HOBO
JOURNAL
IST

How A Pretty Good Career
Ended Up Behind A Sheetz

A Cautionary Tale · Names Withheld · Mostly

Once upon a time the Wise Wolf had a pretty good tech job. The exact nature of this job is not important except to say that it paid actual money, included BENEFITS, and involved sitting in a chair indoors, which represents the absolute pinnacle of human professional achievement.

Wolf was good at this job. He had what the corporate world calls UPWARD MOBILITY, which is the gentle institutional process by which a competent employee is groomed into a slightly more useful version of himself, and then that version into a slightly more useful version, and so on, until eventually he becomes a Vice President of something and loses the ability to feel human emotions.

This trajectory was interrupted, however, by a small but fatal personality defect. The Wise Wolf had STANDARDS. He would not lie. He would not pretend the numbers were good when the numbers were bad. He would not nod gravely during meetings about synergy. He once told a senior executive, in a room full of witnesses, that a particular initiative was "stupid in a way I find personally insulting." The executive smiled politely. Wolf was terminated fourteen business days later for what HR described in his exit paperwork as REASONS.

This was the first mistake. There would be several others.

Wolf attempted to find new employment in tech, where it was rapidly explained to him that his references were "complicated," his attitude was "concerning," and his name had been quietly placed on a list, which is a thing that exists, and which no one will ever admit exists, but which exists.

Bills, as bills will, continued to arrive.

So Wolf took a job at a factory. The factory manufactured a product so industrially specific that Wolf could not, even after eight months of employment, accurately describe what it was. Something involving seals. Or possibly gaskets. The seals and/or gaskets went, he was told, into other things, which went into other other things, which were eventually purchased by hospitals, or possibly the military, or possibly both.

The pay was ten dollars an hour.

Wolf's coworkers were, with very few exceptions, recently incarcerated, actively addicted, or in a number of memorable cases both. They disliked Wolf for one very specific reason, which was that Wolf could read above a sixth-grade level. They had figured this out by observing Wolf, on his lunch break, READING A BOOK. Not a fancy book. A paperback he had purchased at a Barnes & Noble.

The book had words in it. This was sufficient.

Wolf was, by the prevailing local standard, a NARC. Or a COP. Or possibly a SPY. The specifics could not be agreed upon, but the consensus held that he was UP TO SOMETHING, and the something was probably something that would get everybody fired, and so Wolf ate alone in his car for the remainder of his employment.

The boss, however, had begun taking a quiet shine to Wolf, for the same reason everyone else despised him, which was that Wolf could read. The boss was approaching retirement. The boss had a management position that would shortly need filling. The boss had started having little chats with Wolf during the morning shift, the kind of chats that suggest a future, the kind that suggest, eventually, a desk.

Two of Wolf's coworkers noticed.

They had each been quietly hoping the management job might land on one of them. They correctly assessed Wolf as the leading internal candidate. They incorrectly concluded that the appropriate response was to defecate into a five-gallon bucket and place it in the passenger seat of the boss's pickup truck.

This was carried out on a day Wolf was at home with the flu.

The boss returned to his vehicle at the end of his shift. The boss found the bucket. The boss came back into the building screaming. The boss, in his fury, performed the kind of arithmetic an angry man performs at speed, which is to say arithmetic with the wrong numbers, and concluded that Wolf was responsible.

Wolf, eight months into his tenure at the facility, was fired by phone the following morning.

He attempted, several times, to point out that he had not been physically present at the workplace on the day of the bucket, and could not therefore have been the bucket's author or its installer. The boss was uninterested. The boss did not want to play SHIT-TECTIVE. The boss had a bucket of human waste in his passenger seat, somebody was getting fired for it, and Wolf, conveniently, was already on the phone.

He pivoted, as the unemployable do, to CONTENT CREATION, which is the modern term for talking to yourself on the internet but with a microphone. He started a blog. The blog had four readers, two of whom were his mother using different email addresses. He started a podcast. The podcast was downloaded six times in its first month, which sounds bad until you learn that four of those downloads were also his mother. He started a Substack. Substack, at least, had the decency to round his subscriber count to a whole number.

Content creation, however, was not panning out either. The algorithms, much like the factory floor, had identified Wolf as a problem. He kept saying things. The platforms preferred people who said things differently, which is to say, in a way that did not say anything. Wolf could not figure out the trick of this, and his subscriber growth flatlined at a number so embarrassingly small it would be unkind to reproduce here.

It was at this point, having been ejected by every legitimate institution in American economic life, that Wolf reached a conclusion millions of his fellow countrymen had reached before him.

ADDICTION WAS THE ONLY OPTION REMAINING.

He had given society his best shot. Society had returned the favor by spitting in his eye. The least he could do was develop a substance dependency.

Unfortunately the Wise Wolf's drug of choice, historically speaking, had been jack and coke. Not the kind that pours, the kind that snorts. Both cost MONEY he no longer had, and the kind that snorts required a guy named Jermaine he no longer knew.

What he had was ten dollars and forty-three cents and a sense of grim, downwardly mobile purpose. He walked to the only retail establishment within walking distance, which happened to be a Dollar General, and he stood in the craft aisle, and he made a decision that would define the remainder of his life.

He bought a four-pack of Elmer's School Glue.

He took it home. He huffed the first bottle.

Nothing happened. (Nothing CAN happen. Elmer's School Glue is famously, almost aggressively non-toxic. It contains polyvinyl acetate, water, and approximately zero psychoactive compounds. You cannot get high off it. You cannot get even mildly buzzed off it. You can drink an entire bottle and the only documented consequence is gastric distress and a stern voicemail from your mother. It is, chemically speaking, slightly haunted skim milk.)

Wolf did not know this.

Wolf became convinced, despite all available chemistry and the actual label printed on the actual bottle, that he was getting INCREDIBLY HIGH. He described the sensation in his personal journal as "electric, like being kissed by a very small and slightly judgmental God." He began carrying a bottle in his jacket pocket. He became, in the medical literature, the world's first and only documented case of PLACEBO GLUE DEPENDENCY.

The next eighteen months are largely undocumented because Wolf himself cannot remember most of them, despite the fact that there was, again, no chemical reason for him not to. He remembers waking up in a Greyhound station holding a half-empty bottle of Elmer's and a Pulitzer nomination he had apparently written for himself on a Hardee's napkin. The nomination was, technically, for himself, written by himself, addressed to himself. The Pulitzer Committee has confirmed that this is not how the Pulitzer Prize works.

He found himself, as so many fallen men do, on the wrong side of the railroad tracks. Specifically, he was lying ON the railroad tracks. A nice gentleman named Crusty Bill rolled him off the rails with a stick and offered him a sip of something Bill described, accurately, as "mostly Listerine."

It was in that moment, watching the 4:47 freight train rumble past with all his career prospects firmly aboard, that the Wise Wolf had what professionals call a REVELATION.

Journalism was not dead. It had simply died moved.

The truth, he realized, was no longer found in newsrooms (which had become podcast studios) or press conferences (which had become content opportunities) or on television (which had become a hostage situation). The truth was out HERE. Among the railroad ties. Inside the abandoned Wendy's. Behind the dumpster where corporate America discards its receipts. In the drainage ditch behind the Sheetz.

He needed only to embrace what he had become.