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It's now official: I hate work. What's that movie where the guy gets hypnotized and decides to do nothing for a living? I want that life. I can deal with grief, I can deal with severe patches of introspection and months of languishing like a hermit, only leaving the house to get those unbelievably good sandwiches from the place down the street, and I can definitely deal with the lack of social emptiness that one learns by dealing with co-workers every day. I hate commuting, I hate coworkers, I hate production meetings, I hate time sheets, I hate business solution models, I hate company growth systems and work processes, and I really really hate memos restating all of the above. How people can warp their minds to just accept the fact that they give 90% of each day to mindless drivel for the prime 40 or 50 years of their lives amazes me. Call it a crossroads, call it a crisis; I definitely can't see myself still being sane a few decades from now. I don't know what annoys me more, the treadmill of plodding familiarity that we're all supposed to embrace and jog through our lives on, or those that don't see what they're already giving up (or even worse, those that don't want to see). My co-workers all run that treadmill with blinders on every day. Mike, my closest work acquaintance, is already hip-deep in corporate monotony at the age of 26. He doesn't look forward to freedom or retirement or even the end of the day, he looks forward to the next project deposited to him through faceless decrees and automat-style delivery after efficiently handing off his current project through similar means to those below him. Steve, my nearest identifier, works hard to alleviate his debt caused by 16 months of freedom taken after he graduated from college. He claims to know what I mean when I take out my soapbox at lunch and start spewing anti-productive monologue, but I can see in his eyes that he will never get away from it. He'll never get out. Tom maddens me most because he's both the nicest guy of the bunch and the blindest. He's been working in his cubicle for five years, upgraded from an even more claustrophobic basement niche where he struggled for another six. That makes eleven years with Sturges, doing the exact same thing and not minding one bit. Sure his cubicle is decked out with paper models and a small radio with an endless supply of folk music and lots of news clippings and action figures and pictures of his family, but it's just a sign of passive surrender. So I put it down here for the record, that in my time with Sturges, I will have nothing personal in my cubicle, save my computer desktop (which I will change once a week). Today I felt the claws of slavery dig into my ankles as I sat and punched away on the keyboard, and it scared me. I will not be in the same cubicle ten years from now.


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