Sunday Archive V: A Wage Slave Rant
Gmail cleanout part five.
Here’s one that never made it to the GS front page…and it’s no mystery why. The sad thing is that the job I’m bitching about is the same one I have today. So much for following my own advice, eh?
A lot of these articles I’m digging up were written on the Metro, so they tend towards incoherent ranting. But the whole point of this Sunday series is to post the crazy shit clogging up my Gmail box, so here goes…
This is from February of 2005:
There is no doubt in my mind that, one day, my job will kill me. Every little thing, from waking to sleep, seems designed to chink away at my sanity, to drive me down, to create nothing but an emotional cloud that, ultimately, is intended to destroy any sense of free will and life.
My commute lasts 35 minutes…unless you’re going in the morning or coming back in the evening with the hordes of morality slaves. Then it takes 70-90 minutes, sometimes more. A five mile ride from my house to the Metro station, during rush hour, can take 30-40 minutes.
The work, itself, is inhumane and cruel. As painful as a fallen friend, as a treacherous lover, as a permanent injury. The blow, for many, is softened by various factors. Elements of the day that can be enjoyed, friendly co-workers, stolen moments online or abuse of the latest technology. All of this, I’ve come to believe, is intentional. Beyond the brain-dead managers exists some illuminati, some great executive power that sees all through monitored emails and security cameras, that knowingly lets employees surf the net for four hours a day and rip their Netflix discs on the work computer and super-seed torrents of Star Wars. All these things, loopholes and “unmonitored” activites that make people feel like they’re getting away with something, sticking it to the man, are intentionally designed to trick employees into feeling a sense of purpose and individuality. The truth remains constant – the employees are still trapped at their job, bound by the time clocks, desperate for a paycheck that never, ever reflects what they do. They are treated like slow children, singled out for “promotions” that aren’t accompanied by raises, beat down, destroyed. There’s no purpose to a job except to promote consumer culture. How is stealing printer paper and “getting away” with internet surfing important when the real work serves no purpose except to keep you somewhere for eight or nine or ten hours a day?
I ask myself: What is the root of this evil we serve? Is it money? That’s the easy point. The undisciplined cynic always says it’s the money. Yet everyone who makes money is dissatisfied. Everyone wants more money. Take my example. I’m okay with what I make. I can afford extravagant vacations and Amazon binges. Someone who makes $7 an hour is envious of that, someone who makes $90,000 more than I do is also envious. The one can’t afford to live, the other is tied down by a house, a car, a life, a wife. This is the story across the board. No one is happy with the money they have, or the job they do to make it, or their lives as they exist under that influence.
The root of the problem is easy to see. It’s ambition. Where would I be if I lacked ambition? It’s dreams. How much better would life be if I had no desire?
What if I was completely at peace with little to my name? What if my life were like this:
A $350 a month apartment in some tumbledown exburb. When the walls get wet during the humid summers, cockroaches burst out of them.
A $17.99 a month Netflix account. Hey, we all need luxury.
TV, DVD, hotplate and space heater – hand me downs and/or recovered from the Circuit City dumpster. (Really, stake out the dumpster for a month and see what I mean.)
Couch, bed — $170, plus tax from the Used Hotel Warehouse
Table for the TV – one of those big wooden spools from a construction site.
Electricity – Well, if you live near a parking garage, bury an extension cord and run it to one of the disused outlets. You can unplug it on the way to work and put it back in on the way back. This plan also works with your neighbor’s outdoor outlets, outlets in the hallway of your apartment building, etc.
Water – Bottle drinking water from work, clean yourself up in the employee restroom. (I’m amazed at how many jobs have shower facilities.) Do your laundry in the sink.
Food – Rice. Noodles. A ten pound bag of rice at the back alley, creepy, smelly Chinese store near my house will run you $7 bucks. Watch the supermarket’s dumpster for expired foods if you want a high class Sunday dinner.
Take that lifestyle and work at some local minimum wage job. Do the video store thing or the music store thing, whatever. Make $20,000 a year and live well. With rent and Netflix, life will cost about $4420 a year. Now, remove ambition. Remove any desire to be like your neighbor, to get a bigger TV, to have a reliable car, to move forward in life, to go into business for yourself, to travel or afford a lover or go out drinking on Friday nights. Take away all of the dreams and desires of the American future – the white picket fence and the two car garage, the nice clothes. Remove every once of that consumer culture and, no matter the money being made, there’s a chance for happiness.
The root of all evil is dreaming. We’re going to these thankless jobs, managed by lunatics, just so we can make more money, and we’re still living paycheck to paycheck…and the jobs do nothing but clutch our souls and shatter our dreams, anyway. It takes monumental effort to achieve even the smallest things. Look to my friend who recently made a short film for $3500. Three grand! That should be a drop in the bucket. That should be on hand in savings. In 2005, three grand is nothing. Or so it should be, considering the cost of living and the relentless consumerist drive. But it’s not. We’re underpaid and overworked. That, then, leads to the second problem. Three grand is an alien sum, okay, but finding the time is even more difficult. Most Americans go four or five years at a job without even taking two weeks off. The average bereavement time is four days. The average annual leave is 80 hours. There are 5 paid holidays a year, on average. The average sick time per year is 40 hours. How many of you reading the above think, hey, Nacho, that’s pretty generous?
If you are thinking that, there’s something wrong with you. Most of you also know well that the biggest chunk in there – the two weeks leave – can never be taken together, if at all. Your job, which consists of talking to sociopaths on the phone, copying papers for the boss at the copy machine that’s closer to his office than yours, organizing endless pointless files and filling out forms that go off to some unexplored cavern in the bowels of the building is “too important.”
Does anyone ever wonder about that? If you’re so important, if you’re so appreciated, then why are you making $30,000 a year? Less taxes. Less the ever-increasing medical insurance that’ll drop you the moment you get really sick. Less your overwhelming college loans. Less the unsubsidized commute costs either in your car with gas prices rising or on a public transportation system that’s not funded by the third of your paycheck that’s going to the government?
Why are we lying to ourselves?
Now, I should be preaching to the choir. But I’ll hear back from readers. I’ve heard it before when I talk about this stuff over the bar table. I have a bad work ethic. I’m wrong. I’m off base. I’m a hopeless cynic. I just haven’t found the right spot on the career ladder. I just need to settle down with a good woman.
A majority of my friends, and those readers I hear from, defend the workaday world, the 9-5 jobs, the thankless wage slave living. They defend living paycheck to paycheck and working five years in order to pull together a spare $3500 and a week off. People younger than me who have declared bankruptcy twice and have a divorce under their belts say that I’m on the wrong footing and I should mend my ways and make peace with the wage slave world. People my age who have a 2005 car and a townhouse and monthly bills in the range of $3000 yet make $2200 a month at their 50 hour a week job say that I’m crazy. People who have been “promoted” five times yet still make the same as when they started at the job five years prior (oh, plus yearly 1% COLA increases) say that I’m crazy.
I enjoy the later group the most. Are you crazy, Nacho? I’ve been promoted. I’m doing okay.
Yes, but, did you also get a raise? No… Then what’s that mean, really? Hell, if that’s what it’s about, then I promote all of you. All of you reading this – you are now the assistant sub managers of division 12. I’ll give you another promotion in a year. Oh, and, by the way, the government says that the cost of living increase should have been 2.2% this year, and that’s lower than the actual percentage increase. You should have seen three or four percent if you wanted to actually keep up with things. Show of hands – how much more did you pay for commuting? How much more did your rent go up? How much more did your health insurance go up?
And, in the longer run, how much did your company pay into your retirement? Do you have retirement? How much does it increase each year?
Oh, are you a woman? You lot are doing better – you make 76% now of what a man in your position would make. (By the way, it’s not a gender argument, it’s based on “performance ability” where you rank lower because you are “unable to perform the same as a man,” which falls under the government’s “nondiscriminatory business reasons” for judging average annual pay. Don’t worry — if you don’t have kids, or take more sick days than men do, then you’re probably getting equal pay.)
Oh, okay, I’ll cave in to all those naysayers at the bar table. What can you do? You can’t really give up and sleep on a rice mat in a cockroach apartment. Here I am mocking dreams and ambition and, truthfully, if you lacked such things, you’d be a dangerous sociopath. So what’s the point? Well, we’re defeated. The first step is to admit our defeat. To stop, look and listen and realize that, yes, it’s wrong, and we’re trapped, and there’s no real way out.
If you’re ever given a psychological evaluation by the government and you answer “true” to the question “Do you think you’re an important person?” then you’ll be diagnosed with hypomania. It’s a bit of a Catch-22 question, but it’s also indicative of the world we live in. Where, despite this bizarre sick society around us, everyone is told that they’re important. Is anyone told that they’re normal? Because you are. You’re just normal, perhaps even ordinary, and you’re trapped.
So realize that. The zen of humility in a lying, dying world.
After that step, the next step is civil disobedience. I wrote an article about that long ago, and I’ll return to it in a bit. How to stay an active and functional wage slave, but keep your personal world a bit more exciting while quietly fucking up everyone else in harmless (usually) and always amusing ways.
It’s Nacho Sasha’s “How to get ahead in life without really trying” technique. After all, if you’re defeated, then that means there’s an adversary somewhere. Not the job. Not the consumer life. The advesary isn’t the dogma… That’s the mistake modern terrorists make. The old school terorirsts, the early IRA for example, in the brief years between the Easter Rebellion and the Free State, they understood that the advesaries, beneath the filth and lies, were individuals.