Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength To Love
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Viddy of the day: How to use a copy machine – and fail. Angry little office zombie. Feel the love.
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These are some of the many thoughts that crossed my mind as I worked my first full time job in a copy center since March of 2009.
“Man, these machines still suck”
“I can barely remember how to work these damn things.”
“It isn’t that copy centers suck, per se, they don’t. They’re just places to work. It isn’t that the work is horrible, it isn’t, work is work. It isn’t that the people who work in them suck. Some do, but some people ALWAYS suck, always seem to be in the way, trying to ruin your day, or life, or just be a pain in the ass, that can’t be helped, really, that’s just part of being human. What it IS, is that I am a hate filled lunatic who twitches and snarls every time he sees on of these benighted nasty offices, because they exist to suck out your soul, and leave you, and everyone who walks into that souls sucking death-trap with you, a mindless zombie whose sole function is the maintenance of the office, in a routine straight out of Dante’s Inferno.”
“Man, I can be an angry, sick, twisted monkey some days, can’t I?” 
“I want to be my own boss. I also want to be the Left Fielder for the New York Yankees, and I want to hit the lottery. Why do I get a feeling that I’m going 0 fer here?”
“I don’t think I want to be here, but I think at least part of that is that home is comfortable, and not working is easier than working, especially when work can generate as much hate as this job does in me. I think another part of it is that I’ve tasted freedom, and now I’m being chained to an office again, and I don’t like it. It exposes the shackles far to easily for me to see and be comfortable with.”
“Hey, this is pretty easy! The important bit is bite down on your clearly misplaced anger, paste on a fake smile, pretend you give a shit, and press the green button.”
“Holy crap, this place has honest to bob windows. They open and everything! I haven’t worked in one like that since 1993! Most offices are fish bowls, no openings for you to get out of. I guess most places figure if the windows worked, people would be enticed to jump, sick twisted monkeys that they are, and while they hate us, use us, and throw us away when they are done with us, they don’t actually want us dead, dead people can’t do their masters bidding, and be the machines that exist to make them a profit. And plus, their families can get lawyers and sue us, and we might lose some money as a result”
Again: “Man, I can be an angry, sick, twisted monkey some days, can’t I?”
“Ehhhh…. it ain’t so bad. The pay is …pay, which is more than I get at home, and the people really are nice, at least so far.I’ll be nice to them and come back tomorrow. Maybe if I work long enough for them, I can get rid of that toxic attitude of mine, or at least bury it long enough to pay the bills.”
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That’s it from here, America. I’ll write to you tomorrow.
