I hate business. I wish I had enough energy left in my angry little self to write an epic ten-pager about “business”, and how it’s all so ridiculous and petty and stupid and killing my soul. And my friends’ souls. By the millisecond. Sure, you could watch The Office and get the picture – it’s legitimately amusing and certainly does a fine job of lambasting a lot of office types that deserve to be lambasted. But The Office is funny, and while no one is making their dreams come true one Dunder-Mifflin ream of paper at a time, it doesn’t seem like anyone is consciously shriveling away into numb, zombie-esque dust.
I am the first to admit that I have no idea about what is meaningful or important. I’m sure people who go into fields like social work and veterinary medicine (for the right reasons) can consider themselves involved in meaningful work. Same goes for those running rape prevention centers and suicide prevention centers and syphilis prevention centers and whatever other prevention centers are being run.
I don’t know what kind of working person I am. I don’t consider myself to be a lazy artsy fucktard, waiting tables by day and splashing acrylic paint on a canvas and weeping over my own creativity by night. I do know that me sitting behind a desk pretending to give even one fucking shit about anything that I’m supposed to be doing is a waste of my life. Who the fuck invented business meetings? How do some people sit in a room and talk about paper quality and brochures and invoices without stabbing themselves up their noses and ripping away their sinuses? And when you force me to join in on those meetings, how could you possibly think I would ever care? And how have you convinced yourself that you care? I’ve had a fake business smile/persona for less than five years and it is already cracking like a middle-aged white lady.
This shit is not okay. Conversations about “Marketing” are not okay. Not only is marketing not a science, it’s not real! All successful “Marketing” really equals is being inherently interesting or relevant. It’s no fucking secret that fat ass Midwestern lardchunks + drunken me at 3am are going to eat some Taco Bell, with or without your damn chihuahua. And even if it is the chihuahua- who cares? Who cares about any of this? Why does it matter and why do I have to be trapped behind a desk in a stuffy, dirty office surrounded by socially inept freaks, pretending to care, in order to avoid being homeless?
I have this idealized notion of temp work in the 1980s, because I was a very astute first grader and very tuned into nuance (plus I watched Working Girl repeatedly and shat myself with pleasure each time). It seemed like there was all this lame temp work going around, but it was being filled by a community of people who totally saw through it, who could laugh about it at lunch together, who met up after it was over for drinks and comedy shows and bad plays and terrible poetry readings and basically were able to use their day money to pay rent and their free time to do whatever kind of projects they loved. They didn’t have to get INVESTED in their 9-5 bullshit. No one expected the aspiring writer or singer or even law student to fucking give a shit about whatever they were typing up or filing. They left at the end of the day and that was that – they helped out soul-less corporations and soul-less corporations gave them enough money to not have to sleep in a pile of dirty snow in Tompkins Sq Park. The end.
I don’t really know where I’m going with this except to say that I hate the recession, I hate how we’ve all tricked ourselves into thinking that making postcards and pricing popcorn and tallying sales figures in Micro-fucking-soft Excel is what we love. We have all but given up on doing anything that might make us happy for fear it will also make us homeless. Is this okay at all? Is it wrong for me to both whine about hating my job and simultaneously whine about not wanting to live in my 2-door Hyundai Tiburon? I feel like those are both valid complaints with no real answer. It makes me sad and increasingly depressed to watch my talented, interesting, funny friends wither away behind barely middle-class salaries and awful managers. Sure, most of my friends don’t hate their jobs as much as I do, but I don’t know too many of them who wouldn’t drop their jobs like a pair of herpes infected balls if they had the chance to pursue something they really loved. So fuck you business. Fuck fucking you.
