I'm a temp. All hail my mighty temp powers! HAIL THEM!
Excellent. Now that that's taken care of, let's talk about office work. There's been a lot of art coming out the last decade about the dangers cubicleland wreaks on the human psyche. "Dilbert," "Fight Club," "Office Space," "And then we came to end," just to name a few. You've seen or read at least one of these.
Now, I'm a pretty experienced office worker, in that I've never worked any other job. I've never flipped a burger, folded a sweater, or worked a cash register in my life, but I can do data entry and answer phones like nobody's business. Furthermore, I am a fourth-generation office worker. My mother works in an office, her mother worked in an office, and HER mother was the secretary to the Ambassador to the Philippines. So I know what I'm talking about when I say that the hatred of office culture and cubicleland, while not entirely unfounded, isn't exactly a new phenomenon, despite what pop culture may indicate.
The fact is, women have been stuck pushing paper and compiling TPS reports at cramped desks since the turn of the century. It's often the only work we can get. But as soon as men began to sit at desks and compare numbers to other numbers for eight hours a day, suddenly we have a cultural movement. Suddenly everyone is worried about the ennui produced by such mindnumbing, soulsucking work, and books are written about the detriment cubicleland is having on our collective consciousness, COMPLETELY IGNORING the women who have been enduring such work since our great-grandmother's day.
I've been seething over this for a while, and I think the people in high places are starting to take note. Today, I read this sentence in a series of course descriptions that I'm proofreading for blah blah blah, it doesn't matter, it's data entry and it's in my blood, I'll never escape it.
Here is the sentence: "The viewer is in your mind with your neurosis delusions."
I think I'm being watched...
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