Part I
We never go anywhere. On vacation, in a place that does not look different from home, we yearn for the routine of the days at home. On business trips we run from airports to offices to hotel rooms convinced that work is enabling us to see new horizons, but while in the past we only needed to travel small distances to arrive somewhere, today we spend a day in a plane and we are still in the same place. Our conversations are made of identical phrases. Companion, our existence is so standardized that I could take your place and you mine and nobody at work or at home would notice the swap. We would not notice ourselves. The history of mankind is the history of man in relation to his work. First, there was hard physical labor which was necessary for our mere sustenance. Later, there was repetitive office work that was however recognized as such and which we, the workers, tried to escape either by demanding better working conditions or by at least distancing ourselves from work during our off-hours. Now there is repetitive office work that the system has handed us down in such a way that we think it holds the key to our freedom.
As if being clones of each other were not enough, we are also clones of the same one-dimensional being. That being maintains that the universe bound by today’s work ethics and conventions is the only possible universe. Our limitations are clear. Our working hours are incestuously tied to our spare time. Our day revolves around work: there is the commute, the long working hours, and the commute. It becomes hard not to think about what occupies such a central part in our life even if instead of working we are meeting a person, watching a movie, or reading a paper. It is understandable: we can make sense of new experiences only by comparing them to known ones. The conversations with the people that we meet, the books that we read, and the movies that we watch are a mirror of our limited experiences. The experiences are limited because for the most part we are surrounded by people like us, who, like us, commute and work and commute.
Mastering the rules of the system has become synonym with being good in a moral sense. But why the stated objective of the system is excellence, the rules that the system has adopted work against the objective. The initial objective itself has been forgotten. The requirement of our job is no longer quality or perfection, but learning perfectly well how the system works. And so we take a course in business practices, a seminar in project management, and at the same that we cannot finish all the mediocre work that we are assigned because on purpose we were given more work that we could handle so that we would not slack off. And we lack the ability of judging critically our assignment. Today, our inability to get away from work and even the lack of a desire to escape show that we are subjugated but content. Our contentment, however, is double-faced. Any day they can hear us bitch in the elevators, in the halls, around the water-coolers about how much work we have, how an ordinary sandwich at lunch break is the highlight of yet another day, and how we do not recall the last time that we saw a sunset live.
Comrade, you sit on the other side of this partition wall and we are so close that I can hear you breath. We share the same neon light and the same filtered air. We are one body and one soul, in good times as in bad times. I can hear you sneezing and coughing. The same cold that you caught from the comrade sitting two cubicles away from me, I am now catching from you. The flu or a headache, every day sees us here at our combat position. We would come to work even with the chicken-pox or the scarlet fever, if the company let us. There is so much work to be done. Back in college we worked whole nights and we took extra-credit courses so that one day we could have a house in the suburbs. Now we work like dogs so that one day we will be able to play golf in Florida. It is the future what we are living for. I remember when we used to slave away for nights in a row so that we could handle at least those math problems that the professor had assigned during previous midterms. From midterm to midterm the problems kept consistently similar. I doubt that we had a good understanding of mathematics then, like today we do not have a good understanding of the issues facing modern technology. Comrade, I hate to admit it, but we are not very smart. It is not for nothing that we are stuck in a cubicle the size of a rabbit-cage. If it is true that our salary has gone up consistently since we were handed our diploma, it is also true that our increasingly more expensive purchases have kept us in a position where for the next few years we are committed to work just to offset already made expenditures. As soon as we were offered a job, even before receiving the first pay-check, we went out and bought a car. Later with a promise of a higher salary, we bought a larger car and a house.
Comrade, I look around and I see 156 of us on this floor. I see 19 floors like ours in this building. I see thousands of buildings like ours in this town. I see thousands of towns like ours in this country. Ours is the 14th floor of a new building located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The floor is a perfect square where everybody has a standard-size cubicle assigned to himself, that is, everybody with the exception of those six workers who live in the famed corner offices. How they squeezed 6 corners out of a square is a mathematical mystery. The people in the corner offices are copies of the inhabitants of the cubicles. They are special only in the sense that they are the ones who decide where everybody else sits. They also have other small privileges: we cannot hear their personal phone conversations and they do not catch colds while sitting at their spacious desks - they catch them at meetings.
Comrade, we must rise and establish an identity. We must have a will. We have the right to think and to be free. I have to say that I am writing these words with skepticism and fear. The last thing that we want is a revolution. With our mortgage and our planned Florida-vacation we cannot afford a revolution. The word revolution conjures up images of red flags waving in the wind and people destroying government buildings downtown. The commute home is bad as it is, picture it with a revolution. Unless…. The revolution need not be bloody and the various vice-presidents, president, CFO, CEO and board of directors need not be overturned. We could decide - just you and me, but I suspect that others would follow our example since things seem to be contagious around here - to…. No, there is nothing that we can do. Right now I cannot picture a world different from this, not with a deadline hanging over my head. There! I just told my boss to page me during love-making, to email me in the middle of the night (I will keep the computer on, just in case), to call me at home and interrupt my breakfast if he needs anything from me for the sake of the project this weekend.
Comrade, I could not avoid to overhear your personal phone conversation. I heard every word of it, although you were speaking softly so as not to be heard. I could not help it: the softer you were speaking, the more I was straining my ear to hear you. Apparently things are not going well at home. It is the second time this week that I hear you fighting on the phone with your girlfriend. You do not seem to be too sure of yourself when you talk to her. When you talk to a customer, on the other hand, you project confidence and cheerfulness: the weather is good, the work to be done is much, but great strides have been made. I like your voice when you talk to a customer. I would trust that voice to make for me all the right retirement investments and to tell the woman of my dreams that I am worthy of her attentions. To that voice I would give the key to my time-sharing apartment in the White Mountains. I have been living in this cubicle for the past three months, and I have not met you face to face yet. All I know is that your name is Joe, that you regrettably fight with your girlfriend, and that you interact well with the company’s customers. For all I know about you, you could be my best friend Joe from my college times. Him too, I never got to know well. You and I lead an absurd life in the shade of this neon light which is both your sun and my sun. My eyes itch. I imagine that your eyes are itching even more because of your cold (I hope you are not catching pneumonia, since then I would catch it too), this neon light, and the glare from the computer screen.
Comrade, the other day, as I was quickly passing by a window, I thought I saw a sun shining outside. I can hear you checking your voice-mail. From the number of keys that you punch in, I can tell nobody called you. You are still waiting for the phone call that is going to change your life: a woman who tells you that she loves you or your head-hunter informing you that some start-up on some 15th floor is willing to offer you a larger cubicle. Comrade, I bet you are checking your email. How many messages did you receive today? It is hard for me to guess, since the beeping sound that signals a new email is the same sound that signals that you are attempting to scroll down beyond the last page of a document. I suspect that you scroll down past on purpose, in order to give your colleagues the impression that you are more important or popular than you really are. Comrade. Did I hear a yawn? Was that a yawn? I heard like the sound of your jaws clacking at the end of what I thought was a stifled yawn. Are you tired? You have been here since early this morning. And it is almost seven in the evening. God knows that you are working hard.
[censored censored].
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