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.

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.