One grows accustomed to all surroundings, of course, but on the first day my fresh eye was drawn to the foreign, the strange, the slightly off – so that by lunchtime on Monday I felt unsettled by the nagging feeling that something was decidedly odd about my new place of temporary employment. It looked nice at first - high ceilings, marble floor in the lobby, ultramodern flourescent lighting, but upon closer inspection there were cracks in the façade. Many of the lights were broken or barely working, and a crack in one wall let in a stream of curious local bugs. Immediately on entry I noticed a sign: “No Smoking – No Weapons.” I was delighted by the implicit assumption behind the sign that these two rules were of equal importance and severity, and then immediately horrified by mental images of a cigarette-smoking gunman running rampant through the building.
Then there were the doors, which are somewhat narrower than average yet very tall, reaching right up to the ceiling. Each one is identical, without any markings or indication of what lies behind them. In the main lobby where we waited for twenty minutes or so on Monday morning I could see three identical doors on the main floor, and looking up the stairway onto the landing of the second floor there were three more. People filed in to work and each entered a separate identical door – it seemed no two people entered the same one. It was totally bizarre. Even more bizarre was that each and every arriving employee had the same reaction once they saw the group of us temps waiting in the lobby. One by one they would enter, stop abruptly as if in surprise, taking us in, and then all at once there would be a flash of recognition and then a brief dismissive laugh. Then they would carry on their way towards one of the creepy doors.
Once in the actual work areas, I faced the usual array of cubicles and desks and bustling employees, as well as motivational posters and billboards on the walls. All corporate offices use their share of slogans and catchphrases, of course, but something felt wrong about this one setting as its goal service that was “beyond tremendous.” It seemed absurd – just the sound of the words coming off the mouth makes me think of something a badly-costumed alien would say in a 1940’s sci-fi movie. (Universal Pictures is proud to present “THE CREATURE FROM BEYOND TREMENDOUS!!!”) And where many companies may recognize employees on a weekly or monthly or even yearly basis, here they had decided to be more efficient and had a single billboard recognizing “The Employee of the Moment.” No picture, just a stapled piece of paper with a name on it in small print.
We were subjected to a morning’s worth of online orientation and instruction. Our instructions about workplace rules were accompanied by pictures of smartly dressed men and women of business illustrating each point. My favorite came along with guidelines on how to deal with spam e-mails. A young woman in an attractive and powerful outfit sat on the granite steps of some imposing institution with her laptop in front of her. She gazed at the screen with disbelief and disgust, her hands thrown into the air in shock and annoyance. “More spam e-mail?” she seemed to be thinking, “It just keeps coming! It’s unjust and wrong and somebody should do something about it!” Her facial features were so exaggerated that she had to be either a model or a musical theater actor. ((NOTE: This underhanded attack at musical theater people is done in lieu of an angry and bitter blog entry I recently wrote and then, upon returning to a normal state of mind, decided not to post.))
I found favor with the powers that be, I guess, for not long after finishing our training another new worker and I were separated from the main group of new employees and taken upstairs. I knew immediately that this was a step up. Not only was I working on the second floor, but the cubicles there had higher walls. As any good American can tell you, the degree of personal privacy and amount of elevation from ground level is directly proportional to the level of importance on the corporate ladder. There we were trained on our primary objective which, I am glad to say, at the end of an entire weeks work at the office I have yet to actually perform due to the IT department taking their sweet time. The woman who trained us had a strong attitude towards the company that could only be described as conspiratorially passive aggressive.
“THEY don’t know that I know how to do this,” she would say, showing us some back door through the bureaucratic red tape, “but we won’t tell THEM, will we?” She looked around, expecting the corporate powers to jump out and catch her in the act.
“Ah-ha!!!” They might say, “We knew somebody was trying to be efficient rather than follow complicated regulation procedures!”
Like most good American corporate workers, she had no clue and didn’t care about the big picture.
“Where do all these things we are typing come from?” you might ask.
“I don’t know,” she’d reply, “They scan them in some where, I think. Maybe a different branch. Maybe upstairs. Wait, do we have an upstairs? Well, they scan them in scanner thingys.”
“And what happens to these forms after we type them?”
“You put them in this box over here and eventually they disappear. As long as you do more each day than you did the day before, you’re set. Nobody will bother you.”
And that is the plight of the worker in corporate culture. You are a piece of the larger machinery, a cog in the works that cannot possibly understand the many complicated parts that make up the whole contraption. So you come in each day, give your eight hours, have endlessly repetitive conversations with your co-workers (“How was your weekend? Where are you going to lunch? Same place as yesterday? That sounds great!”) and generally try to maintain your dignity and humanity in a situation that makes that very difficult. It’s only my first week, but every day around 3:30 in the afternoon or so there comes a moment when I stop my work, turn and look around the room at all the people in their little cubby holes typing furiously. The hair on the back of my neck raises and I get an unfamiliar queasy sensation in the pit of my stomach.
“WHO AM I?” I shout inside my head, “WHAT AM I DOING HERE? AND WHY THE HELL ARE ALL YOU PEOPLE HERE TOO?? WHAT ON EARTH ARE WE DOING???”
But my wallet is a starving and famished lump against my buttock, and in the distance I can hear the sound of my bank account letting out of the screams of its dying agony, so I turn and start to type.
Then there were the doors, which are somewhat narrower than average yet very tall, reaching right up to the ceiling. Each one is identical, without any markings or indication of what lies behind them. In the main lobby where we waited for twenty minutes or so on Monday morning I could see three identical doors on the main floor, and looking up the stairway onto the landing of the second floor there were three more. People filed in to work and each entered a separate identical door – it seemed no two people entered the same one. It was totally bizarre. Even more bizarre was that each and every arriving employee had the same reaction once they saw the group of us temps waiting in the lobby. One by one they would enter, stop abruptly as if in surprise, taking us in, and then all at once there would be a flash of recognition and then a brief dismissive laugh. Then they would carry on their way towards one of the creepy doors.
Once in the actual work areas, I faced the usual array of cubicles and desks and bustling employees, as well as motivational posters and billboards on the walls. All corporate offices use their share of slogans and catchphrases, of course, but something felt wrong about this one setting as its goal service that was “beyond tremendous.” It seemed absurd – just the sound of the words coming off the mouth makes me think of something a badly-costumed alien would say in a 1940’s sci-fi movie. (Universal Pictures is proud to present “THE CREATURE FROM BEYOND TREMENDOUS!!!”) And where many companies may recognize employees on a weekly or monthly or even yearly basis, here they had decided to be more efficient and had a single billboard recognizing “The Employee of the Moment.” No picture, just a stapled piece of paper with a name on it in small print.
We were subjected to a morning’s worth of online orientation and instruction. Our instructions about workplace rules were accompanied by pictures of smartly dressed men and women of business illustrating each point. My favorite came along with guidelines on how to deal with spam e-mails. A young woman in an attractive and powerful outfit sat on the granite steps of some imposing institution with her laptop in front of her. She gazed at the screen with disbelief and disgust, her hands thrown into the air in shock and annoyance. “More spam e-mail?” she seemed to be thinking, “It just keeps coming! It’s unjust and wrong and somebody should do something about it!” Her facial features were so exaggerated that she had to be either a model or a musical theater actor. ((NOTE: This underhanded attack at musical theater people is done in lieu of an angry and bitter blog entry I recently wrote and then, upon returning to a normal state of mind, decided not to post.))
I found favor with the powers that be, I guess, for not long after finishing our training another new worker and I were separated from the main group of new employees and taken upstairs. I knew immediately that this was a step up. Not only was I working on the second floor, but the cubicles there had higher walls. As any good American can tell you, the degree of personal privacy and amount of elevation from ground level is directly proportional to the level of importance on the corporate ladder. There we were trained on our primary objective which, I am glad to say, at the end of an entire weeks work at the office I have yet to actually perform due to the IT department taking their sweet time. The woman who trained us had a strong attitude towards the company that could only be described as conspiratorially passive aggressive.
“THEY don’t know that I know how to do this,” she would say, showing us some back door through the bureaucratic red tape, “but we won’t tell THEM, will we?” She looked around, expecting the corporate powers to jump out and catch her in the act.
“Ah-ha!!!” They might say, “We knew somebody was trying to be efficient rather than follow complicated regulation procedures!”
Like most good American corporate workers, she had no clue and didn’t care about the big picture.
“Where do all these things we are typing come from?” you might ask.
“I don’t know,” she’d reply, “They scan them in some where, I think. Maybe a different branch. Maybe upstairs. Wait, do we have an upstairs? Well, they scan them in scanner thingys.”
“And what happens to these forms after we type them?”
“You put them in this box over here and eventually they disappear. As long as you do more each day than you did the day before, you’re set. Nobody will bother you.”
And that is the plight of the worker in corporate culture. You are a piece of the larger machinery, a cog in the works that cannot possibly understand the many complicated parts that make up the whole contraption. So you come in each day, give your eight hours, have endlessly repetitive conversations with your co-workers (“How was your weekend? Where are you going to lunch? Same place as yesterday? That sounds great!”) and generally try to maintain your dignity and humanity in a situation that makes that very difficult. It’s only my first week, but every day around 3:30 in the afternoon or so there comes a moment when I stop my work, turn and look around the room at all the people in their little cubby holes typing furiously. The hair on the back of my neck raises and I get an unfamiliar queasy sensation in the pit of my stomach.
“WHO AM I?” I shout inside my head, “WHAT AM I DOING HERE? AND WHY THE HELL ARE ALL YOU PEOPLE HERE TOO?? WHAT ON EARTH ARE WE DOING???”
But my wallet is a starving and famished lump against my buttock, and in the distance I can hear the sound of my bank account letting out of the screams of its dying agony, so I turn and start to type.
Comments
The endlessly repetitive conversations, I know... What to do??? Say weird, off the wall things? I dunno. :P
Hope you've escaped it by now--if only a different creepy workplace. ;-)