Notes from the Underground
Jan. 30th, 2005 07:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraThe 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?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-01-30 09:24 pm (UTC)This debate went on for an hour.
Heh heh. Wow.
Hang in there. You are so much more than that place. Have you ever read any Stanislav Lem? Memoirs Found in a Bathtub is the title that springs to mind when reading these chronicles. Man, those Eastern Europeans can really nail the feel of a soul-crushing bureaucracy. Hope you still get chances to walk the dogs on the beach.
I had the "I'm never gonna move up in this place, am I?" conversation with my boss last week. I asked to be taken off maintenance duty and my wish was granted. I found love and don't mind my stupid job so much any more. Fuck the scut job. Well, do it well, but don't forget who you are and what you're really about. Congrats on your 10,000th sale.
Springtime is just around the corner. I smelled it in the air today.
no subject
Date: 2005-01-31 01:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-31 04:40 pm (UTC)Well, there is more to life for you than this job, isn't there? Do you find having to be around them depressing? Be detached, think of your life outside. Keep collecting those bureaucratic and conversational gems, perhaps there's a story there.
Or are you perhaps depressed on their account? Don't be sorry for them, they would probably not even understand why you were.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-02 03:03 pm (UTC)Yeah, I am depressed on their account. I'm too lightweight to ever grapple with any of the Big Philosophers but the Meaning of Life is a constant subtext for me and there ain't no meaning for them. And it makes me sad.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-04 12:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-04 02:13 pm (UTC)