It’s fascinating to me how often people talk about Xeno reacting poorly to corporate America, etc., etc., when I think it’s actually pretty important that he has never worked for a corporation. He’s a civil servant, and Stan also works for the government in a different capacity, so he can’t even hit up his best friend for a reality check.
And I think that really would impact what he was expecting when he got into it. Corporate America is all money and social schmoozing (in theory). Government and academia do almost all of the fundamental scientific research to keep everything running and developing. We have so much tech that has filtered into the public thanks to NASA and the NIH and such like.
And, well, Xeno’s been through academia. Clearly the academic grant funding process was not for him, and anyway, academia is a lot more theory-based and a lot less practical most of the time, and he likes building things. And NASA is...NASA.
Xeno might have thought it would be focused scientific research, but NASA is a government organization ruled and funded by politics. By goodwill and reputation. I’ve seen that NASA employee say that they couldn’t have as many rocket failures as SpaceX because the government just wouldn’t have it. They cannot simply spend money and brute force their way through trial and error. Everything they do has to be checked, double checked, approved, and run through layers and layers of bureaucracy to spend tax dollars on it. He has to pitch his projects well, because otherwise he’s never going to get permission for anything. The government simply does not want to invest in science the way he wishes it would (Stan's getting all the money instead, oops. Except not actually Stan, because we pay our service members shit, too).
It’s not like there aren’t other places Xeno could have worked as a rocket engineer. SpaceX. Lockheed Martin. Boeing. And on and on. But he picked government work. He could’ve been corporate, but he didn’t go that route. And, okay, the true Doylist reason he works for NASA is because of its name recognition, but as far as Watsonian explanations, I think he picked it for a reason. It says something about who he is, whether or not the Inagaki...actually intended it to say any of those things.
So Xeno is a civil servant with no experience in corporate America, and I think that actually made his jaded reaction worse. And he picked it despite the worse pay and benefits around things like pensions and time off and regular work hours and decidedly not the little perks corporate America gets like free coffee or snacks or free cake for birthdays or corporate holiday parties or a day off to make pizzas or volunteer as “team building.”
Because the government doesn’t get that kind of thing. People always get up their ass about wasteful tax dollar spending if they do things like give their employees coffee. They have reliably 40 hours work weeks with almost no overtime, even for exempt employees like Xeno is. He would get comp time, not extra pay for any extra hours he works, but he is not going to be encouraged or even allowed to work longer hours. The government doesn’t really like having to compensate for that. So probably only for launch crunch time type things. He might not work a typical schedule, to have international meetings, but reliably 40 hours.
I don’t actually think Xeno’s a workaholic, exactly, but I do suspect getting kicked out of the labs and office after 40 hours a week annoys him if he was in the middle of something, dammit. I hope it means he gets plenty of time to devote to his own stuff.
But not a lot of money to devote to it. It seems relatively common to write him as a wealthy individual, and I am fascinated by this. Xeno is a government employee. He makes jack. He is a highly educated scientist. Of course he makes jack. Working for NASA comes with prestige, not money.
I’ve looked up what his and Stan’s salaries would most probably be in 2025, and it’s not terrible for their ages and childlessness, because they’re both well ahead in their careers from a very early start because they’re both freak prodigies, but they’re not making great money, either, especially considering Houston is actually a pretty expensive city. Xeno is making like. Probably can get an apartment with in-unit laundry and a gym money. He’s not making BMW and heated floors money (also BMWs are kind of known for being unreliable and in the shop all the time and I don’t think Xeno would be into that).
I mean, maybe Xeno’s hoping to get rid of some of those ridiculous student loans he must have with civil service, but that doesn’t seem to be the vibe.
So Xeno probably has a reasonably comfortable but not luxurious lifestyle, and he pretty much has to pay for everything at work, including his coffee addiction.
But one of my friends was just sure they had to do something for employee morale, and while I was dubious, I did find what NASA does for employee morale, at least at the JSC, which is what’s relevant here anyway.
It’s called Starport. This is where all their team building and morale events are, all their parties and employee discounts and gifts and the like are. And they get away with it by this:
AKA: the employees are paying for this stuff. The vending machines and lunches and events—they gotta pay for it.
It’s actually wild how much stuff about NASA employee-exclusive stuff is available online. Like. A lot of this would be on the intranet at any private company I’ve ever worked at. What’s even going at NASA. I don’t understand. I can find their old holiday party events and their recreational class schedules and locations on their public website. Sure, I can’t get into the JSC buildings that easily, probably (there are public access locations???), but I’ve worked in secured locations and still???
Fun fact: what they do for the holidays at the end of the year, and for most holidays, it seems, is after-hours family-friendly events. The holidays included a bounce house and an ugly sweater contest, and it cost 10 dollars a ticket last year. It’s nice to know he could easily invite Stan to these things, but also the idea of Xeno spending twenty dollars to go to an event with an ugly sweater contest and a bounce house for children is killing me. I don’t. I don’t know that I—
As for work discounts (why is this so publicly available), I found an apartment complex near the JSC offering loads of NASA discounts (not even remotely surprised by that), but also this, which had me wheezing.
This place also has a military discount one day a week, so cheap date night, I guess? The idea of Xeno’s coworkers walking in to try out their new discount thing and finding Xeno canoodling with a terrifying supermodel is so damn funny to me. “I’m kind of not surprised he knows this much about guns, but who’s the blond? What do you mean he’s married? What do you mean he’s married to someone that hot?”
So anyway. Food for thought about Xeno’s work life, why and how he ended up there, and ways to intentionally shove Stan into Xeno’s coworkers’ presence.
