19th Aug 09

It’s becoming increasingly hard to live in a world, where I am asked with all the threatening seriousness of a superior asking a subordinate, ‘why was the shift report sent 15 minutes early?’ The ire that such an innocuous question raises is almost psychopathically dangerous; as though I had been asked to move the Rock of Gibraltar with a teaspoon, and once completed, denigrated for not having ‘done it nicely’. I think it’s more than enough that the tedium of work takes up 8 hours a day, without some small minded office bureaucrat berating me for the presumptuous sending of an email a whole quarter of an hour early.

Work

They say time heals all: but tonight
The ticking clock hails nothing new,
But endless seconds echoed away 'till five o'clock;
The first timid trace of dawns' dim light.

The air is thick. It doesn't move, but hangs,
just as it does in the light. Theres no difference then
between night and day, no cut off point,
no spiritual sensation of a big bang

To mark something changed. Tomorrow,
The working day will be the same, the coffee,
Idle chatter with the clerk at her desk:
Days marked by an ever deepening sorrow.

Coolio

Oh Lord, save me from everything iniquitous,

Oh Lord, save me from myself

Save me from Tuesday night’s and sat on the edge of the bed

Staring with existential dread,

Save me from holiday’s
Save me from nothing to do
Save me from TV, coffee, tea & death
Save me from me

Save me from pencil death staring at the whiteboard of eternity
As pencil necked men pencil in pointlessness on the eyelid’s of
Monday morning, face fucked from here to Friday on the back
Of productivity & pro-activity & performance, Oh Lord! Save
Them for they do not know, oh Lord! Save them for they do not see
The words that haunt them are the words that
Blind them, the words that blind them
Are the words of work that blinds and
Haunts them, on Tuesday’s of Huddles at three PM
When the soul is stretched thin over coals
Of scores racked up & spat out & sucked up
Into the vacuum of the Trial of the Castle of
Postmen going postal, of old age and pension
Slips, collected and dejected marching out of
Post offices, unwanted & unloved and hated above &
Below and holed
just there.

Franz Kafka, Disgruntled Office Worker

Let's face it, he probably was. If you've ever read any of his books, you'll see the obvious parallels: but if he were alive now, I think Franz would be locking and loading and thinking it's time to go postal. I'm writing this because Kafka hit the nail on the head: psychologically the position we are forced to put ourselves into for work is tantamount to indoctrination. Obviously this doesn't apply to everyone, but the average Joe (such as myself) works in an office, hitting buttons and copying/pasting for eight hours a day sat behind a screen that is slowly boiling your eyes, but it's not left that at that. Now you have to live the company, breath in it's acrid air of superiority and kowtow to the machinations of managers and mysterious HR departments without the smallest bit of dialogue interchanged. To be successful in an office now, means foregoing personality for the majority of your life. You can't be to loud, but you have to be a "pro-active communicative member of the team", you have to have constructive input, but it must be praise and not negative (saying that such and such is wrong is frowned upon).

Such as it is, the office presents an irreconcilable dichotomy that cannot be resolved in the psyche. It offers you the chance to express yourself, but that expression must be within the terms that the company wants. Essentially it gives you the illusion of freedom to be who you are, but when you try to get this "out there", the illusion if sadly shattered as your free will is not the companies, but not just on a business sense, but on how you conduct yourself. With such a paradox in place, is it any wonder that stress, anxiety, and depression are now occurring to more people than ever before? Much as K finds himself in a situation where he thinks he is progressing, the illusion is taken away repeatedly, until he (us) questions everything about life and whether we are intrinsically wrong!

Speaking of the office, I better get back to work now. God I hate my job.