The Faint-hearted Bolshevik Read Online Free PDF

people’s salaries, and then, nicely fattened up and pockets full of cash, they’ll be sent home to wallow in all kinds of vices. This proceeding is what is most commonly known as early retirement. While they wait for the appropriate birthday or their turn, these buddhas while away their clearly defined eight hours a day ticking off days on the calendar and boxes on their betting slips or lottery tickets. They regularly suffer from all sorts of illnesses and injuries: flu (a fortnight off), hay fever in the spring (ten days off), a summer cold (eight days at home) and they always fracture a minor bone out jogging on the last day of their summer holidays (another three weeks off). Every couple of years they have to have a sebaceous cyst removed (a month off) and break a major bone skiing (two months off). And as all this still leaves more time in the office than is desirable, they won’t give up a single long weekend.
    Truth be told, among those who enjoy this blessed impunity, there are a few morons who work because they either have principles or because they feel a sort of religious calling to do so well. Of course they are everybody’s laughing stock. Bear in mind that you have to be fool to have principles when no one else does (if ministers steal, they shouldn’t expect anything different of me, according to ninety-five per cent of people participating in the latest surveys). And those with a vocation are by far the most ridiculed (more than ninety-nine per cent of respondents categorically declared that a vocation should only be expected from the motherfuckers who reap the benefits from it). So please forgive me if in this brief analysis I omit any further mention of this anomalous group so categorically condemned by popular wisdom.
    Of the remaining seventy per cent,four fifths are crummy two-bit temps. Let’s get this straight: I don’t mean they have short-term contracts, but rather that they can be fired according to their employer’s whims. In such incidences, the firing of a permanent employee is nothing more than a tacitly agreed failure to renew a contract. Crummy two-bit temps can be characterised in the first place by the fact that they were hired after proper employment contracts went to hell. As is always the case when things go to hell, this was done with dire consequences for those who came afterwards, and the utmost delicacy for those who came before, in this case or rather, the buddhas. Regardless of their employment sector, these temps’ union representatives, when they exist, have practically zero influence and act a bit like kamikazes. Another characteristic of crummy two-bit temps is their chronological age, on average well below that of the buddhas. They make up for this with a pretty poor appearance because they barely have enough money to buy themselves designer clothes (let alone to go on summer holidays or skiing), and because twelve hours a day of actual work are much more damaging to your health than eight hours of simply being present in the office. If a buddha crosses paths with a crummy two-bit temp in the corridor and deigns to look at him, he can relish the fact that, although the crummy two-bit temp may be twenty years his junior, the latter is less tanned, has bags under his eyes so heavy they’re literally weighing them down, and has many more gray hairs that he hasn’t had time to dye.
    According to the most recent figures, the life of a crummy two-bit temp is worth slightly less than that of a woodlouse. If they get sick more than once or twice a year, their contracts are not renewed. If you should happen to tell them at midnight that they have to re-do everything they did that day and they make a face, their contracts are not renewed. If they don’t stir the coffee properly, their contracts are not renewed. If the crummy two-bit temp happens to be a secretary and wears trousers rather than a skirt, her contract is not renewed. If they don’t smile all the time (in spite