So, I'm reading this novel, Then We Came To the End, by Joshua Ferris. A friend lent it to me about a month ago and I took to it immediately. To say it's about office culture wouldn't really do it justice, but it does embrace the intricacies of the office microcosm and explores them in squirm-worthy, knowing, lurid detail, all the while hinting at some sort of ending of magnitude. I'm not there yet, but I'm indulging in its many nods to the way functioning in an environment of unmemorable carpet and pressboard shelving can feel like a sort of robbery. Its cover is adorned, edge to edge, in blank yellow Post-It notes--a perfect homage to the empty confinement of spending our days sharing strange space with stranger people, and the surprising blankness of outrage.
I was engrossed last Tuesday night, as usual, when the following passage flew off the page and stopped my heart:
"There was so much unpleasantness in the workaday world. The last thing you ever wanted to do at night was go home and do the dishes. And just the idea that part of the weekend had to be dedicated to getting the oil changed and doing the laundry was enough to make any of us still full from lunch want to lie down and insist that all those who remained committed walk around us. It might not be so bad. They could drop food down to us, or if that was not possible, crumbs from their power bars and bags of microwave popcorn would surely end up within an arm's length sooner or later. The cleaning crews, needing to vacuum, would inevitably turn us on our sides, preventing bedsores, and we could make little toys out of any runs in the carpet, which, in moments of extreme regression, we might suck on for comfort. But enough daydreaming. Our desks were waiting, we had work to do. And work was everything. We liked to think it was family, it was God, it was following football on Sundays, it was shopping with the girls or a strong drink on Saturday night, that it was love, that it was sex, that it was keeping our eye on retirement. But at two in the afternoon with bills to pay and layoffs hovering over us, it was all about the work."
I read and re-read that chunk of text three times before closing the book and nodding off. As I slept it rattled around in my brain like a loose screw I could hear but couldn't locate--irritating, tinkling, eventually banging and demanding I notice it. It was still with me when I woke up. The bit about microwave popcorn (someone's always making that), the reference to runs in the carpet, the way Ferris reminds me how it's really the tiny details that become our undoing in an office rather than the major committments of sin by management against underling. In the end, it's never really the lack of recognition, the passing us over for a better position, the eternal underpaying and overworking. No, it's more the cumulative nothings, like the the fact that The Company didn't invite us to dinner with the huge client even though we scored her in the first place, the sudden end of summer Fridays, insistance that we not eat Chinese food in our offices because they don't like the way it smells, and interrupting our meetings to ask for their messages (of which there are none). It's those idiocies, minor in nature and major in number, that have combined in my work life to numb me nearly to death.
Wednesday morning after reading the above passage, I woke up. I sat in another meeting listening to another spiel about another "opportunity to be seized" and thought, 'I will no longer be someone's opportunity-seizer without real financial compensation for it.' There's just simply a limit to how much work I'll do for The Company for free. And we're way over capacity. Way, way over capacity. So in the afternoon, I walked into management's office and told them that we needed to re-examine my "compensation to contribution" ratio. I have no idea where I got that phrase, but I think the looming fear of falling asleep on a floor covered in microwave popcorn and carpet runs was beginning to unzip me. In response, The Company offered the requisite passive-aggressive reminder of what they've done for me, reminded me of how underpaid everyone in our office is (that's supposed to make it fine??) and ultimately said they'd do something.
The deal is this: I'm building myself a bridge over which to walk into a different life. This job has its term limit, and we're nearing it. It's the next big makeover on the Chrysalis plan and is perhaps the biggest steel anchor of all, weighting me to my old life. It's a place where I regularly allow myself to be undervalued, understimulated, unchallenged and undefined. I've got to insist, no, fucking demand that I save myself from suckling for safety on shreds of blue carpet.
I don't know what'll come of my request for better compensation. In the end, I think it's most important that I asked for it. That I knew to ask for it. I felt it the minute I left The Office--the deep sense that I'd set off a chain of events that couldn't be undone. I guess that was the point.
