Working for myself

I got up again. I didn't mean to do it. But since no one's actually buried me, I saw no reason not to kick my feet out from under the covers.

It was after 8.

Today, I had no mind-numbing job with people joking how I ended up in their Dilbert universe. There's always one guy who looks exactly like Dilbert's boss.
Never fails.

A vacation from it would be nice.

A vacation from being dressed and out the door with self-made lunch and running for the bus with a coffee in hand just to arrive and find out you had to wait for the person who had the logistics of why you'd even been called for the assignment.

Do I call the agencies today? No, let them wait. Hell, they're probably interviewing new applicants. Women who may or may not be dressed for success.

The woman who interviewed before me yesterday for an office job –– and whose interview time ran over into my scheduled slot –– was wearing tight jeans and a shirt that barely covered her spill of fleshy torso. Dumb me wore a suit, and had good responses and good questions.

My interview was still short. But they made sure to compliment my “phone voice.”
Honesty is my worst enemy in the interview. So is bullshitting with the zeal of a missionary.

It’s not like I have a lack of work ethic. It’s refusal to blow it all for idiots who use phrases like “thinking outside the box” with a straight face.

What do you think you’re sitting in all day? Or, are you actually going to call two screwed together partitions over which anyone can poke his head to see you surfing Craigslist a wall?

We’re happy being here on top of one another, is what the cubicle world wants to impart. We know each other’s habits and embrace them. Tom, the IT coordinator, is eating his 3 pm après-lunch vending machine pastry and the rustling of plastic wrapper is music to our ears as he tears the seams with practiced finickiness. Tammy, the paid intern with the clunky heels and elephant walk, is just back from her smoke break and exhales January smoking garage nicotine into February’s waiting face. Trey, or Trae, whose job no one but maybe three people know but everyone can fairly guess is gay, is trimming his nails, keeping an intentionally faulty metronome to remind everyone – even people whose jobs don’t permit access inside his insular hemisphere, displayed in photos of himself in his graduation garb and others where he and other pretty men are in party girl mode – that he’s special.

Yes, Tom, Tammy and Trae, and everyone else busying themselves with the miniscule gears through which most modern companies prove themselves as productive: You are all special.

I am not. I knew I wasn’t at a very early age, and have been trying to atone for that lack by writing about other people, who clearly had no idea that they are so imminently observable.

I have no reason to still be in my pajamas. I’m my own boss, so I pour myself another cup of coffee, grateful for my invisibility.