nudity, sexuality, and violence

i've just finished reading a recent post from a friend/coworker that got my thinkin' cogs slowly grinding (a miracle on a monday morning after five hours of sleep, and after i woke up to a mysterious and painful bump on my head -- mayhap chris decided i'm more work than i'm worth and attempted to elbow me to death in the wee hours of the morning?). i only read the goddamned thing because he promised scenes with coarse language and sexuality. boy, was i disappointed to find NOT ONE cuss word and no smooching, groping, or flashing either. false advertising. not only did this post make me think thoughts that are entirely too deep, it also got me wayyyyy too emotional.

some persistent themes included: the horrific myopia of our boss (not literally -- he's deaf, not blind), the family-like emotional and psychological ties of affection (as in, we like each other, mostly) and dysfunction among and between the office staff, and the general feeling of professional castration and uselessness that our organization often fosters. boy, i hope i don't get dueced for this post. good thing my boss is a technophobe. anyway. i feel that writing about themes 1 and 2 would probably fuck me up this early in the morning, so by default, i'm gonna talk about theme 3. now, the coworker who got me thinking about all this stuff definitely has the shittiest job in the office -- he is/was the administrative assistant to our executive director (it's a little unclear exactly what my coworker's position is now, as we have added yet another staff member with an ambiguous catch all job title). he is/was responsible for loads and loads of unnecessary typing, answering the phones, looking up bus routes for our erstwhile director, and a pile of other random and unpredictable things. his input was not wanted or required, in spite of the fact that he's fairly smart (though a pinko commie -- we can't really take him seriously, then, can we?). said coworker is understandably fed up -- when you eat a diet of shitcakes and shitballs and shitsticks all day everyday, you tend to get full fairly quickly. however, thinking about his plight got me thinking about the plight of others in the office. at the apparent opposite end of the spectrum are myself and our IT/finance manager. we have 'held the ear' of the boss for the longest time, have been here the longest (bless our hearts), and therefore have earned certain privileges. however, though i am dubbed the operations manager, i do not have the authority to make decisions on even the smallest points of policy, or even the smallest points of operations. the guy who is/was working as the admin assistant was supposed to be my 'second in command' as far as operations are concerned, and he was co-opted by my boss, and now i am doing the job alone. which is fine, in principle, but really, this job is best shared by two people. that's how it was in the past, and that's how it was when our little organization was operating at peak efficiency. so that's my cross to bear -- even though i can talk to the boss, and sometimes have him listen to me, he only listens when i give him answers he wants to hear. so of course, it makes me feel a bit like the office bitch -- i deal with the consequences of outdated policy or our director's inaction/missteps. as for the finance/IT manager, he is often asked to literally make up budgets, to shuffle money from our director's personal account into our office account, and to make all of this awful accounting look like it's on the up and up. he doesn't get to protest. he doesn't get to decide anything. the boss says jump for the money, and he has to ask how high. also, he is supposed to be working on a dedicated server to streamline our IT.... our website crashes all the time because our shared server can't handle the traffic, and we are running two databases, which causes all sorts of errors. but, our boss won't earmark any money to purchase a shared server. it's absurd. so the IT guy has to listen to all of us bitch about the IT system, when he isn't given the budget to buy what we need to fix the problems. our volunteer manager has a pretty decent gig, though she has to explain why it is that volunteers sometimes don't show up or change their schedules -- obviously she is doing something wrong when college students and teenagers decide to sleep in or fuck or anything fun like that instead of showing up for their volunteer work. our publicity/fundraising person has to write drafts and drafts and drafts of grants, only to be told that the project sucks and have to start again. she can't publish any posters or ads or anything because she doesn't have a budget either. each of these problems arises out of one source: the b-o-s-s. he has managed through his manipulation and his obtusity (is that a word?) and his awful awfulness to kill the spirit of not just my coworker who talked about it on his blog, but every staff member in this office.

now, i know that i said above that i was going to talk about theme 3, and my concluding sentence looks a lot like theme 1, but the two are inextricable from each other. having a boss who treats you like a child, who patronizes you and uses your labor like an abused sex toy to be taken out for his own gratification at his will and leisure (see, i got in some sexual content after all) is incredibly demoralizing. hold on. before you accuse me of white, lower-middle class self-pity, i do recognize that having an office job, no matter how shitty, is preferable to picking cotton in a hot field all day or cleaning out shit buckets, or whatever, consider that i do realize there are much worse jobs out there and i am by no means implying otherwise. i'm just trying to articulate the effects of working at a place where the boss is like a little dictator. in spite of the fact that ALL of us in the office have a bachelor's degree or better (two of us have master's), in spite of the fact that most of us have participated or directed meaningful social or political actions, in spite of the fact that we are all pretty darn decent, smart, and worthy human beings, we are not treated as such. and not only does this have an effect on our senses of self on a personal level, but it also has a devastating consequence for our senses of self on a professional level. i mean, how do you view your professional self when you have gotten what seems like so very little professional development? how do you view your professional self when you have no room for promotion? how do you view your professional self when your ideas are consistently pooped upon? how do you view your personal self when your boss refers to the royal "we" in a way that dehumanizes and devalues you? how do you view your professional self when you only exist at the office to serve the whim of another human being? you start to view yourself as expendable, as fairly useless, and you start to be afraid. you start to wonder if you would be able to cut it at a 'real' job, you start to think about your resume and how few skills you have acquired during your tenure at this place. your professional self shrinks into a little ball of apprehension and ennui. so... even though that effect is not so awful has having your fingers hacked off by a machete while cutting down sugarcane or not sleeping because of spasms in your back caused by ten hours of heavy lifting, it is there and it is significant, and for most of us, it really sucks.

now then. are you as depressed as me yet? i figure you must be. you're either depressed cause you can relate to the stuff i've said or you're depressed cause you've just wasted ten minutes of your life reading this shit and you're thinking that humanity is doomed if self-interested, sniveling little bitches like me populate the north american work force. in either case, i have to pat myself on the back for a job well done.