A workplace comedy of the mind
The spiritual life of the semi-recent past
In the world to come, everything will be as it is now, just a little different.
- Ben Lerner (sort of)
Office Space was starting to feel like a documentary.
For one thing, I never meant to be a paralegal.
For another, I never did my job.
This is 2012. But let me back up.
There is no paper jam
In Office Space, an alienated office drone, despairing of his stuck-ness, reluctantly agrees to be hypnotized.
Having hypnotized the drone, the hypnotist has a fatal heart attack before he can bring his subject out of the trance. In this way, the hypnosis succeeds.
The drone returns to drone-dom—to The Office. His circumstances are utterly unchanged—it is the job, the people, the life entire, that he has come to despise. But his perspective—his attitude—has transformed. (How intensely 90s is the word attitude?)
The Robin Hood of the teenage suburbs
Ron Livingston’s Peter Gibbons, permanently hypnotized, is now possessed of the magically attractive indifference I associate with both European aristocracy and this guy I went to high school with, the son of the district superintendent, who was kind to absolutely everyone despite or because of the fact that the laws of disciplinary gravity did not, apparently, apply to him.
He skipped class at will, touring the halls swinging his car-key lanyard around two fingers as if toying with the option of leaving altogether. He was also our star basketball player, and not a tall one—the John Stockton of southwest Ohio in the early aughts. The Muggsy Bogues of being white. (Seriously though, dude could PLAY.)
In this way, he was both underdog and aspirational figure.
Think I’m overselling it?
Let me tell you one of our most famous senior-year rumors: one frozen but snowless winter morning, Young Stockton woke up before dawn and took a hose to his dad’s driveway—his dad, remember, being the superintendent—in hopes that, if the man in charge starts his drive to work by slipping on a patch of ice, a snow day is guaranteed.
Just wanted tuh… get another look atchyeh
That was late 2003. Two years earlier, on 9/11, my cross-country coach was apoplectic. He had been overruled: practice was canceled.
His reaction seemed puzzling, mostly due to the 9/11-ness of it all. On the other hand, even then, the terrorists seemed likely to spare the Beechmont Avenue Pizza Hut that was the namesake and halfway mark of the loop we were scheduled to run that afternoon.
What I didn’t know then was that a pattern was being set. One began hearing the word “unprecedented” with a frequency I am tempted to describe using the word itself; in truth, these were merely the word’s first wobbly steps on a rags-to-riches journey of monstrous proportions.
The not-singer Michael Bolton
How should we describe the changes undergone by Peter Gibbons in Office Space as a result of his botched de-hypnosis?
“Psychological” is wrong: his transformation is deeper. Even to say his “philosophical outlook” has evolved doesn’t capture it; my philosophical outlook “evolves” every time I make the mistake of allowing myself access to a firehose of raw Wikipedia.
It is Peter’s spirit, for lack of a better word, that has changed. A new man, he neither fears discipline nor craves advancement. His spiritual awakening means he sees everything differently—the geography of a new future.
What do his superiors see? Management potential.
Abstract catastrophe
9/11 changed the material conditions of my life not one iota.
But the spirit of the country had changed. Sorta like the hypnosis in Office Space in reverse, and on a national scale. The landscape of possibilities darkened with threat. It’s a bit like the second season of Stranger Things, when Will finds his mind crowded with “now-memories,” shadowy dangers of uncertain veracity which nonetheless come to dominate his life. (This is also the elevator pitch for Dick Cheney’s autobiography.)
After 9/11, the American subjunctive became crowded with—well, rather more explosions. The explosions remained unreal at home even as they multiplied abroad.
In Ohio, the experience of 9/11 was vicarious, even virtual. Intellectually, I knew it was real; like everyone else, I watched it on TV. We even got together in a friend’s driveway and held a candlelight vigil. But my body remained blissfully ignorant—the catastrophe was abstract. (Short of airport security, it would remain so.)
Coach Wolf was, for our purposes, a man of the body. What do you mean, no cross-country practice? Practice has never been canceled. Ever.
Clear blue sky. Shelter in place. Funnily enough, it wouldn’t be the last time.
Come here often?
Like I was saying, I never meant to be a paralegal.
But I wanted to move back to New York, and my friend, a paralegal, said she could get me a job.
Once she did, I had a job in New York, and this New York job, paralegal, was mine to do. I had every intention of doing it. The job. 2012! This is your year, Howe.
Technically my job title was proofreader. I was in the estates department, which is a euphemism indicating that all of our clients were dead. Our job was to proofread settlements of wrongful death lawsuits filed on behalf of victims of asbestos-related illnesses—100% fatal, in our case—so their next of kin could receive the compensation for which they were eligible.
I never met anyone’s next of kin. I never met any clients (dead). I never even met my boss.
Being a New York law firm, 9/11 was less than abstract for them. I was told our boss left after the towers fell—moved to Miami and never came back. Being 2012—and a cost-conscious law firm armed with computers from 2002—there would be no video calls.
So, management-wise, this was a Waiting for Godot-type situation. That plus access to the internet meant I finished proofreading the first settlement I was assigned, and then the second, not AS quickly as I understood my ghost-boss to want.
I was anxious about that. Also, every day, the New York Times had published—online!—more articles for me to read, irrespective of how many I had already read—if anything seeming to accelerate in kind, like the candy assembly line in I Love Lucy.
Every day I planned to do proofreading. To proofread. Professionally. This was my plan.
Six months later, a monstrous pile of un-proofread settlements loomed above my ancient computer like the monolith towering over monkeys in 2001. I was invited to an unfamiliar floor of the building for a conversation with human resources.
The human resources lady informed me that they were declining to renew my contract.
Like an insane person, I said, “Why?” She looked at me like she was going to snatch my larynx. I assume it’s how a chameleon looks at a bug it’s about to tongue-assassinate, or how Osama bin Laden looked at freedom.
Ever the professional, instead she repeated the information that my contract was not being renewed. Tomorrow was my last day.
The next morning, I was terrified to face my coworkers: there was nothing abstract about them. I’d saddled them with months’ worth of work—work that by even the most negligible standards of human conduct, I should have done myself. I was ashamed.
I gathered what few belongings I kept in the office. Smushing together my fragmentary dignity, I looked at my colleagues—my fellow proofreaders—and gestured to the looming stack of lawsuits on my desk.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
Everyone smiled good-naturedly. Benevolently, even. How was this possible?
My fellow proofreader looked at me, and I swear to you this is true.
He said, “Don’t worry, Alex. The last guy’s stack was bigger.”
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SEE YOU NEXT FRIDAY, DEAR FRIENDS.