POWER MIST: The

JOB

YOUR

QUIT

GENERATION X

"I deflected her question. I like Margaret. She tries hard. She's older,
and attractive in a hair-spray-and-shoulder-pads-twice-divorced survivor
of way. A real bulldozer. She's like one of those little rooms you
only in Chicago or New York in superexpensive downtown
apartments—small rooms painted intense, flaring colors like emerald or
raw beef to hide the fact that they're so small. She told me my season
once, too: I'm a summer. " 'God, Margaret. You really have to wonder
why we even bother to get up in the morning. I

mean, really: Why work? Simply to buy more

stuff? That's just not enough. Look at us all.

What's the common as- sumption that got us all

from here to here? What makes us deserve the ice

cream and running shoes and wool Italian suits we

have? I mean, I see all of us trying so hard to ac-

quire so much stuff, but I can't help but feeling that we didn't merit it, that..." 'But Margaret cooled me right there. Putting down her mug, she said that before I got into one of my Exercised Young Man states, I should realize that the only reason we all go to work in the morning is because we're terrified of what would happen if we stopped. We 're not built for free time as a species. We think we are, but we aren't.' Then she began almost talking to herself. I'd gotten her going, She was saying that most of us have only two or three genuinely interesting

SICK BUILDING MIGRATION: The tendency of younger workers to leave or avoid jobs in unhealthy office environments or workplaces affected by the Sick Building Syndrome.

RECURVING: Leaving one job to take another that pays less but places one back on the learning curve.

moments in our lives, the rest is filler, and that at the end of our lives, most of us will be lucky if any of those moments connect together to form a story that anyone would find remotely interesting.

"Well. You can see that morbid and self-destructive impulses were overtaking me that morning and that Margaret was more than willing to sweep her floor into my fireplace. So we sat there watching tea steep (never a fun thing to do, I might add) and in a shared moment listened to the office proles discuss whether a certain game show host had or had not had cosmetic surgery recently.

" 'Hey, Margaret,' I said, 'I bet you can't think of one person in the entire history of the world who became famous without a whole lot of cash changing hands along the way.'

"She wanted to know what this meant, so I elaborated. I told her that people simply don't... can't become famous in this world unless a lot of people make a lot of money. The cynicism of this took her aback, but she answered my challenge at face value. 'That's a bit harsh, Dag. What about Abraham Lincoln?'

" 'No go. That was all about slavery and land. Tons-o'-cash hap­pening there.'

"So she says, 'Leonardo da Vinci,' to which I could only state that he was a businessman like Shakespeare or any of those old boys and that all of his work was purely on a commission basis and even worse, his research was used to support the military.

" 'Well, Dag, this is just the stu pidest argument I've ever heard,' she starts saying, getting desperate. 'Of course people become famous without people making money out of it.' ' 'So name one, then.'

"I could see Margaret's thinking flail, her features dissolving and reforming, and I was feeling just a little too full of myself, knowing that other people in the cafeteria had started to listen in on the conversation. I was the boy in the baseball cap driving the convertible again, high on his own cleverness and ascribing darkness and greed to all human endeavors. That was me.

' 'Oh, all right, you win,' she says, conceding me a pyrrhic victory, and I was about to walk out of the room with my coffee (now the Perfect-But-Somewhat-Smug Young Man), when I heard a little voice at the back of the coffee room say 'Anne Frank.' "Well.

"I pivoted around on the ball of my foot, and who did I see, looking quietly defiant but dreadfully dull and tubby, but Charlene sitting next to the megatub of office acetaminophen tablets. Charlene with her trailer-park bleached perm, meat-extension recipes culled from Family Circle magazine, and neglect from her boyfriend; the sort of person who when you draw their name out of the hat for the office Christmas party gift, you say, 'Who?'

' 'Anne Frank?' I bellowed, 'Why of course there was money there, why...' but, of course, there was no money there. I had unwittingly declared a moral battle that she had deftly won. I felt awfully silly and awfully mean.

"The staff, of course, sided with Charlene—no one sides with scuzzballs. They were wearing their 'you-got-your-comeuppance' smiles, and there was a lull while the cafeteria audience waited for me to dig my hole deeper, with Charlene in particular looking righteous. But I just stood there unspeaking; all they got to watch instead was my fluffy white karma instantly converting into iron-black cannon balls acceler­ating to the bottom of a cold and deep Swiss lake. I felt like turning into a plant—a comatose, nonbreathing, nonthinking entity, right there and then. But, of course, plants in offices get scalding hot coffee poured into their soil by copier machine repair people, don't they? So what was I to do? I wrote off the psychic wreckage of that job, before it got any worse. I walked out of that kitchen, out the office doors, and never bothered to come back. Nor did I ever bother to gather my belongings from my veal-fattening pen.

"I figure in retrospect, though, that if they had any wisdom at all at the company (which I doubt), they would have made Charlene clean out my desk for me. Only because in my mind's eye I like to see her standing there, wastepaper basket in her plump sausage-fingered hands, sifting through my rubble of documents. There she would come across my framed photo of the whaling ship crushed and stuck, possibly forever, in the glassy Antarctic ice. I see her staring at this photo in mild confusion, wondering in that moment what sort of young man I am and possibly finding me not unlovable.

"But inevitably she would wonder why I would want to frame such a strange image and then, I imagine, she would wonder whether it has any financial value. I then see her counting her lucky stars that she doesn't understand such unorthodox impulses, and then I see her throw-

0 Z M 0 SIS: The inability of one's job to live up to one's self-image.

tendency of hierarchies in office environments to be diffuse and preclude crisp articulation.

ing the picture, already forgotten, into the trash. But in that brief moment of confusion... that brief moment before she'd decided to throw the photo out, well... I think I could almost love Charlene then.

"And it was this thought of loving that sustained me for a long while when, after quitting, I turned into a Basement Person and never went in to work in an office again."

OVERBOARDING: Overcom-pensating for fears about the future by plunging headlong into a job or life-style seemingly unrelated to one's previous life interests; i.e., Amway sales, aerobics, the Republican party, a career in law, cults, McJobs....

EARTH TONES: A youthful subgroup interested in vegetarianism, tie-dyed outfits, mild recreational drugs, and good stereo equipment. Earnest, frequently lacking in humor.

Дата добавления: 2014-12-23