A minor incident at work

I am watching the symptoms of a system meltdown. Not on a major scale, nothing anybody else seems to notice in this busy bees nest yet it’s subtly perceptible and somehow significant. I am sitting at my desk at work, as one does, and around me I am witnessing the roots of disorder. I am reading it in peoples faces, their movements and their glazed eyes.

Maybe this requires some contextualisation. I work in a Design studio, outside London in an industrial shithole otherwise known as Slough. I can’t complain, being my first job (as a student work placement) It’s down right fantastic. We get to enjoy the foxy-modern-hip policies of a design studio like free coffee and being able to listen to music off our sexy G5 computers. No complaints about it, the early mornings are a lesson in discipline, the paycheck is an excuse for monthly binges and the work is easy going.

Oh the work. It’s not exciting, I doubt anybody thought it would be. We sit at our desks with our fancy equipment and design ads for print, churning them out while listening to music and sipping mediocre coffee. There you go, it pays the bills and provides a workingman structure to my lifestyle which I can use as an excuse to go overboard in my free time, it all works out. Next year I will be a student again for my final year (gulp) and after that it’s the Real Rat Race so I guess right now I’m in a kind of social no-mans-land. Groovy.

So, I rise in the dark and flock to work with the rest of the herd of commuters, seeing familiar yet glum faces in the train morning after morning. I enter the gates of the corporate dimension and grab a coffee, make my way to my desk, settle in, Log-in and space out. That brings me here, to my work station; the place where I exercise my official purpose, my job, the source of my income, my title. I guess I’m being so flippant because I can afford to be. I’m aware that this year is just a transitory step and so I don’t have the devotion towards my job that people have when they meet someone and say “Hi, I am a Person, I do So-and-So for a living so that is what I represent”. I work here, but this is not what I Do.

My work habits are strange but they suit this job perfectly. I have always been an underachiever, frustrating teachers throughout my life with my wasted potential. It wasn’t really wasted, it was simply subject to my whims – my potential poured into my interests and being the lively young puppy I was they changed constantly. It was consistency which I lacked and still do. I find consistency boring.
I work in bursts of massive productivity followed by long breaks which I spend surfing the mighty and all encompassing internet, designing, writing and pondering. I’m surrounded by people that pace themselves and work constantly, they don’t understand why I work the way I do and manage to get things done – I don’t understand how why they decide to be bored. I guess they’re not bored though, I just get bored to think of their approach. I’m not talking about everybody around me, I am talking about the people that have brought me to write this.

Today the networking system that is the backbone to our work process has crashed and will remain down indefinitely. It has been this way for the past three hours but they hope to get it fixed soon so we are meant to stay and, well, pass our time. This is when I began perceiving the symptoms. At first everybody seemed relieved and joked about the situation. Since i’m in my musical isolation (studio verborrhea is generally intolerable) I witness everything as a choreographed pantomime. The expressions move from jolly-jokey, to sheepish to shifty to uncomfortable. People are getting impatient about this situation, they are getting bored because they can’t work; they “can’t get no satisfaction” because they can’t do what they are meant to be doing.

The question whether man is innately lazy or ambitious is a long lasting dilemma. Many social disorders can be attributed to this paradox; some people are stressed by work they don’t want or don’t like and other people are frustrated and getting depressed because they can’t find a job. I think that basically it has to do with non-conformity. Yet at the same time that is another paradox; non-conformity can be tremendously constructive as a self preservation device for people to break from the beaten track and explore, innovate, rebel! Then again I was referring to the non-conformity with serves as a constant warping of goals so that they can never be achieved. Maybe they weren’t genuine, sincere goals in the first place (that’s a whole other story). I reckon this all has something to do with the overwhelming majority of glum faces I see in the morning. I doubt mine looks much better.

Time old dilemmas to one side, all I can say is that before me I see people gagging to work, they seem like they are about to choke in the awkwardness of this situation. Should I stand up on my chair and explain, screaming, that it’s just temporary, that soon things will be back to normal?

“We design for a corporation that has just announced a turnover up by 6.7 % to £897.9 million in the last quarter! You are not changing the world, you are a hair on the mammoth of irrelevance, your work here belongs to a world far from the reality that matters to your human side, yes that little quivering being that’s lurks within you. Our role here serves the machine that is awesome and all encompassing in our era, but it’s this same machine which makes you feel so lonely and so sick, because you are so devoted to it that you trust enough to have forgotten about the massive ocean that lies beneath the surface you are doggy paddling on. Stop and see where you stand because you are both the exhausted beast and the abusive rider, look ahead so your aspirations aren’t lost in the dust of this lunar landscape, so that you have bearings are based on the permanence of the stars, of Quality and of awareness. What is more cliché, to warn against the evil that lies in the slippery path of society or to truly become the ‘architects of our own demise’ regardless of all the harbingers? Yes! Work with gumption but remember what you are working for, remember what it means. And when a network breaks down in your design studio, with no detrimental effects on your income or job (in fact it donates free time to your busy day) question why you start manifesting symptoms of panic. Question the root of that feeling! Question why you have driven me to stand on this chair and scream this, do you understand what I’m trying to do?”

The meaning doesn’t really gel, I think it’s too hard to make my message cogent, besides that was an emulated rant in my head - maybe it would have clicked If I had gone for it. I guess I’m not ready to make myself look like a lunatic, and get my ass fired, for these victims of my judgment who probably see me as another form of wasted space.

Oh, there it goes; the system is back-up and running. Back to work.