Smile Like Mona Lisa

“Move quickly, or, the meat will rot,” shouts the new boss at an undisclosed warehouse somewhere in the Middle East. Well, it’s a little past 10:30 in the morning and already, the temperature is well over 37/38 ºC (100ºF) in the shade. A freight delivery of meat has just arrived from a small specialty prime beef distributor situated out of New York which has its meat processing operations out of Texas, land of the beef experts. It does not matter why the shipment is late, of course, you’re curious. In the future, it would be nicer to avoid these sorts of panicked moments. “Move it, move it, move it,” ushers the boss man as he commands his workers much like one commands cattle.

The food inspector lurks just beyond the chaos wearing sunglasses, trying to show no emotion. Almost smirking as if he has been tipped off about the late delivery? Who knows, maybe he is the cause of the late deliver? There is the inspector standing there watching the tick, tick of the wristwatch he wears as he is impatiently waiting as he counts down the minutes. For the moment, it could go either way, if time runs out in respect to food safety, he’ll be ready to jump in and do what he is trained to do.

The food inspector loses the bet. This race against time went quickly, but, the boss is master of bending time in his favor. All the meat is collected from the docks in record time, transported back to the warehouse in refrigerated trucks and rushed into the proper storage areas of the warehouse.

The boss grins, shouts a few insults that send his workers scurrying and he heads to his private office. Believe it or not, there is a bath tub in his private bathroom and he enters the room weighted down by two sacks of ice. While he could make slaves of his employees and have them carry the ice, he does not. The boss man is fixing to take an ice bath. Yes, you heard right, he is going to take an ice bath to soak off the sweat and heat that comes with being boss. How often does he do this? He won’t tell all his secrets, at least not today.

Ragging on the richness of experience that being salaried provides, about three years ago, a friend of mine,  Fahkr* was working in KSA as a Logistics Supervising Manager. He worked his way up and into this particular title with blood, sweat and tears. Working within a warehouse for a very high profile company that is affiliated with the Saudi Royal family came with its own stresses.

You weren’t just king of the warehouse, you were king of whatever sort of flood or mudslide any of your employees got into. One of the true realities of being salaried as opposed to hourly is that you will have some weeks when you just work forty hours, but, there are also many weeks when you work somewhere between 70 hours and upward to 80 hours a week.

You’d think that the worst of being salaried is when you get called in the middle of the night because one of your drivers got in an accident with one of your company’s tractor trailers. There are a number of problems that go down like a sinkhole swallows everything that comes in its path and if you don’t act quickly, it changes into a natural disaster like a mudslide that devours everything that’s in its path.

Meanwhile, inside your mind is something of a combination of a tsunami and a hurricane combined which both threatens to wash away everything or pick it up and toss it in the air; either way, you’re talking about massive destruction. So, it’s really about collateral damage, how do you manage your sanity while evaluating reality to come up with the best course of action to escape absolute destruction? The answer is, there is no formula to it, but, first, you smile like Mona Lisa, hoping that people wonder your secret and find you mysterious.

Mona Lisa Smiles

Maybe if your smile is mysterious, maybe the people will forget about the problem; delusion, it’s easy to wish for that kind of outlook, but, delusion never helped anyone. The problems are real and Fahkr cannot pretend otherwise. Taking a deep breath he thinks, Mona Lisa smiles, you smile like Mona Lisa. Utter nonsense and blood pressure lowers into a normal range so that you deal with the problem at hand.

On the one hand, you have to stand for the company. On the other hand, regardless of what happened, this is your employee and it is in your best interest to defend your employee first. Maybe your reason is as selfish as my friend admitted, it’s all logistics. The truth of the matter is, the very process involved in hiring a replacement is lengthy and daunting. There is something worse than having a driver with a mark on their driving record and, that is, having a no driver at all. Now, the employee in this company generally would be fired, that is, if you follow the rule book.

The problem is the rule book needs to be updated and each boss that has preceded him as a logistics supervisor has not taken the time to update the manual or the business practices stated in the manual. Thus, he puts himself on the line by going against policy. While normally, the logistics supervisor would fire the driver it just is not necessarily done so immediately.

On a good day, the drivers are a liability. Now, there are resulting fines you’ll have to pay including paying the bail to get the driver out of jail. You do this because each employee has a work contract that is a certified paper which the sponsoring company has already paid the government for. A lesson in business is, there are no shortcuts, you don’t throw away money that’s already been spent, even when it means you have to spend a little more money to grease the wheels so to speak.

The liabilities of the driver continue beyond the short term, the fact that was conveyed to me was, an employee that is marked by the Saudi police is an easy target in the future. The company takes the hit, as they rightly should do in adherence with the laws that are in place.

The fact is, the company overloads their trucks because they are understaffed. They are understaffed because they like to keep more profits for themselves. So the cycle goes where the understaffed are overworked and the likelihood for accidents increases. This balance between business best practices and testing the limits of laws results in the need for a fall guy.

It’s kind of like a reenactment of the stereotyped mafia and how they operate. A good boss knows when to bring problems the corporate table and when to handle them personally. Now, the boss, in this case, the first boss in direct command of the drivers is the logistics supervisor. This boss has his own self-interests and he also has the best interests of his employees in mind.

He wants to retain the employees he has because they have become obedient to his unorthodox method of management which is part bark and part bullying. Somehow, this commands the recognition that he is the alpha dog. Firstly, the only person that stands between the warehouse employee’s impending doom of being fired is the logistics supervisor who as the boss uses his own money to pay the jail fine to get his worker back. Then, he docks his employee’s pay. The employee somehow becomes beholden to the boss and is even more obedient than before.

Maybe it says there was some questionable behavior going on between the police where the fine is more like a bribe. As this was never stated directly and I never thought to ask, I cannot comment either way as, I honestly don’t know if that was a fact of daily duties as a logistics supervisor. Hahahaha and, if it was a duty of his job, it definitely wasn’t in writing, but had been passed down verbally through the chain of communication.

Nobody Knows Why Mona Lisa Smiles

This is where Human Resources came in. They loved so much the results of the management in the warehouse, they lay claim to the Logistics Supervising Manager. The only problem was, yes, you guessed it, finding a replacement. So, in the honor of accepting the one job title, he had to carry two jobs in two different places that were on opposite sides of the city. His salary stays the same because the company rationalizes that giving an employee experience is worth more in value and thus should not be paid to learn on the job.

So, Fahkr learns on the job and he pays with his time while searching for his replacement. All the time he is working, he is angling wolfishly with his eyes on the next advancement that could come into place. He is of course out of place, he is far from his home, far from his family and the fact is, his family helped him get in on an entry level job. The way this company operated still required you to prove yourself, but, it’s much easier to get ahead when you have the chief operating general manager as your uncle.

The dignified decorous and dainty men of H.R. quickly realize that they have a gray wolf on their hands, one that is both black nor white but is silvery gray like the fog and as the fog rolls in, they can see nothing of Fahkr’s whereabouts.

This made them feel uneasy because, he’d rush by in silence and they never knew if they were in on the hunt or if he had prepared them as the kill. They felt their own jobs become at stake because he questioned their practices of general operations. After one heated boardroom discussion, it turned into a verbal boxing club which then became between two men trying to jump over the table at the other to choke the other one out.

The thing is, both had good things to say and both had plenty to offer the discussion. As this group had operated formally together for years, they had never established a mediator or named one individual to chair the group. So it was with the introduction of a new person that a standard H.R. meeting turned into absolute chaos.

From what I heard, the most tenured man in the group burst into tears and threatened to quit. The wolfish new one, Fahkr was up to some tricks just for fun. He knew that in the painting of Mona Lisa, she didn’t fully smile and so he tried to lead them deeper into the mystery of this chaos.

He must have been trying to signal that he was no longer wanting to be a team player because, sometime shortly after this episode, he ended up putting in his own fiery resignation which of course included lots of shouting, throwing things about and the slamming of doors. That door closed on him.

While H.R. did everything they could to welcome him back, he refused. Fahkr chose to wear black like the Mona Lisa with her mysterious smile, he left there smiling too. Those that saw him pass out those doors that day said, he looked like the man in black, Johnny Cash and he was whistling the tune, “My Way”.

Well, the legend of Fahkr is nearing its end, but, his story didn’t end there. For the moment, he was still the man in black as he whistled; he got his own black mark. This mark was officially banned him from returning to work in Saudi Arabia for several years.

Where he works now, what he does is another mystery that will remain untold because he left a megalith of a company to be greeted by open arms of an economy that was soft, but, that’s another story. If you see this man that looks a bit like Johnny Cash whistling the tune, “My Way” maybe you can ask Fahkr and find out for yourself how it all ended.

*For the sake of anonymity, in this article, his name has been changed to protect his identity and the name of the company has been omitted as well. While he no longer works for this company, it is in the best interests of all involved to veil the past without pinpointing any particular person by name or the associated company or companies.

Naima Maria deFlorio

Makeup Art & Photography: Aya Nasr