The Worst Jobs I Ever Had: Profiles of My Co-Workers

I want to do a series of profiles of previous co-workers.

These will be of people I worked with at various times over the years.

I will change the names slightly to protect the guilty. And the innocent. But mostly the guilty.

This isn't some form of juvenile revenge game.

It's a fully adult revenge game.

I'm joking. We were all in it together. At least for a while.

Some of you were my "difficult co-workers." I was yours. Some of us got on fabulously together and conspired like two bluebirds taking a shit on a picnic table. Some of us were convinced we knew which cubicle the Devil stapled and Scotch-taped in, and sometimes we were that Lord of Darkness hogging the xerox machine or deliberately leaving your pothead boyfriend who doesn't have a job jonesing on hold for ten minutes because you didn't return the Post-its as you promised.

We know, like Sartre, that Hell will be an eternity spent wondering who has our stapler, the one we bought and paid for with our own money, goddamn it, because do the staplers they give you here really work, do they, really, ever work, or an eternity spent silently boiling that that woman chose to play that Pussycat Dolls song for the fortieth time in a row. A song by a band modeled on Josie & the Pussycats is now as permanently a part of your neuronal infrastructure as your social security number, or your first love. And there's not a damn thing you can do about it. Because conversations that start with "Dear, could you please turn down that radio just a bit?" usually end in felonies profiled on TRU TV. It's just a fact of office life.

I would like to be able to speak of the redemptive and spiritually significant meaning of work, to cite some inspirational apothegms or morally instructional proverbs.

But I can't. I haven't had those types of job. Well, not for long.

Jejunus, the God of Boredom, always made sure to shoot the magic unicorn of Meaningful Work whenever I found it.

Right between the eyes.

The best I can say about work is that it is like prison. In many ways. It mixes individuals from different parts of society and you get to hear the viewpoints and belief systems of people who were raised in different parts of the culture, in that part of town where you never go, in that strange-looking house of worship you scoff at when you drive past.

In other words, it is a form of living death.

Imagine if the Editorials page of the paper came alive and started talking and never shut up for eternity. You would have the office! Yay variety! Yay tendentious and prejudiced and judgmental and loquacious and can you believe she wore that?

The sparrows are always closing in for the kill.

The office is death by sparrows.

The death of a thousand paper-cuts.

I bet there are at least a few massacres that were triggered by a paper-cut.

It simply had to have happened.

If you sit there long enough, you will begin to understand why Roman dictators assumed absolute power over life and death.

You will realize Caligula was a stand-up guy.

You will spend many hours envying Caligula.

And as in prison, people shiv people. Oh, not in the showers.

At the water cooler or the coffee machine.

While they're taking a dump, or fixing their makeup for the latest pointless flirtation or putting the training wheels on their next divorce, and starting to peddle slowly.

And as in prison everyone hates the Warden.

And the food sucks. That too.

People write horrible things about you and put them in folders and there's not a thing you can do about it.

Again like prison.

Your worst fear as an inmate is that you will die in this place.

And your soul will spend eternity by that copier that has never worked properly three consecutive days.

This is the hoosegow. The clink. The Big House.

But you will never have the nerve to take your Hello Kitty Mug and begin running it back and forth along the top of your cubicle chanting "Attica! Attica!"

You will staple and color-code your bile with Post-Its.

You will stare at everyone the way Charles Baudelaire stared at modern art.

This is the Colosseum. And you are being herded in here. Over and over.

They don't even have the decency to give you a trident. A net. A lion spear.

They give you a paperweight that bears the name of the prison.

It is a toy brick. It says "LAYING THE FOUNDATION FOR A BETTER TOMORROW."

Oh, a brick was such a bad idea.

Really it was.