Sloane brought our paychecks around one Friday and with them was our bonus check for that quarter. I opened the envelope containing my check before Sloane could walk away.

“A fucking $9.86 bonus?!” I yelled.

Shaun opened his as well. “Look at that, dude, $8.41. That’s some bullshit.”

Others shouted the amounts of their checks and several bolted toward Sloane who tried to make a getaway into the foremen’s office building, but failed and found himself surrounded. I joined them.

“Gentlemen,” he pleaded, his hands raised, “I do not control the amount of money you get for your bonus.”

An older man with a thick red beard and mustache pushed himself at Sloane to the point that their noses were touching.

“We work like fucking dogs! You tell me how we work that goddamned hard and this is all we get for a bonus?!”

Sloane backed up and the men behind him gave him a bit of room.

“Your bonus is calculated on the number of hours you work,” he explained.

I looked around me at the faces of the others as the realization hit us: the harder we worked the more work we completed, the more work we completed the more orders we filled, the more orders we filled the more money the company made, and the fewer hours it took us to fill the orders the smaller our bonus check would be. Our faces hardened and with one mind we seemed to agree that dismembering Sloane on the spot wouldn’t change this overarching structure of the whole damned world.