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It's been a while, I know; I've been unusually peaceful and content recently, although it might simply be the East-Coast heat I've been enjoying that's keeping me listless and apathetic. Still, five days a week I get a blast of air-conditioning that wakes me up, which at the same time usually gets my temper up as well: Attending my job. It's come to my attention recently that working for a living sucks-not because of the work, mind you, but because of the fucking 'corporate culture' poor souls like me have to endure. The great majority of us have to work in order to survive. I've always been a white-collar, deskbound worker, the sort of worker who gets a cubical and a long string of bosses-not such a bad life, and it certainly beats hard physical labor or living on the street as far as I can tell. The inescapable suck involved in working for a large corporation is slow to manifest, because in the early stages of your employment, you're usually just happy to have once again avoided the unemployment downward spiral into homelessness-it's easy to imagine that all the homeless people on the streets started off by not getting that job. And perhaps their first taste of crack cocaine. So every time I get a new job I always feel like I've danced with death and lived to tell the tale, you know? The feeling of relief that getting the job gives me lasts a few months, the paychecks masking any initial doubts or unhappiness I might have. Oh, but the mask never lasts. Around the six-month mark with any large company I begin to get that taste in my mouth again, the Taste of Suck. There is nothing worse than the taste of suck. There are many, many micro reasons why corporate culture sucks, ranging from the fact that no company kitchen area has anything resembling decent coffee, ever, to the simple indignities of a dress code, which is basically telling a group of grown adults how to dress, a skill which I would imagine we'd all mastered by around age nine. The micro reasons are merely the symptoms, however; the true culprits in this daily dance with Suck are the macro reason, which is A MASSIVE MISUSE OF WASTED RESOURCES. High School has nothing on a corporate job for bullshit. Supposedly, we're hired to perform a job, a job we're ostensibly trained for. You might imagine that in a sane world you'd be left to do your job, and judged accordingly. In truth, you poor, naive bastards, your average corporation spends a tremendous, huge, insane amount of its money and collective energies making sure you dress properly, observe a raft of more or less arbitrary rules concerning use of equipment and pursuit of personal business on company time, and the ever-elusive creature known as employee moral. In other words, instead of spending their time and energy on getting the work done, they spend it on bullshit, the amount of which is in direct proportion to the Suck Level in the average office. Maybe this just sounds like bitter bitching, but it isn't. While I find the level of Suck to be irritating to my sensitive clown skin, in general it's no big deal, and if a particular company's Suck level gets too high I can always go elsewhere to find a less chlorinated environment. But I'm outraged at the MASSIVE MISUSE OF WASTED RESOURCES. Partly because watching people run amok pouring energy into Suck is always irritating, whether it's at my job, or overseas in, say, Iraq, and partly because the bastards could be paying me more if they'd stop putting money into Suck. I've tried composing memos about this subject, but they never get taken seriously. Oh well. No one's probably still reading this. The only thing I get e-mails about these days is Avril Lavinge, anyway. I'm writing this at work and if someone sees me, the Suck will envelope me and smother me right out of here, so I'd better end here. Until next time, remember that everything sucks. |
July 18, 2003