you know, it's funny. in the 90s there was this whole fuss about getting an office job and the nature of selling out. i'm sure you've heard the tale by now. if you bought into corporate america and gave your life up to capitalism to buy a house and raise kids in the suburbs like it was the 50s, you were seen as a class traitor. you'd abandoned your moral compass for financial security. and in a time where the cold war had ended and people were proclaiming it "the end of history" because things were just So Prosperous economically, it really did seem like a noble hill to die on if you were anywhere left of center.
at least that's what i hear from gen xers and elder millennials. i was born in late 1994, so i didn't really get to "experience" the 90s the way they did. what i do vividly remember experiencing however, is 9/11. just six days after the towers fell, hunter s thompson published an article for ESPN titled, "when war drums roll" which was already his second column reflecting on the uncertain future of america post-9/11. oft quoted now, he wrote that, "the last half of the 20th century will seem like a wild party for rich kids, compared to what's coming now. the party's over, folks." and buddy, let me tell you that man was fucking right.
corporate america and office culture very much still exist after 9/11, after the recession, even "after" covid but they have mutated and crystalized into glass houses. their access dwindling faster and faster to outsiders not born into wealth with each devastating technological advancement that allows for those in power to grip a tighter chokehold on the proletariat. the 90s american dream that was given as a pathway to xers by boomers as a "sure bet" for a life of security crumbled to dust with the rubble of the world trade center. and with it went any hopes of stability for the generations to follow. nowadays having a 9-5 desk job is more of a dream than an inevitability for young people. it's something that attracts the allure of security for the 20 somethings of today that are, as thompson laid out in 2001, "doomed to be the first generation of Americans who will grow up with a lower standard of living than their parents enjoyed."
and even for those of my generation and younger who do get desk jobs, after having given up their autonomy in the humiliating and debilitating test of worth that is the job application grind, i've found that most discover what's on the inside to be just as insecure an investment of time and energy as being outside that system can be. breakdowns in communication abundant, lack of generational understanding between peers, issues with proprietary technology, hierarchical structures that demand exploitation of the workers on the ground to actually propel the operation forward, and a level of stability that stops just short of guaranteeing that you'll be laid off without a moment's notice once some number-cruncher higher up finds your position redundant. none of that even speaks to the complications of your employment being tied to your healthcare in this country, regardless of how secure your job is. call me politically-disengaged, but i really am not thinking about "the free marketplace of ideas" when i'm experiencing some phantom pain at my physical labor job and have to wager whether it's worth taking a significant hit to my financial income just for a healthcare professional to tell me i should be resting more and stressing less. i'll get right on that doc!
but i mean, that's how the system was designed to work. you already knew that before reading my review of this 27 year old comedy movie where hot-as-hell parker posey tells toni collette she has a beautiful mouth. what i'm getting at is that being an entire generation removed from the characters portrayed in clockwatchers, and with all that has changed around the social construct of The Office Job since, this movie still rang incredibly true to my life experience. and no, i've never worked in an office myself.
in 2023 i had a 3 month stint working a temp job for the Chicago Board of Elections for our initial and runoff mayoral elections. i worked with about 100 other people, most from impoverished neighborhoods in the city, in a half abandoned warehouse just east of Garfield Park, an area of chicago with a disproportionally high crime rate compared to the rest of the city. they split us into teams and i was with four other guys and one woman for the majority of my time there working under an incredibly overworked manager. she herself had been a temp with the board doing our job for years before they promoted her. she'd never managed people before, so i don't blame her for being a terrible boss. even as she would fly off the handle and yell at people when she got stressed out. more so i blame the cruel system that lorded over her for years and wrung her out of all her time and energy before giving her this position more out of pity than anything else. a system that so detested her autonomy that it forced her to make a makeshift bed and office out of pallets and folding tables in a half abandoned warehouse because it demanded she be present there more than with her two children to call it a fulltime job.
i have a lot of stories from those brisk 3 months but our standard routine was as follows:
> show up around 8am every weekday, sit in little plastic chairs in our makeshift workspace and wait for our manager to wake up from the nap she'd been taking for the past hour. often times she'd fallen asleep watching full episodes of law & order that had been sped-up and uploaded in segments on tiktok blasting from her phone at full volume
> from 9am to lunch we would wait for our manager's supers working in the fancy office downtown to call and tell her what to do and then assemble whatever paperwork or materials we needed for the menial task they were gonna assign us
> take a 90 minute PAID lunch
> bullshit around and talk about whatever tf when we came back
> be told what our assignment was
> conclude it was gonna take more time than we had that day to complete and that we should just wait until tomorrow to start it
> then move to the other side of the warehouse where we knew supervisors would not be roaming around spying on if temps were on their phones and chill for another hour before going downstairs to clock out
> rinse repeat with about 5 to 10 of our total 40 hour work week actually getting devoted to doing the tasks that needed to get done
the systems that are in place to make capitalism operate, they're all a rouse. it's all a stacked deck of fake hierarchies that ensure some rich person's unrealistic dream gets approximated with duct tape and clothes pins by people whose livelihoods depend on convincingly constructing that illusion as reality.
to get 22% of our city's population (the best we could do after two rounds of voting) to elect a mayor whose rubber-stamping affects all of our lives every day, it took two months and roughly 100 underpaid workers from the southside pushing heaving metal supply cabinets full of voting materials around, along with the five of us packing papers into plastic bags and prepping equipment for polling centers. that was the cost of doing business. we constructed the illusion of democracy in a city where JB pritzker makes a more meaningful impact on our lives than our mayor ever will.
and it's giant metal voting supply cabinets all the way down, baby. any big corporation like the one in clockwatchers or like the arm of the city i briefly worked for is being held together by the same kinds of duct tape at every turn. and they will take every opportunity to make everyone's days as frustrating and pointless as they can before cutting the cord loose and letting employees endure being unemployed when it becomes convenient for the suits signing the paychecks. and when things have to get squeezed to such extremes to make ends meet, it's gonna create a lot of meaningless dead-ends in the process of actually moving the gears on the operation. those 100 people gotta do *something* when they clock in and there aren't giant cabinets to move. so hours and hours of wasted time will get put on the books and filed away as necessary to get the job done.
so yeah, it's no surprise that this movie resonates with me despite never being a paper pusher in a cubicle prison myself. this movie is less "for everyone whose ever worked a meaningless job before" or even anyone whose ever worked a temp job, and more for anyone who's ever worked a job period. because basically every job is meaningless when you think about the logistics involved in its actual operation.
i wish i had gotten a hot galpal friendgroup out of my temp job like toni collette did tho. instead i just got to argue hypotheticals all day with people i found very little to relate to while sitting in an uncomfortable chair. real chin-scratchers like “if you jumped from a third story window to escape a fire do you think you would land without injury?" i do miss the guy who wanted to talk to me about yugioh. and the tboy pup from little village who i occasionally would talk to on lunch breaks and fumble trying to flirt with. they showed me their urbex pics exploring the parts of the abandoned warehouse we weren't supposed to go in one time. and by then i had assumed we were friendly enough to exchange instagrams. but when i asked they told me they "don't give theirs out usually" and then i never saw them again. i was crestfallen. had i done something to offend? they kept one of those stainless steel urethra dick plugs on their keychain and had a foldout baton they would twirl around tucked away in their cargo pants at all times. can't remember their name, but i think about them every now and again when i see someone at a rave in little village wearing a dog collar. anyway what was i talking about? yes, this movie. clockwatchers. toni collette, parker posey, phoebe friends, serena legallyblonde. it is, as they say, Office Space For Bitches (positive).