A somewhat lazy complaint from an office worker on his typical office day today. As someone in his thirties, I’ve been part of the office world for about ten years now, and it still fascinates me how awful it actually is. Endless meetings that lead nowhere, vague reports that end up in a drawer, policy documents that nobody does anything with. And above all: 99 percent of colleagues who, deep down, don’t give a damn about it either.
I know: I could look for something else. But I have a family to support, and my job pays well. So I just play along with the game. Still, sometimes I’d rather go work for the parks department than keep doing this. How did it happen that, after the Second World War, we collectively built up this system on such a massive scale while it feels so incredibly pointless?
Office Space was a great movie!
It should be a must watch for anyone thinking like this.
The fact what 2 of them go back to the office work is really telling.
Not sure what you do, but it’s just different work. It’s the planning work that needs to be done that no one really thinks about. The larger a company gets the more they need to do. The administrative load gets fairly stagger at a large size.
Yes because work before the Second World War was always so meaningful (and good for your health) and people loved going to work…
You’re just jealous you didn’t get the chance to work in a coal mine or die building dams.
I personally prefer the good old days of having weather destroy my crops and my whole family starving to death.
Better times. At least you didn’t have to work in an office.
Like all children, I yearn for the mines.
You aren’t paid for the pointless stuff. You are paid for the stuff which needs to be done and to be available if something needs to be done.
50 % of my work is pointless but without me (insert standard stuff) doesn’t work and if something exceptional happens in business they need my expertise. So i have a full time job.
I agree it can be soul-crushing and boring, but nobody is trying to keep an office-job “system” in place. It’s just that in a post-industrialized world, more and more of the work needed to make society function (public and private sector) boils down reviewing information, making a decision about that information, and communicating and memorializing that decision. Which is what most office jobs really amount to. Society only needs so much manual labor.
What is your actual job position?
“Office job” includes all kinds of actual positions, which may or may not offer meaningful value in all sorts of ways.
Jobs are shaped by what makes your employer money: not what makes workers happy.
> How did it happen that … we collectively built up this system on such a massive scale while it feels so incredibly pointless?
What continues to be true is that groups of people, specialists who cooperate, are incredibly powerful. Much, much more capable than either A) any individual, or B) a group of individual generalists operating without organization.
There’s a transition going on where it’s no longer clear that everyone needs to be physically located in the office, but that’s still not 100% clear. What IS clear is that skilled humans in groups are the most powerful force on earth.
Kid, I started my working life in the Alberta oil patch.
There a tendency among white collar, and especially government types to mythologize blue collar work as having special meaning. Don’t fall into that trap.
We took risks, lost toes, spent time away from family and even had a crew member lose their life so that shareholders could get good returns and executives get bonuses.
I will take my white collar government office job and the safety and predictability it brings with joy for the rest of my life.