I work for a very, very large chemical company that is present in every corner of the world. You might guess which one it is. To be honest, I don’t lose any sleep over it. I’m not involved in manufacturing in any way, I just answer emails in an office. The pay is good and the benefits are great. It’s not like I work in a cave lab in a mountain. We have plants in the office and all.
Corporate has always been impeccably friendly to us. I guess when you’re that large, even internal communication is a form of PR. They probably write emails by committee over four meetings. We usually get like, two emails a day from the company at large, about upcoming charity races and company-wide events. They’re so bland and sterile I usually ignore them. If they were important at all we’d have a meeting I guess.
You can probably already tell I’m not that invested in my job. It pays the bills, and nowadays that’s almost a luxury itself. But I don’t usually… notice things happening at the company itself, nor do I care about the restructurings or blood drives or anything. But this was different. It got weird
As I said, we have blood drives and stuff. I’ve never taken part myself, but some of my coworkers have. I didn’t notice it at first, but when gossip started going around the office I dug through my inbox and found it:
A very sterile, very standard email about hydrocephalus awareness.
It was a little weird, I guess, if you looked at it too long. Isn’t hydrocephalus a third world thing? Sorry if that’s racist, when I read “hydrocephalus” I just picture little dark skinned babies with huge heads in a bombed out hospital. I guess every company picks its battles? I’m not exactly Melinda Gates.
Well, that was a bit ago. It didn’t raise any flags until corporate started insisting. A month later we got an email about a brain health seminar, focusing on CSF quality, which did raise a few flags. I mean, CSF is a weird body fluid. I don’t exactly think about getting my CSF tested.
In hindsight, this does sound pretty ominous, but you have to keep in mind these were just words in my inbox. There was a lot of other stuff going on both at work and in my life, thanks for asking. I even got a little plaque for a presentation I gave, but you don’t care about that, do you? Yeah I didn’t think so.
Eventually a meeting was called. Again, huge company, bigger than the Catholic Church. We have a lot of useless meetings.
It was a remote conference about brain health given by a group of incredibly attractive, perfectly corporate company physicians. Well, honestly, they could have been models in embroidered lab coats. We sat through it in groups of twenty twice a day, through the entire week, in our company boardroom to watch it. It was a pain in the ass and it cut right through our schedules, but our manager stressed its importance through gritted teeth, so what choice did we have?
From what a couple of coworkers and I gossiped after it was done, there were four doctors giving the presentations. Mine was a tall, skinny brunette with piercing blue eyes, hair down to her neck, a defined, authoritative jawline and huge perfect movie-star teeth. She was just the right amount of warm and practiced that the content was easy to follow, but if she had been any less charming you could have sworn she was just an AI. Not that she was creepy or anything, but you could tell the presentation had been rehearsed and polished. Somebody got a budget for this brain health drive, and it clearly had a bunch of zeroes. The company wasn’t known to be stingy, and corporate had deep pockets, but this was clearly out of bounds. The doctor-cum-model walked towards the camera in a huge, windowed hallway, smiling warmly as relevant infographics and short illustrative videos appeared at her fingertips seamlessly and in perfect rhythm. She spoke for about twenty minutes
(Es presentación o video?? Como es una presentación corporativa personal de alto valor de producción? Tengo que decidir)
The biggest, weirdest, and most attractive point popped out at the end: our participation in the meeting included a free MRI for each and every employee, in any location, available at your convenience, just by replying to the original summoning email.
This was a huge deal. As I said, the company wasn’t stingy, but you couldn’t expense a stick of gum without submitting a Bible’s worth of expense reports, and here they were simply giving away brain scans like they were pens at a business fair. It was a whole thing.
At first I got an inkling some nitwit at Health & Safety up the corporate ladder had probably poured the whole budget into this single project and the whole thing would vanish when the board took notice, but it was well integrated into the company structure: HR would grant you the day off, no questions asked, if you mentioned you were going to get your scan, but you actually HAD to go then: people would start calling you. Some guy at the office apparently had an itch for a long weekend and took the monday off to get his scan but never actually went, figuring it was only a corporate courtesy; he got REALLY yelled at… and then got another paid day off to go actually get his scan.
That said, MRIs are expensive. A lot of people simply took them over the course of the first few months of the program. Hell, I did, and I don’t really care for my health all that much, but I’m not one to leave money on the table. It came out okay, thanks for asking.
Seriously, nothing came of it for a while. We joked about it at lunch and every time the microwave broke down or something like that. “So that’s where the coffee budget went!” There was this really good one where the microwave had a soyjak face and— ah, you wouldn’t get it. We shared posts about the impossibly hot doctors that were really interested in your spinal fluid. But we also had brunch and Chris got married and I finished a race. A lot of stuff happened.
…And then inevitably, it got weird. Yeah, you knew it was coming. This isn’t a story about a company with a harmless brain fetish. It had to get weird.
So I ran a race, right? Well, I ran it with Chris. Chris is this amazing, perfect machine of a man who does everything right. He’s smart, handsome, warm with a broad smile and a firm handshake. He talked me into running with him thrice a week as he was getting in shape for his wedding. He, of course, ran every single day. Chris’ story is all the more amazing because he was actually born with hydrocephalus. He showed us some baby pictures where his head is like, real big. It doesn’t really impact him on the daily as an adult, he just has a shunt that drains his extra spinal fluid into a cavity in his torso.
Ah, now you see where this is going.
Well, maybe not, because the Dow Chemical Company isn’t fucking stupid. They didn’t kidnap Chris to harvest his brain juice with a turkey baster, or anything like that. They did, however, promote him. Many times, in a very short timeframe.
Chris was a mere QA Supervisor, but he dreamed of going over to Health & Safety. He was actually pretty on board with the whole brain scan thing, even if he found it a little off the beaten path in terms of corporate sponsored health initiatives. Specially given his… condition.
Yeah.
It wasn’t long after his wedding when Corporate took notice. I guess it was an insurance thing, some box he ticked somewhere. And then things got real good for him. First, he got called into a meeting with H&S, which was both exciting a bit scary, he told us over rice noodles in the break room one day. The microwave was still broken by the way. The next day, he stood up from his desk and walked into our largest meeting room, and walked back two hours later with the biggest smile I’ve ever seen plastered on his face. He was gonna be a star!
He told us excitedly how they were very impressed with his track record and interest in the department, and when a coworker had written a glowing recommendation letter to them about his most inspiring story, they just had to meet him. They extended him an invitation to participate in a special “inspiration all around us” capsule, to be sent as a mass email every month. Nobody reads those, but we would for our friend. I couldn’t help wondering though, who wrote that letter? Did anyone? Or had corporate been digging through his medical records? Had they been through mine, too? Why?
And then…nothing else happened. I got a different, better, remote job. Chris now works in Dow H&S and shares daily posts on workplace safety. I don’t think I’ve seen a photo of him where he isn’t wearing a safety vest in years.
I’ve met with my former coworkers for drinks a couple of times over the years, a group that dwindles in size as people move away, have children, or make cooler friends. Chris doesn’t, though. I’m told he doesn’t drink anymore.
I need to really underline the following: I don’t know nor care what is Dow Chemical doing with people’s brain juice. The most charitable explanation I can come up with is that they are getting a very juicy tax rebate for focusing on hydrocephalus relief, but that doesn’t square with the absolutely massive budget that the brain juice people had.
What do I really think is happening? Well, Dow is a chemical company that has faced thinning profits in the last years. Their business always starts with a massive expenditure in production infrastructure.
The Dow Chemical that brought pesticides and agrochemicals to the entire world, that levelled half of Vietnam? I think they’re back, baby.