Читать книгу Be Awesome: Modern Life for Modern Ladies - Hadley Freeman, Hadley Freeman - Страница 7

Here are five of rules of thumb, should all the fingers on one of your hands turn into thumbs and you decide to rule them.

1 There is no day too dull, no problem too great that cannot be fixed with a couple of plays of ‘Rush Rush’ by Paula Abdul.

2 The amount of time it takes for you to get over him is exactly the same amount of time it will take for him to start missing you.

3 Talking about exercise burns exactly the same amount of calories as doing exercise.

4 ‘When someone asks you if you’re a god, you say YES!’

5 The office sucks.

Four of these are true. And one – is wrong! Damn wrong!

‘Yay, I’m in the office!’ is not a sentence one frequently hears, or at least not uncoated in the gloopy marinade of heavy sarcasm. ‘Yeah, I’m stuck in the office,’ is the more common phraseology.

Indeed, ‘an office job’ is often held up as precisely the opposite of human aspiration. ‘Pen-pusher’, ‘office lackey’, ‘wage slave’: the derogatory terms for a person devoted to the office life are many. The only positive one, really, is ‘boss’, and even that’s only a good thing if it’s you that has the title.

Oh sure, there is the whole ‘trapped sitting at the same desk every day, year upon year, watching your life go by as you work in this soul-crushing, dehumanising place doing a wholly pointless job’ element. Then there’s what Joshua Ferris described in his office-based novel, Then We Came to the End: ‘sitting all morning next to someone you deliberately cross the road to avoid at lunchtime’. (Although as true office devotees know, you don’t go out to eat your lunch: you eat at your desk while surfing the internet, thereby reducing your daily movement to a level one can only describe as ‘paraplegic’.)

But in the main, antipathy towards the office is merely a hangover from the teenage mentality that dominates so much of adult life. An example of this is the frisson that exists around alcohol twenty years after one is allowed to drink it legally, expressed in the faux-shamefaced boasting about how hilariously wasted one was the night before. You know, only really COOL people are allowed to buy alcohol.

But the most obvious manifestation of this mentality is in regard to the office. To work in an office is the adult equivalent of studying for an English test and giving the answers that you know will get you a decent grade as opposed to riffing off on your own torturously thought-out theories to express your individuality (working in the creative arts); crossing your fingers and hoping for the best (freelancing); or cheating (living off someone else). It’s the coward’s way, in other words, the approach that is boring and safe, in which the reliability of the outcome is in no way worth the monotony of the process.

But like telling the teacher what they want to hear in order to get on with your life as quickly and painlessly as possible, the office is deeply underrated. Far from being the place where your soul goes to die, it is the ideal environment for the human being, providing occupation, companionship, identity, shelter, food and water; in other words, all anyone needs to survive physically and emotionally. It is the Serengeti to your inner pinstriped tiger. And, of course, it also has that most basic of human requirements, too, the one God gifted to Moses on the Mount: free internet access.

In order to appreciate this, you have to leave the Office of Conditioned Responses and transfer yourself to the Office of Magical Thinking, and to help facilitate this, all your concerns will now be dealt with by HR, point by point. Tea and coffee will be available. Well, they are wherever you are reading this, presumably. And if they’re not, then this book is insulted that you are reading it in such a poor environment. No wonder you have trouble in the office, you anti-social weirdo.