I am going to start filtering some of my more private musings. Since blogger does not have a tool for that, you will need to visit my Live Journal and ask to be friended there. I will continue to post Daily Gratitude and other subjects here. There is also a FAQ for my Journal at the same link.
more thoughts on our society's model of "employment"
| Sunday, March 19, 2006 @ 12:33 On February 15th I wrote about unemployment and how I find the office environment insane. Two days later I was called into the temp agency to fill out paperwork for the temp-job-from-hell (TJFH). I covered that in the first part of this series of posts describing the current transition in my life. I suppose it could also be the temp-job-from-heaven since it gave me the final push that I needed to dedicate my life to more creative pursuits. TJFH just reminded me of the details of why office work (and by extension factory work, retail work, any structured work designed to sell goods or provide services) is insane. So, your time isn't your own during the 9-5 or 8-4:30 or 11pm-7am shift. Then you realize you're locked into your commute time to get to and from work. You're locked into having enough vehicles or bus passes or subway tokens to transport you (and however many others in your household work). You're locked into time grooming and dressing for work. You're locked into time spent acquiring and maintaining your work wardrobe. You're locked into spending the money on transportation, grooming, and acquiring and maintaining your work wardrobe (and it's usually a wardrobe you can't wear anywhere else in your life). You're forced into scheduling your meals around the company's schedule, which may or may not mean being locked into spending more on meals or eating things you wouldn't otherwise. And, if you should be so lucky as to get morning and/or afternoon breaks in addition to lunch, you have to follow company policy as to where and when those breaks can occur. If you think you can run errands or go out, you have to subtract any travel time from your allotted break. It is not your time to do as you wish. It is the company's regulated time that they allow you to step away from your work. It still belongs to them, not you. TJFH had the audacity to provide a plethora of refrigerators, microwaves, and vending machines, coffee, tea, hot cocoa, ice machine, dishwasher -- they even had a working stove and oven, but no bottled water. (In Arizona that would be a crime.) I've been to companies with espresso machines, "healthy foods" initiatives, full-service cafeterias, and other amenities. I've heard of gyms, showers, free bus passes, day care, even quiet rooms for napping. I'm sure there are all sorts of perks to working for some companies. Things that are designed to make you think the company cares about you rather than your productivity. In reality, these things are designed to improve your productivity, and that is how they are proposed and approved and written into budgets. The same goes for whether or not you're allowed to have personal photos, radios, plants, etc. on your desk and what type of art is on the walls (if there is art -- or walls). I'm not even going to delve into the process of performance reviews, because we've all be graded since kindergarten (if not pre-school) and the only difference between a review and a production quota is the subjectivity of the supervisor and opportunities for humiliation. And this doesn't go into what we DO during that job. Some people have found a way to get paid for their passion (as boy has finally found his way into a kitchen where he feels comfortable AND is appreciated). Most, however, are just doing whatever job they could find. It may be necessary. It may even be of vital importance. It probably provides salary and benefits and a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day. And it fills your day so that you don't have to worry about filling it yourself. After all, "idle hands..." (which, of course, really means idle minds might think independent thoughts if they weren't filled with job regulations, processes, and work-related data). It may feel good to be gainfully employed and have the security of a paycheck and two weeks vacation a year. But, really, is it sane to live life this way? To structure our entire society like this? One of the frustrating elements of all this is knowing that I can't make the current system go away. Even though I have my own ideas about what model could replace it, unless a huge portion of the working world decides to leave the insanity, it will remain the MO of society. As long as the current system exists, I have to operate around, in, and with it. In order to pay debts, secure health care, buy food and clothing and cat litter, I have to find a way to generate income. In order to generate income, I have to either submit to the system or find creative ways to get income from people who are part of the system. boy's solution to the problem is to make the system work for you the best you can. he has found a job that lets him do what he loves and that makes it worth it to him to put up with the insanity of the system. Additionally, we have goals and dreams and we need income to make them happen. Knowing that he is working towards those goals also makes being part of the system worthwhile. Realizing all this while in TJFH was agonizing. I have had a number of regular jobs and countless temp jobs in my life. Even in the mortage-office-from-hell, there were things that were good (after all, it's where I met one of my now-dearest friends). I literally looked out the the break room window at TJFH and felt like I was in prison. A nice prison, yes. A day prison that let me go home every night, but a prison hiding beneath the veneer of a "good job with a steady paycheck." After much internal dialogue and discussions with boy, I decided that I could no longer live my life supporting the insanity of the modern workplace. So, I quit the job and didn't reapply for the remaining weeks of unemployment (which would have required me to resume a job search). I am at a place where I can not actively participate in that system of work. My priorities are creative and spiritual (which are really two aspects of the same thing). If someone offered to pay me two or three times what I was making at TJFH in order to do something I truly loved, I *might* consider working for a short time to meet some financial goals, but I might not. Although I hate business-speak, I have found mysElf saying "I want to live outside the box" a lot in the last several weeks. Thanks to TJFH, I have made a commitment to do just that.
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