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At least it was in the middle 1980s. My parents worked for them for a while. U-Haul bought their company and kept them on for a few months to teach the U-Haul management team the tricks of the trade. They might as well have given ten thousand monkeys a typewriter and demanded a best-seller. Six months turned into a year turned into three years. The money was good. They were not hassled. But they brought home an endless series of often hilarious corporate bullshit stories.
They also brought some of the corporate literature home -- it was Scientological in its grandiosity, but unlike the fruit of Ron's imagination, there were no claimed benefits; you worked for the profit and the pleasure of The Company, and that was that. The attitude toward the employees was abusive, to say the least. If you think Wal-Mart is bad, U-Haul in the early 1980s made them look positively benign. For example, the management literature contained numerous snide remarks about how workers who were injured on the job were to be assumed to be "goldbricking".
I'm not sure that it's changed much in two decades. The last time I rented a truck from them, I got into a conversation with one of the workers, and asked her how badly she hated the place. She just smiled and said we "shouldn't go there".
I remember one memo, consisting entirely of the main corporate mantra printed on a big piece of paper, something like "PAMWLE = HWFTO" which was an acronym for something like "pissing and moaning will lead everyone to hell whacking off in a fucking handbasket" (I don't remember it exactly, but it was expletive-filled) -- and was pronounced "Pamally Whifto". There was a master list of about fifty of these acronyms, like "5MXP = ABCNWEIN" and "SPCDF/TMNRL" and the suggestively-lettered "2W + 2F + 2C = F4EO" (I interpreted it as "to wank and to fuck and to come is fun for everyone"). It didn't take long until "DS8LDLSD-25" ("Doc Sam Ate All The LSD-25") came into usage. These acronyms would appear in any given piece of official, in-house U-Haul literature, and woe betided a manager who couldn't at least come close to giving a translation without referring to the Big List.
"Doc Sam", of course, was the Fearless Leader; I think his doctorate was either self-awarded or a Dr. Laura type of doctorate. He encouraged a cult of personality to be developed over him. When he died, U-Haul passed to his two sons, who wrangled for control of the old man's empire. One of them showed up at the place where my mother was working one day, and she said he was wearing a $2500 jogging suit ... bragging about it.
Yes: A rich man's son bragging about spending $2500 on a jogging suit, to a bunch of minimum-wage workers who hate his guts, but need the work. I suppose the heirs-apparent to Father Suparmurat will act in similar style, much as the Royal Scion to George H. W. Bush has done. The difference being that while the worst Doc Sam could do was to fire you, Niyazov could order you imprisoned and tortured to death. (The Wrath of Dubya is usually satisfied by a little ole waterboardin' an' some of that-thar extry-ordinary renditiation.)
On the other hand, you can't argue with success -- at least as far as the money goes. Otherwise, you can, and probably should, argue with it. Wal-Mart, Amway, Tupperware, Mary Kay cosmetics, Herbalife vitamins, and A.L. Williams Insurance all made billions of dollars with cult-like operations. They also systematically defrauded, deluded, and outright robbed thousands and tens of thousands of their employees and customers; the Department of Justice has files of the perfidy enough to reach Mars, give the Face on Mars a stylish goatee, and stretch back to the Earth. U-Haul, in that context, was not quite so bad, focusing on the hides and bank accounts of its lower-level management. Niyazov had an entire country and its natural resource base to give him suck.
As the L. Ron Hubbard of rental vehicles would say, "Pamally Whifto!" And so endeth this extensive digression. :)
--p!
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