On Tuesday I get the memo. “There will be a mandatory meeting Saturday, 2/10/07, from 9 to 9:55 a.m. Please bring your Operations Manual.”
On Friday I check the bus schedule and for the millionth time I curse My Fair City’s public transit company. Where is Charles Foster Kane when I need him, and his oh-so yellow journalism, to protect me from Trimet Corp. and its pack of money grubbing pirates?
On Saturday I rise and catch the bus. I read Woman on the Edge of Time. My commute is ninety minutes of sit, stand, and wait. I put twenty-six pages to bed before I arrive.
Inside my coworkers are ranged around the desk. My manager allows himself the privilege of standing. He addresses us in a direct, unhesitant voice that is used to being listened to. A manager’s voice. His bald plate of a head glows in the overhead lights. He tells us that, in 2006, our call center processed seven hundred thousand two hundred and ninety-six tickets. I am supposed to be impressed.
We are told to meet quota in the upcoming busy season. We are told which door to exit through in case of a fire. We are told not to put our feet on our desks, chairs, power strips, or cubical walls. We are told the team who moved our furniture to its new location spent five hours cleaning the walls of our “pods,” and that it was “not fun.” We are told to clean up after ourselves. Candy bars may be eaten at our desks, but “messy” food is off limits. “We have a nice break room for all of you. Use it, alright?”
Nine o’clock becomes nine-fifteen becomes nine fifty-five. We’re told to hang our coats on coat wracks and sit quietly at our desks. I think of kindergarten. The rules were exactly the same in Mrs. Neatherton’s class and the only “pods” that concerned me were Seth Brundle’s telepods. I think back to my five year-old self, and the first time I watched David Croneberg’s The Fly. I think of Geena Davis literally knocking Jeff Goldblum’s block off.
“And remember,” our manager says, “whenever you press your ‘Mute’ button, what you say still goes on the recording. All your calls are recorded. The microphone is always on. And sometimes the board members are listening.”
We are, to him, giant five year-olds in need of constant supervision. That being impossible, the “adults” being busy with their own, oh-so important lives, our supervisory benefactors revert to their favorite default method of control: fear.
“Fear,” as Darth Maul once told us (in a line cut from the finished film, thank you very fucking much, literally cutting his spoken performance in half) “is the mind-killer. Fear is my weapon.” A certain “path to the dark side,” fear is also the most effect means of self-enforcement known to man…in any galaxy. Fearful individuals are too busy watching their own backs (or mouths, as the case may be) to ask questions, demand leniency, or feel patronized by jumped-up, self-important authority figures. They want us to worry about our every move. They want us cowed into a state of glassy-eyed stupidity. They need us to police ourselves because (as has been true throughout history) there are far more of us than there are of them, and their masters are all-too ready to subscribe to the same tactics.
Thus fear, like an avalanche, flows downward, always gathering force as it goes, leaving those of us down in the trenches of our modern, service economy to bear the brunt of its weight. Any good German (or good America) will tell you that the fearful are the most compliant and compliant parts allow the machinery to move all the more swiftly.
“Remember, the moment you come into work, you decide whether or not to have a good day. It’s your choice.” The only choice we, at the lowest levels, are allowed in view of all of the above. Do we accept the repetitive, mechanistic character of our work, which requires virtually none of our conscious attention? Do we ignore the fact that we are, daily, reduced to the level of component parts if a societal machine erected for no better purpose than to preserve a corporation’s private property at the behest of a government? Do we reject any grandiose delusions we might have that we are really creative, intuitive, rational, inventive, human individuals with individualized needs, beliefs, experiences or capacities? Do we ignore the fact that every one of our callers possesses all these traits as well? Do we merely sit and work, screaming in desperation behind the smiles frozen to our faces (“Remember: they can hear a smile in your voice”), unable, even, to sympathize with our fellow toilers for fear that some suit with visions of lawsuits dancing in his head might fire us because of an offhand remark?
We are meant to, yes, as to acknowledge the consciousness destroying quality of “work” (which “requires” so little “exertion of physical or mental effort” that I’m beginning to doubt its claim to the word, as defined by my copy of the Oxford) would render us incapable of performing it. The sheer absurdity of the situation would reduce us to giggling heaps, were we motivated by our own survival to maintain a facade of seriousness. Sometimes this happens to me, and I know now that my every bout of uncontrollable laughter survives, somewhere, sleeping next to every muttered curse, every offhand comment and every paranoid utterance.
However, my manager is right to say the choice remains in our hands. We could always chose to merely act as if we’ve made the choice. Turn these choices into a role, breathing new life into the Bard’s old world as we “performed” our working “lives” for an audience of “superiors”, remaining just sentient enough to play the role of obedient machines. The only danger in that was articulated by Nietzsche a century and a quarter ago, in one of his most over-used of quotes: Beyond Good and Evil’s Epigram and Interlude 146. All together now:
“Whosoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”
Strange to hide that thought, of all places, amidst a page of unmitigated nineteenth century sexism.
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