My final post ever...at the office

This picture, while not an authentic replica, offers a decent idea of the space in which I've been mostly blogging on since this blog started up in July. It is a plain space, lurid and shiftless, and more boring than a Mass on Palm Sunday (plus it doesnn't come with a creepy smiling single mom). Its only saving grace: this computer and its corporate-funded high speed Internet connection, which I've exploited for over a month now. And this blog, my friends, has been the result of that exploitation.

Without giving away too much info, here's the scenario I've been in: in between grad school years I worked as a temp out of a downtown Columbus office, and they hooked me up with a pretty sweet-looking part time gig as both an assistant of development and on-call receptionist. No sweat, I've done this shit for a while, right? Well, I guess it only goes to show that the more time I spend in these office environments, the more bullshit I find.

Right now this fat bitch in the cubicle opposite of mine is complaining about...oh, something, I don't know. It doesn't really matter. It seems that every office has to have at least one (but often two to four) fat bitches spending about 20% of their work day doing nothing but complaining to their coworkers about how shitty their life is. I remember this one idiot fat bitch at an old real estate office I worked at who would take her time to come to me directly and complain about the most trivial shit, like how she'd been up at 4:30 in the morning exercising (yeah right) and wouldn't be finished with work until 9 pm that evening. Like I give a fuck. Fortunately no one's complained to me directly about anything, it's just working in this open environment that makes me receptive to all the "woe-is-me" personalities around my desk. It makes me want to cut myself while listening to the Downward Spiral over and over again.

But right, why is it that no one ever complains to me about their problems? Probably because they barely acknowledge my existence. As an assistant to the director of development, my primary supervisor is, well, the director of development. The only problem is, I think she's a cokehead or something, because she often doesn't come into work unil 10 o'clock, whereas I got in at 8. (she's also the daughter of the big boss, if that helps explain things) The boss overseeing her (the Director of Ops) would be the next person to talk to, and he's a good guy with a good heart, but all the multi-tasking his job entails leaves me left behind in the woodwork.

Not that I'm complaining.

I've done work like this enough to know when you have to view the glass as half-full instead of half-empty. Instead of doing actual work for most of the day, I've been getting paid $10.20 an hour to register for fall classes, catch up on my Dostoevsky, manage my fantasy football team, bid on useless things on eBay, and most importantly, keep this thing up to date. How the hell can I complain about the situation I've been living in? The trick, I learned, is to keep your mouth shut and look like you're being productive. After the first few days, when I had little to do (and trust me, this job gave me very little to do, thanks to the incompetence of my immediate supervisor) I would ask people if they needed help with anything. Often times the answer would be no, and I realized that if I just stayed out of people's hair they'd take less notice of me. I'd become inferior to them, like an insect on the wall and oblivious to all higher-ups. I know most people don't like inferority, but in this case, it was a great fucking position to be in! That's fucking freedom! Don't we all live for that? I mean, the very fact that I'm taking about forty minutes out of my work day to describe kind of massive bullshit the office is shows how much freedom I have, and that's all kinds of awesome. It'd be nice if I could get paid better for it, but it is a temp job.

Some other observations from office work:

• There's at least two guys in here (and they're both jackoffs) who were pink shirts on a regular basis. I thought that cliche died in 2005. The pink shirt is an abomination to men everywhere, and if you're a breast cancer survivor who was offended by this sentence, I don't care. REAL MEN HATE PINK. They wear black. Yeah. Black shirt FTW.


• The workspace makes you that less funnier and less creative. You end up laughing at the corniest jokes. You say the most predictable things. You drive yourself into a pattern of "normal, normal, normal" or "blend, blend, blend" and that's who you become. This is why people say college is the best time of their lives, because they allow this shit to happen to them. This is also what Tyler Durden was talking about, in a way. If you decide to go into office work for the long run, don't let the group mentality overcome you. Rebel in some way, whether it's growing your hair long, wearing jeans on Friday afternoon, or writing a blog about how your life sucks. You'll find some way.

(For the record, my life doesn't suck, because I spent the past two months essentially getting paid to write about sports. Remember that.)

I really don't have much more to say. I guess I can be so laissez-faire about office work because I really did detest it. I detested dressing in slacks and a tie every day and looking and acting like everyone else. I despised the standards that corporate offices employ on their employees for how they should act and interact, enforcing what it means to act and behave like a professional. Fuck that motherfucking shit. I am a professional! It just so happens that my profession isn't in life insurance policies, but rather in making fun of you slackasses. (and music too) So you go on ahead in your gray suits and double grande lattes, filing away massive amounts of meaningless paperwork while bitching about how you have to have your nails done before dinner, because when it all boils down, the vast majority of you have already made the decision to do nothing meaningful with your lives except make money, and you can't take it with you. In other words, you're already dead, bitches.

God damn I'm awesome. And He agrees, too.