VIII. On a wide-ranging wander toward the snack machine, through areas infrequently traveled, you notice that a cubicle formerly occupied by one of your co-workers is now empty: he has been “canned” or “shitcanned” or maybe he’s dead. The vacancy confronts you, the pathetic human traces — a paper cup, an open notebook, a sock — and in a single pulse of mild astonishment, like a silent shout expanding through the universe, you register the complete and irreparable absence of this person. Then you go and get your Twix bar.
IX. The songs of the office are few. English pop has something of a tradition of rabid singing office boys — from the Clash’s “Career Opportunities” (“Do you wanna make tea at the BBC?”), to Hard Fi’s “Living for the Weekend,” to the whole of Quadrophenia — but the American rocker, when he turns his attention to the workplace, will write something that smells of the assembly line, not the photocopier. No bitterness in the minor mode for him: he’ll write “Blue Collar Man” by Styx. True, Frank Zappa had a slow blues number called “Sexual Harassment in the Workplace.” But that was an instrumental.
X. Take a person from your office — a person called, say, Bill. The one thing you know about Bill is his name, so you use it whenever you get the chance: “What’s up, Bill?”, “Bill, how’s it hangin’?” There are other people in the office whose names you do not know — whose names you will never learn, because it is too late to ask. At these people you nod, or grunt, or do a kind of lurching full-body grimace when you move around them in the hallway. And then, most hauntingly, there is that small and purgatorial tribe of peers whose names you once knew but have somehow contrived to forget. These are the ones you will see in your dreams.
XI. In Barry’s Company, the secret terror of every office worker is fulfilled: your job exists at the whim of occult and despotic forces, and has no meaning whatsoever. Zephyr Holdings, unbeknownst to its employees, is not a company at all but a laboratory: a corporate think tank called the Omega Management System is using the Zephyr structure to road test some of its more ruthlessly advanced “techniques.” Project 3811, for example, is an experiment with “endurance limits in floating-deadline environments” — four people trapped in a room working on a task that never ends. The Depersonalization Project investigates the effects of eliminating employees’ first names and its implications for “job function.” “It’s early days yet,” coos one Omega Manager, “but we’re seeing potentially significant downward trends in nonbusiness watercooler and phone chatter.”
XII. For the human body, as opposed to the electric stapler, office life has metabolic implications. Eight hours of desk-driving involves one inevitably in the business of what I will call “buzz management”: keeping yourself alert-but-not-anxious (coffee/tea/chocolate), and relaxed-but-not-drowsy (alcohol/meds). The body, being a fundamentally conservative institution, keeps to its routines. And in a large office, there will always be someone with a digestive cycle similar to yours. After a while, like female roommates synchronizing their periods, you and this person will be heading for the bathroom at exactly the same time every day. You will meet, in fact, at the bathroom door.
XIII. Pack your shit! You’re fired.
James Parker cares deeply for his co-workers. He can be reached atjparker@phx.com.
