I CAN LEARN – But Can I Get it Together? A continuation

Written by John Paul Marat
Tuesday, 30 June 2009 13:42

This article follows Steven Walden's confessio of life in the world of for-profit educational development.  Click here to read "I Can Learn??"

In the earlier, bourgeois incarnation of my life, I was the victim of class oppression by the cruel and unforgiving corporate doomsday machine euphemistically known as “I Can Learn”, but secretly called JRL Enterprises, cleverly named after its founder John R. Lee, himself named after notorious Confedero-fascist Robert E. Lee.

Imagine my surprise then to see an article on NOLAFugees by another escapee of said soulless, deadening chamber of horrors. The author touched on many of the same experiences that his  fellow victim had, but evidently not long enough to pry open every chamber in Bluebeard’s castle.

John R. Lee, the company’s eponymous eminence grise, is the perfect pick for a horror movie villain. His pasty-white, cadaverous, wrinkled skin, combined with a ghoulish, unsmiling demeanor, leave the audience aghast with ice-cold discomfort. His voice croaks in a lifeless monotone that makes him sound like the lovechild of Leona Helmsley and Henry Kissinger. You watch some snappy young idealist strut into his office, all smiles, eager to meet the leader of this mission civiliatrice, but your heart pounds over the wild, dissonant swings of an orchestra announcing the  antagonist’s unearthly intentions. You buckle over in your seat, shouting, “No! Can’t you see he’s evil!!” No subtle foreshadowing here; you have stared Beelzebub right in the eye and know that the story can only go down from here. The peanut gallery eagerly awaits a well-placed stake in his heart.

His brother, the nefarious Craig Lee, is the ultimate sidekick, the Darth Vader to JR Lee’s Emperor, sharing the unfortunate guise of a specter from beyond the grave. He certainly couldn’t look any worse donning a black cape and trapezoidal helmet – it would make a more pleasant or a more threatening impression, either one more inspiring than the repellent stench of villainy that trails his every step.

This cunning ex-NSA spook would go on periodic rants about company morale, alternatively screeching about inefficiencies or droning on about how employees complained too much. His words were about as inspirational as one of John Kerry’s valium-high enhancing monologues, with all the tact and grace of a 200-pound drag queen on a coke bender.

No, JRL Enterprises was a true Pandora’s Box of everything that can and will go wrong in a New Orleans-based business, a Murphy’s Law made flesh on steroids. Disorganization, cronyism, corruption and intemperance reigned. We, the unfortunate stooges caught in this cabalistic scheme to defraud the nations’ schools, survived through humor and a gleeful sense of JRL’s inevitable, permanent decline.

The original product that launched the company to local stardom was good. It was a simple remedial math program that apparently did wonders for the local education system, and our most precious resource, our children. By contrast, the new software the company was developing was downright putrid – poorly engineered, riddled with errors, even displeasing to the eye.

Yet no one seemed able or willing to get a grasp of the place and make it run. Employees lived up to the lowly stereotype of the New Orleans work ethic, whimsically appearing and disappearing at a moment’s notice and spending an inordinate amount of time making coffee. Entire departments would lock themselves up into impenetrable fortresses, feverishly protecting their benighted fiefdoms,  and leave outsiders beckoning and wailing for shelter. Communication was at a standstill, mired in a bedlam of confusion and pessimism. All the while the ghost-like figure of JR Lee himself hovered in the minds and midst of all, appearing at awkward moments like the ghost of Christmas past.

The teachers hired for content were what one would expect from New Orleans teachers – poorly educated themselves, they butchered the product’s lesson plans, greedily sucking the life out of the bloody entrails of our once-proud institutes of learning. As problem after problem would beset production, a unmitigated malaise and indiscipline permeated the place, testing the resolve of those few who’s labors carried the entire enterprise. Certainly I was not one of those fools.

Dozens of young idealists would be hired for various jobs, only to be released again in a bizarre, annual summer ritual. “Bring in the young victims”, the macabre HR rep says, a revolting, bony finger extended towards an unseen void. But that would imply that this company with around 200 employees even had an HR department. To this day I meet the occasional straggler who was tossed overboard by the reckless hiring and firing concocted by unhinged and diabolical corporate managers. Such, it seems, was the fate of our previous NOLAFugees writer.

The upper echelon of management gave the impression of a political cabal or mafia inner circle, JRL’s own Carlyle Group. Cold-blooded corporate execs weighed the company down through sheer numbers, bodies bloated through a diet of fatty foods and the blood of young Orleans Parish students. No one could really explain why the company had so many managers, though the idea that some kind of nepotism or corruption was at stake was correctly deduced to be the culprit. The Times-Picayune’s expose’ on I CAN LEARN gave us all a good, hearty, knowing laugh, and a chance at personal redemption.

Alcohol was the drug of choice, from top to bottom, the author being no exception. Some employees would come in on a whiskey high, wearing wife-beaters and shrugging off sneering comments while sporting a heroin-induced glaze in their eyes. A top-level exec would curse and moan between swigs of the juice, sweating and breathing Scotch fire on anyone who dared cross his path. One staffer had to be driven home after a drunken rampage at a nearby lunch counter.

Eventually a DEA agent was hurried in to talk about the company’s impending drug testing policy in an attempt to establish order. Knowing looks betrayed their guilt. As usual at JRL, a project was begun, money was spent, and the results remained ruined, broken, and worthless. Drug abuse continued unabated. Most likely some of the company brass had a hand in local drug distribution and had the idea killed off.

Like most horror shows, this one had lots of sex. People spent a suspiciously long time at the office after work. Marriages were broken and reshaped. Babies were born, possibly deformed, and sacrificed in cold blood, most likely in an effort to boost sales in a pact with Mephistopheles. Employee bonding and mutual affection was in the air. Perhaps Doctor Frankenfurter is a more appropriate allusion for the company’s overlord than Frankenstein.

As a New Orleans business JRL Enterprises possessed a true panoply of New Orleans society. The upper-crust, old-blood New Orleans Anglos. The receptionist with her broad Chalmatian brogue. The light skinned mulatto, descendant of Afro-French prostitutes, with a fear of blacks and unabashed hatred for whites. The grumpy, tight-lipped Sicilian manager who always seemed to be able to glare at everyone simultaneously. The mad, oversexed Texan blaring gangsta rap at every opportunity. The woman from Magnolia projects who on one occasion threatened to kick the author’s ass. The Vietnamese programmer from Versailles who’s mastery of the English language was pocked with local African jargon – “oh Lohd, you wong fo daat.” The gay Yankee who fell in love with New Orleans and just as quickly feared and left New Orleans. The Metairiean who knew nothing of life outdoors, only the comforts of office, SUV, and home.

Time-honored traditions like Fish Fries, King Cake, and Easter Holidays were all part of JRL, reflecting the power and resilience of our local culture. To this day it is shocking that anything got done there, though nothing was ever done quite as well there as pretending to work and fucking off.

JRL Enterprises was the last time the author worked for a large company. If your goal in life is a soulless existence then I highly recommend it. Selling poorly designed, bug-ridden software to schools funded by our tax-dollars and sold by small-time politicos who pocket all the money that incidentally could be part of yours truly’s compensation or your children’s future? Who wouldn’t get jaded.