Here’s something about my job. On slow days I turn Google News on random and read until my eyes cross. In the midst of the media haze I see signs that bloggers (one “g” or two…damnit) are quickly and serupticiously getting their buds nipped by employers for blogging on the job…or even about the job. Writers from London to Amityville to En-Why-Cee face termination, suspension or (horror of horrors) the dreaded Non-Disclosure Agreement, all for doing what the Great Author of Us All merely commanded us to do…speak.
There’s not a law in the world that says corporations can’t force their employees to into silence. Whole books of law explicitly state that this is exactly what corporations have the right to do whensoever they judges their “best interest” are served. Their “best interests” in all cases being self-aggrandizement, expansion of power, of control, whatever the current phraseology (“maximizing capital dividends for Q3, fiscal 2006”) might be.
I admit, these stories scarred me. They fucked me up something awful because I need(ed) this job to survive. Currently dominate visions of Western culture hold that one must pay to exist. All goods and services (from the water you drink to the food you eat to the land on which you exist) are available for exchanged thanks to a magically fictitious substance we call “money”, a handy substitute for power. For control.
Humans, for most of their recorded history, have imbued rare and beautiful stones with the properties of this magically fictitious substance. This practice allowed for some spectacular art and architecture, but could easily grow cumbersome for the unwary rich man. The old saying, “You really can’t take it with you,” means a lot more when it is a royal treasury, you are the king and you are trying to sneak out the back of your summer house in a summer house in a southern province with all your gold and a raving mob of half-starved peasants breaking in the front.
But I digress. I admit, for a moment I was afraid to write about my job. I admit, for a moment there, they had me good and afraid. I apologize for the lapse. As a gesture of miea culpa, I present the first in our Within The Empire’s god-only-knows-how-many-part series:
Cubefarm. Act one.
I’ll tell you what’s good about my job.
The piece of paper thumb-tacked to my cube calls me a Customer Service Specialist. I work for a large software company I will not name (thank god it isn’t Microsoft…I don’t want to live in India), base in the suburban development zone to the west of My Fair City.
Politicians call it “the Silicon Forrest,” an evil term for what was once a beautiful forest. Three of them actually. Pine, spruce, aspen and firs climbed down the Rocky Mountains, crashing into an unbroken swath of sequoa, oak, redwood, sorrel, maple and ferns that marched all the way over the Cascades to the Pacific Ocean. The expedition led by Lewis and Clark trudged through this land two hundred years ago, riding the major rivers down hill after so many months of no where to go but up. By this point they were so desperate to taste something other than fish that they traded salmon to the locals for dogs, which were summarily slaughtered for their meat.
Now trans-national corporations (Nike being top dog) mow the forest down to build golf courses, housing developments, cul-de-sacs, and the root of all Evil, the dreaded “office parks” (another evil phrase that means, “a sprawling, monolithic building composed for right angles and glass and steel, surrounded by acres of parking lot).
My job’s “office park” borders what I’ll charitably describe as “the wetland.” Three large pipes allow brown water to flow beneath a highway over pass. It creates a swamp of cattails, wild barley and crabgrass. The English Ivy my job’s landscapers planted for easy clipping have migrated across the parking lot, and are slowly encroaching. A train track runs beside this place. I’ve never seen a train go by. A flock of ducks lives in the slow moving, murky water. They never seem to do much, either. Most are content to dip their heads below the surface, float along, and clean themselves. In the morning some waddle up into the parking lot and sit in the sun. There droppings stretch across six parking spaces. I’ve come in and nine a.m. to find several with their heads beneath their wings, taking early morning naps. They are either brave, or hopelessly cowed, so trusting of humans they’re doomed to be the first to die should anything happen to our country’s industrial agriculture (another piece of America totally dependent on oil).
There is one Canadian goose living the swamp behind my job. His/her left wing is, or was at some point broken. It juts, curving and hooked, from the goose’s side, immobile, inflexible. S/he obviously will never fly again and seems to be at peace with that. How can you tell, unless you’re Dr. Dolittle? In any case, s/he’s made a life for hishself, waddling up the hill with the ducks, honking at the human gawkers, giving them one beady, yellow eye. The goose is not cowed. S/he will not go down without a fight…or a good running away, at least. A few good pecks, maybe. A few slaps with his/her one good wing before someone…well…
(Incidentally, how come “choking the chickens” gets to be a commonly used euphemism pounding your pud, but no one ever calls it “strangling the goose”?)
Tomorrow (yeah, right, and Joe Lieberman will get beaten in a primary…oh, wait…): I’ll tell you what’s bad about my job.
Tag yourself: Job, The:Ducks:Wage Slavery
No comments:
Post a Comment