White Collar Factory

The same high ceilings and concrete floors. Same dead-eyed vacant stares on the workers' faces, as vacant as the lodgings in recession-era Disneyland. Same idea too, but instead of assembling and producing, they type and scan. Paper and folders everywhere. Here, instead of keeping you on your feet, they keep you in your chair. The manager gives instructions to the supervisors to keep feeding the workers paper and folders: "Your goal is to keep them from leaving their chairs."

The length of breaks, the lack of vending machines, the bathrooms located in the parking lot... ostensibly designed for "security," but the program functions also to provide just enough nourishment and relief - and receive in return a maximum of complacency. Faux friendliness and sanitized humor mask a much deeper inequality. As well, there's no obvious hierarchy of leadership: the managers and supervisors wear the same uniforms, and who knows what power is commanded by the polo shirted-ones, spying quietly from the perimeter?

Because the stakes are lower - the workers don't absolutely depend on this job for their survival, and the manager knows it - the game is more psychological. The manager appeals to the worker's pride, ingrained sense of duty, and desire to be obedient. Sure, it's sad to see the educated young worker move papers and type faster to please his boss; but it becomes disgusting when one considers he's really typing faster to please himself, to feed his own ego.

Two nights in a row I see an ad on TV for Heavy Metal Ballads that almost brings tears to my eyes. Not the music itself, but the nostalgia. Reminds me of county fairs, the acid-washed jeans and leather jackets that my role models wore, and shoot-till-you-win games at amusement parks. The combination of a bittersweet nostalgia for childhood with an awareness of the futility of the eight-hour-days of adulthood makes it difficult to create new memories, to live in the present.

And on the third day, with the rain pouring down, I miss another bus, and almost another meal. Water on the outside of the rain-jacket, sweat on the inside. But then the sun breaks through, shining with a heavenly radiance on Panda Express. And another bus comes. On it, I read about Fourier's utopian future vision of the domestication of the zebra and beaver, and the seas turning to lemonade, and begin to feel an optimistic contentment that will develop throughout the day. Vaneigem says, "The desire for an other life is that life already." The desire and the struggle trump all. If I miss another bus, the factory will not close down. If I run out of time for lunch, Panda Express will not close down. And if it does, I'll find food somewhere. The point is to use the desire and the struggle to turn the seas to lemonade. Everything else will be just fine and dandy.