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WORK
The new factories
Mundane,
modern office life is turning us into automatons, and it’s
all in the pay of corporate arseholes
Turn
up, sit down, beaver away all day at some exhilarating spreadsheet
in a massive under-exploitation of your skills, go home, repeat
‘til you’re 50. Oh, and no more than 25 holidays a year,
the bulk of which you won’t be able to take until November
because you’ll be forced to juggle too many ‘projects’
and ‘products’. Too many people from the middle and
working classes are increasingly resigning themselves to such
a life of sucking corporate cock, even though they hate the job,
the robot existence, the office culture and, ultimately, themselves
for sticking with the tedium. Office life is so demoralising that
we’re all wasting away into a shallow acceptance of this
rubbish existence, where dreams, aspirations and aims go unfulfilled
as the primacy of economics — got to pay the bills, still
got student debt, need money for pubs and clubs — goes unchallenged.
Time to question our fates, I think, before the world becomes
one big call centre.
Meeting
up with three mates from a previous job recently in Clerkenwell,
London, the usual mood of welcome reacquaintance was replaced
with more sombre tones. Why? They’re all sick to death of
their mundane 9-5 existence. Opposite, Gavin was frustrated with
the total disdain in which his input was viewed by his seniors;
to my left, Lee was about to leave the continued uncertainty of
working for a ‘new economy’ company; to my right, Cat
was totally fed up with going from one faceless PR company to
another...and finding that the usual corporate bollocks rules
everywhere.
I’ve
been chasing a scaled-down version of my journalistic dream for
four years. And it feels like 44 years already. Bouncing around
from one mediocre post to another, setting up desk next to another
bunch of managers all seemingly hullabaloo with their daily displays
of mutual masturbation. I never thought that such a profession
would bring with it such ritual tedium. But it’s become
clear that the type of job is irrelevant; it’s the overpowering
odiousness of the office that determines the atmosphere. If you’re
lucky enough to work under progressive management in a purpose-built
development with spot-on air conditioning, do exactly what you
wanted to do and live without self-loathing or wounded
ambition, then vacate this rant now. If like the rest of us, you’ve
found yourself unwittingly among, and in the pay of, corporate
pricks where the profit motive far exceeds the concerns for personnel,
then this may ring true.
So
it may be all shiny PCs and state-of-the-art office ‘solutions’,
but in the New Factories these are merely the latest tools of
submission. And it’s no surprise that, at some new offices,
staff have to clock in and clock out — the old tools of the
warehouse and the factory being revived for the unsuspecting computer-literate
generation. Flexi-time clearly not that flexible, then. Really,
it’s just the most blatant method of senior staff trying
to ensure compulsory attendance. This insistence on the herd mentality,
and the subsequent loss of individuality, is paranoid atavism
against the thankfully, growing trend of staff working from home,
which is the surest way of assuring some degree of corporate loyalty:
people tend to react favourably when they realise others have
confidence in their abilities and convictions, people react badly
when they’re looking over their shoulder for the wrath of
the foreman, sorry, the head of sales, the communications chief
or the editorial manager.
"Our
systems had stopped working, jammed with the odour of copy machines,
Tipex, the smell of bond paper and the endless stress of pointless
jobs done grudgingly to little applause. We had compulsions that
made us confuse shopping with creativity, to take downers and
to assume that merely renting a video on a Saturday night was
enough. But now that we live here in the desert, things are much,
much better" Douglas Coupland, Generation X
Thus
the chief effect of this glorious 9-to-whenever-it’s-done
office existence is the alienation of individuality. There are
two main ways in which this development manifests itself —
people who realise the process and instinctively react against
it, and those who don’t even realise this strange corporate
conversion is happening to them.
I’m
definitely in the first group. As a chief sub to whom everything
is directed, I’m expected to be more active, engaging in
meetings with advertisers, marketers and, worse, lovely ‘clients’
from big banks. But I do the basic subbing and organisation job
and leave all the rest to those that relish it. But this is alienating
in itself, as the staunch refusal to get involved in all this
means I’m as quiet as a mouse in the day — safer to
say nothing than to get locked into some asinine strategic business
discussion. I only return to self on departure. The other day
I unusually tried to be helpful, offering suggestions for the
magazine’s website, as it looked awful: the internet ‘guys’
weren’t interested in my ideas as they didn’t correspond
with their own. So fuck them, they won’t be getting any more
‘input’. The email is the only salvation at work
— and it’s definitely not for work. For the many
who can’t afford to join Tony’s computer crusade at
home, it is arguable that our recently-developed dependence on
the electronic post helps to bind us to the office: there may
be some truth in that.
The
second group, of unwitting office robots, transform from acceptable
anonymity to annoying arseholes within months of employment. They’re
easy to spot, the runt of the litter at school, only went to university
‘for something to do’ and in their rabid enthusiasm
for their role as Junior Sales Manager don’t see the whole
risible artifice of the office life (even the titles are overblown
to make you feel important). Before you know it, they’re
like any Jo or Josephine Bloggs down the Slug & Lettuce, boring
their mates, full of enforced jocularity and an unerring faith
in their prospects at the office. And like the patrons of those
wackily-titled-but-bland-as-fuck pubs, their relentless uniformity
and utterly predictable social options marks them out. We KNOW
who you are! They’re the types who’ll email you (and
your boss) on any trivial work development, will call you when
it would be easier to travel the 10 yards and speak face-to-face
and of, course, have no grasp of normal English whatsoever. They’ve
been dehumanised, and they don’t even know it:
((www.tvgohome.com,
11.05pm. Wanking for Coins: Rowland Rivron takes a look at the
world’s most desperate and degrading careers/no.3 Marketing
Executive/Tony Warburton has been working in marketing for ten
years, and is now mentally and physically incapable of describing
a single human emotion without using the word ‘product’
in the same sentence…
Do
you have an ultimately meaningless job? Have you spent years learning
to converse in dense marketing jargon, only to wake up one night
in a clammy sweat, haunted by the certainty that your life’s
work improves the lot of humanity not one iota??...The Killjoy
team would like to hear from you now…)
And
there are variations on these hapless beasts, if not with the
same meek surrender to the corporate culture. There are those
out there who actually like this risible language,
unbending corporate loyalty and…knock, knock IS THERE ANYONE
IN THERE YOU STUPID MONKEYS?? But people do, they actually like
all the flatulent language. Recently, I had a call diverted to
me (thanks!) by some PR manager of a West End hotel, offering
incentives for clients from my company. He prattled on in some
unknown jargon for about 15 minutes, oblivious to my attempts
to tell him I wasn’t the relevant person. I won’t be
‘touching base’ with him again.
In
the end, they’re the same as the "I don’t care"
merchants, those who shamelessly employ these tools for climbing
the corporate ladder of success — literally ‘wanking
for coins’. It’s a reverse of the management/staff exploitation,
and honest enough in itself, but not something I’d ever be
able to live with. Again, they’re easy to spot, thus easy
to avoid. The problem is when you’re at some work do for
the free booze and you get introduced to the Mr Keen, the Mr Brain
Dead or the Mr Power Trip. "Would it be terribly rude if
I stopped listening to you?" It’s also laughable how
important these types consider their job to be. Listen, selling
ad space or developing client relationships makes you — and
the company — some cash, but as Tvgohome says, it’s
"ultimately meaningless". I strongly believe that anyone
can do many of the functions of the modern office, but some choose
not to as they see it for the alienating spiritual atrophy it
is.
So
we’ve been honest with ourselves, we’ve accepted that
it is an execrable, moribund existence, banal beyond reason —
WHICH IT IS. Why then are we unwilling types bothering with it?.
Like
many things, it’s easier to spot the problems than to extricate
yourself from the mire. And the prime factor has to be the debt
cycle that modern twenty-somethings get themselves into. It starts
at university, where you’re actively encouraged to take on
loans and build up overdrafts (especially with the educational
rape of tuition fees), then continues as you discover the new
costs of the graduate life. I haven’t set foot inside higher
education for five years, but I’ve still got Student and
Graduate Loans that will be with me for another half-decade. Then
there’s the rent, transport costs, living costs....I know
I’d get far more job satisfaction on some independent music/sport/whatever
title, but it’s not going to pay the bills.
And
we don’t help ourselves out do we? Post Acid House, the growth
in the culture of going out, and the correlative of increased
consumption of booze and drugs (even more so among females) means
that we’re continually looking to finance the next session,
of whatever variety. And unfortunately, that need must partly
be due to the mundane existence of the office life itself. "Christ,
I’ve had a shit week, boss is on my back, I’m going
to get pissed out of my head/stoned as arse/mashed beyond reason/delete
as the mood prefers on Friday evening. Nowadays, we need this
nihilistic, hedonistic release even more, and people’s attitudes
are often ‘fuck the consequences’. So we need disposable
income.
And
maybe we can’t shake the guilt. We feel that we have to use
our education and training, but with the way many courses are
structured now, that inevitably leads us into an office. The guilt
isn’t often all ours either. There’s also the parental
expectation to deal with. "Ooh I’m so glad he’s
found himself a nice office job and he’s wearing a suit".
I’m not, Mum, I HATE IT! "Hey, son, we’ve invested
in you in all these years, and we want a return on that investment."
Sorry Dad, I didn’t release I was a faceless commodity. Nevertheless,
parents like being placated, and life’s all about concessions,
otherwise we wouldn’t have sold ourselves down the river
in the first place.
So,
we’ve got to pay the bills and earn money to shit up the
wall in an alco- or narco-haze, but even that’s possibly
all a smokescreen for the way this whole sorry, enervatory office
existence saps the creative lifeforce out of you. It’s time
to stop resigning ourselves to an eternal daytime spent ‘liaising’
with people you’d always conspicuously avoided. And the way
this alienating and aspiritual environment is going, it will drive
everybody home. Such regimentation may well become the foci for
minor civil disturbances, followed by practically all staff given
the choice between office and home (like management often already
have). Are offices the antithesis of social intercourse or just
its current manifestation, and thus will the office come to serve
the purposes of domestic niceties? There may be hope for us yet....
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