loss. They end up owing the company for, like the indentured labour system of old, the price of the ticket is only waived if the contract is completed.

I never knew much about Waymart before, although I had frequented their stores. They had more market share before the oil crash when they imported goods in huge diesel-driven container ships across the Pacific to the western States and British Columbia. Oil was so cheap back then that transport was actually feasible, although it sounds foolish to say it now; the goods were on huge floating barges, capable of holding many thousands of tons, and they produced a wake that could be seen by satellites from space, back when we had satellites that could do that. It was a crazy time really. It was cheaper to use workers in China and Korea than to manufacture our own plastic crap. Now those plastics are at a premium and are rapidly being disinterred from our crowded landfills. Waymart, which went by Waymarket back then, was king of the labour multinationals. We learned that in our introductory training session; but when the oil started to disappear Waymarket went bankrupt, came back as Waymart, and started to work closer to home.

Received: Friday, April 24th

I sent you my introductory email and you are now complaining about its content. You tell me I’m blocking, for you always use those vid therapy words; that I am refusing to share my true feelings. You tell me I am using my history of Waymart to avoid talking about my own history. If Waymart hadn’t outsourced its therapy, and those therapists weren’t overbooked, then we wouldn’t even be emailing. You are the outsourced option when the regular contract is filled. Something gets lost in Internet therapy, they say, but what gets lost is you and me. You are out there in etherspace somewhere, and you might even be in my Compound. Likely you’re caught in the piecework therapy boom, and sit all day in your home answering email from people like me.

My own history. Ok. I was born naked at a very young age. How do you begin such a thing? You probably want to hear about my parents, about me getting caught masturbating, about my hatred of my father, but that’s not what’s bothering me now.

Weird childhood guilt is no match for what I’m seeing here. History isn’t buried in some toy box; it’s all around us. You don’t see it because you go to the Waymart wherever you live and for you it just means cheap stuff to buy, but behind that cheap stuff are a lot of lies. That’s what’s difficult to talk about. If we say it any other way, then it’s like saying that the Hittites were just crazy and enjoyed a fight, instead of old-time Syria was a place of conflict and scarce resources. Otherwise, Easter Island is a holiday spot rather than a warning.

I had to tell a guy today that he’s under quota. He’s a really tough looking guy who could have broken me like a twig and he fell to his knees and cried. He thought I could change the stats I’ve been keeping on him for the last few weeks, but I can’t. They go in the central computer automatically from my handheld, and there are people who check on me. He’s a good worker but the encouraged two shifts in a row are taking their toll.

As well, after work he indulges in the Compound bar. The workers are only allowed into the bar near the end of their contract, after their 5th month. By that time the company has made their profit and the workers only need to screw up a couple of times before Waymart can send them back owing even more than when they first arrived. That’s the purpose of the bars—the strippers, the porno flicks in the back—regardless of what Waymart says. Enthrall the workers in their last month and they will make a mistake; then someone like me has to tell them to report to shift office, and everyone knows what that means.

The guy was grabbing my knees and saying something in that high-pitched language of theirs, probably begging not to be sent back. Likely he’s got family somewhere, China, Taiwan, Japan; we’re encouraged not to know too much about them. They have no chance to learn English and they live away from our housing units in vast dormitories. They don’t have their own beds, so they just take an empty one; when one drone is falling into bed, another has just risen. They are allowed to bring only one kilo of personal belongings from home with them. Usually, they bring photos. Bright faced children with a wife or husband looking into the light, squinting into their parents’ future, into where they go to ensure that the children can continue eating.

Things are bad over there, worse than what we hear on the vids; people are dying in droves. Their only chance is this job, this chicanery of a contract, and now I’ve made sure this guy will go back with only the money he’s already sent home; he’ll return owing Waymart. I’ve made sure that he has to join the queues on the other side, wait to be picked by Waymart’s representatives, people like me who decide their fate.

That’s the fucked up stuff that’s going on over here. Makes you think differently about trying to get that Waymart staff job, I bet. Their therapists are pretty busy; that’s why I’m allowed to go off-Compound to you. Otherwise, I’d have to see a staff one; they don’t have real degrees and you never know how much of what you say is going to the bosses.

Received: Monday, April 27th

I’m happy to be talking to you; don’t get me wrong. It’s just that no one on the outside knows what’s going on here and it’s difficult to explain. It was interesting to see your reaction to my last instalment. You heard some stuff then, didn’t you? I knew you weren’t on staff because you don’t know the inner workings of Waymart. There’s a language here, less than a language, more like a return to grunts, where oppression is an identifiable system. I can recognize a stranger to the tribe. I know you can’t say where you are, or anything about yourself, but I think of you as a woman. You write with a tenderness that I doubt a man could manage, and you actually seem qualified. You know a lingo beyond what is used on the real-time therapy shows.

They say that dentists used to have the highest