After a few weeks at ‘The Slim Vacancy,’ Hector and I eventually muster the energy to abandon our bed for the next lucky arrival. We don’t get far before the desolate ‘Nevadan Unemployment Center’ spills off ahead and to the west of the interstate. It’s early evening by the time we reach it- hardly dark but late enough that it doesn’t make sense to go any further. We pick a likely cubicle and, seeing the clouds gather, I unpack the tarp. Rain has already begun to fall by the time I finished the makeshift roof and slump into the cement likeness of a spinning office chair.
‘The Nevadan State Government’s manifestation of an ‘Unemployment Center’ suggests a cruel sense of humor and a severe lack of budget oversight. Though preliminary sketches of the facility are penned with such brutalism that one can’t help but assume it’s design is in jest, the project’s real world manifestation in 2006 did away with the playful artsy pretense and settled on something wholly brutal. Though someone had taken great care to model the cement likenesses of office equipment in each cubicle, the ‘Center’ was, and is, little more than a parking lot of cement outhouses baking in the sun off the interstate.
A series of PSAs aired shortly after work on ‘The Nevada Unemployment Center’ completed and these outlined the project’s simple offer: sit in these cubicles for eight hours a day and receive minimum wage. Humanitarian-based criticisms of the program are well-documented and can be perused elsewhere but most focus on that initial wave of enthusiastic participants. People from all over the state swarmed the cubicles and it soon became a thing all its own: half ironic artist retreat and legitimate tent city. When checks arrived two weeks later, a second wave of ‘employees’ appeared and demanded their turn. Violence followed, enough violence that the plan faced termination and ‘The Unemployment Center,’ a cement slab in the middle of nowhere, had to be fenced-off and guarded- a grand new tax-payer expense.
Interest in ‘The Nevada Unemployment Center’ soon waned and, criticisms aside, the oddball program may well have stabilized had it not been for the final blow. Following a tip from a small-town lawyer named Ricky Handler, all those initial ‘employees’ found they now qualified for severance and a revised unemployment package. A bill arrived somewhere at the statehouse and the guards disappeared overnight. ‘The Nevada Unemployment Center’ was abandoned, spiritually and otherwise. It remains abandoned to this day.
‘The Nevada Unemployment Center’ makes for a poor living space. It’s miles from the nearest town and provides little protection from the elements. It makes for a poor skate park- a poor background for the movers and shakers of modern social media. Nothing thrives there but snakes and tumbleweeds. It serves no real purpose but research suggests that, of all Nevada’s novelties, ‘The Unemployment Center’ will stand longer than just about anything else. If an alien shoe should step on the earth long after the human flame has been extinguished, they will know something of humanity and it will be the cubicle floor-plan of the early millennial office.’
I worked in a video shop when I was a teenager and spent the night there twice. The first time I was snowed in- I made microwave popcorn for dinner and waited out the storm. The second time was for some event- some late-night movie showing for which I never received overtime. Spending the night in a cubicle of ‘The Nevadan Unemployment Center’ reminds me of that place. Too formal to be a home. To familiar to be a business. I knew that store like the back of my hand and I didn’t mind, so much, stretching out on the floor and watching the snow fall. I didn’t mind, so much, catching glimpses of the night sky from the parking lot during that event- the crisp, midnight air. It’s like that, again, when the rain comes down onto the tarp. It’s like that when the wind flicks between the cubicles, rushing past our little shelter. Lightning flashes across the sky and I tell Hector we ought to unplug the cement computer, just in case. He blinks his cloudy eyes and finds a corner to relieve himself in.
A letter finds me two weeks later- something that hardly ever happens. It’s from Nevada and I think, for just a moment, that it might be a check. It’s a warning for trespassing: a generic cease-and-desist as though that little satisfaction might tempt me to return to that little box and to try to live out my life there.
-traveler
