![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Notes from the Underground
Jan. 30th, 2005 07:49 amThe Indian Trading Company vanished over night. The doors to a strange little crafts gallery – Headtrip or Headcheese, Head-something – have been shuttered for over a week now. Also – and this is really sad – my favorite restaurant in Monterey, the Lighthouse Bistro, is now an Irish pub.
Meanwhile sometime Friday my store did its ten thousandth sale.
I was unavailable for celebrating since at that exact moment I was deep inside the bowels of the Ministry of Love servicing the Frankenstein database. The work itself, though repetitive, is not so bad – it utilizes the video games grid in the human brain though the pay-off comes not in flashing lights and music but in the form a pitifully small check mailed to me from Temp Central the following week. No, what's really depressing about the scut job is the other people who work there. It's not that they're stupid exactly – I mean some of them are, some of them aren't – it's more the pathos factor.
See, this job is meaningless. Really meaningless. Kafka on his worst day could not have imagined this job.
Bartleby Data Systems (BDS) – the brainchild of a Texas billionaire who once ran for president – is desperate to keep its outsourcing contract with the Dept of Defense and to that end has shrouded database maintenance in layers and layers of administrative obfuscation. The end result is records documenting every trivial encounter between the database and its human interface, gigabytes and gigabytes of useless information that must all be transformed into computerized entries using standardized formats that deploy only those English language abbreviations and punctuations that have managed to survive weeks of grueling examination by bureaucratic taskforces.
I attended my first "team" meeting this week. Its high point was a heated debate over the cc: line at the end of one of the form letters: do the other recipients go on the same line as the cc: or do they go underneath it?
This debate went on for an hour.
I mean, c'mon. Who wakes up at 3 AM, scratching their head and wondering, "How should cc: be formatted?"
It's Weber 101: organizations exist primarily to sustain themselves, and only secondarily to whatever work they were created to do. The result is bureaucracy, volumes of regulations, numbing layers of supervision and a quality control process that's obsessed with the space bar.
To combat this tedium, the BDS lifers try to make the rest of their lives important. They do this by having twenty minute conversations about what they ate for breakfast, what they're planning to eat for lunch and what parking space they managed to snag that morning:
"You know, I got here at ten minutes after eight –"
"That's late! You lucky LaToya didn't see you sneaking in."
"I didn't think there'd be any spaces left in the upper level, but you know I lucked out. There was one. Otherwise I'd have had to walk in from the side lot."
"That was probably LaToya's space. She was late too."
"I know, I couldn't believe it. I'm so lucky! Maybe I should buy a Lotto ticket – "
They also talk endlessly about sports teams and TV shows – American Idol is the big favorite – though never about movies. And, of course, they talk about each other. Endlessly.
They really do depress the shit out of me. What is the point of being alive if this is all there is to it?
Meanwhile sometime Friday my store did its ten thousandth sale.
I was unavailable for celebrating since at that exact moment I was deep inside the bowels of the Ministry of Love servicing the Frankenstein database. The work itself, though repetitive, is not so bad – it utilizes the video games grid in the human brain though the pay-off comes not in flashing lights and music but in the form a pitifully small check mailed to me from Temp Central the following week. No, what's really depressing about the scut job is the other people who work there. It's not that they're stupid exactly – I mean some of them are, some of them aren't – it's more the pathos factor.
See, this job is meaningless. Really meaningless. Kafka on his worst day could not have imagined this job.
Bartleby Data Systems (BDS) – the brainchild of a Texas billionaire who once ran for president – is desperate to keep its outsourcing contract with the Dept of Defense and to that end has shrouded database maintenance in layers and layers of administrative obfuscation. The end result is records documenting every trivial encounter between the database and its human interface, gigabytes and gigabytes of useless information that must all be transformed into computerized entries using standardized formats that deploy only those English language abbreviations and punctuations that have managed to survive weeks of grueling examination by bureaucratic taskforces.
I attended my first "team" meeting this week. Its high point was a heated debate over the cc: line at the end of one of the form letters: do the other recipients go on the same line as the cc: or do they go underneath it?
This debate went on for an hour.
I mean, c'mon. Who wakes up at 3 AM, scratching their head and wondering, "How should cc: be formatted?"
It's Weber 101: organizations exist primarily to sustain themselves, and only secondarily to whatever work they were created to do. The result is bureaucracy, volumes of regulations, numbing layers of supervision and a quality control process that's obsessed with the space bar.
To combat this tedium, the BDS lifers try to make the rest of their lives important. They do this by having twenty minute conversations about what they ate for breakfast, what they're planning to eat for lunch and what parking space they managed to snag that morning:
"You know, I got here at ten minutes after eight –"
"That's late! You lucky LaToya didn't see you sneaking in."
"I didn't think there'd be any spaces left in the upper level, but you know I lucked out. There was one. Otherwise I'd have had to walk in from the side lot."
"That was probably LaToya's space. She was late too."
"I know, I couldn't believe it. I'm so lucky! Maybe I should buy a Lotto ticket – "
They also talk endlessly about sports teams and TV shows – American Idol is the big favorite – though never about movies. And, of course, they talk about each other. Endlessly.
They really do depress the shit out of me. What is the point of being alive if this is all there is to it?
