Friday, February 27, 2009

What to Expect When You're Expected (Part 1)

By M.R.R





I reached down below my desk to turn on the computer and as I looked around me, changing from my winter boots to office-appropriate footwear, it all seeed strangely familiar. Not familiar in the sense that it was Wednesday and I had been at this job Monday through Friday for the past six months; it was familiar in the sense that I had done all this only several hours ago. It was as if I slept in the office or worked through the night, as thoughts of mentoring and public awareness (or, to use a detestable phrase, "branding") encroached upon my inexplicable, albeit incredibly important, R.E.M. cycle.

Yes, i had dreamt about work again. But what was worse was that i had solved a problem, figured out a task that had stumped me, and, as soon as 9am rolled around, i could execute my solution.

So it worked; i found a missing file that had been misfiled and it took me all of half an hour to fix it. Then I looked up from my desk in the basement-level office out the large window where I cannot see the sun itself, but I can see the color of the sky and I can see glares and reflections. I sat and thought about other people. Other people were sleeping in right now; other people were walking their dogs, meeting other people walking their dogs; other people were starting and then subsequently finishing something that they wanted to start and then subsequently finish. And I was refiling existing information.

2 comments:

elsa said...

so ready for part deux. and LOVE the title.

emily said...

Love this! Am intrigued by your cliff hanger.

This reminds me of "work":

"The deepest evil in the totalitarian system is precisely that which makes it work: its programmed, single-minded monotonous efficiency; bureaucratic formalism , the dueling daily service, standard, boring, letter-perfect, generalities, uniform. No thought and no responsiveness. Eichmann. Form without anima becomes formalism . . . forms without luster , without the presence of body. "

- James Hillman