It’s amazing, the effect work has on my general disposition. “Oh, Christ, Bill. Are we complaining about work again?” Number 1: Yes. Number 2: Yes, fuck you.

Unless you’re very close to me (e.g., Nina), I don’t show it much, or I just avoid you, but the past week has worried me a bit. I’m back on another temp position. When designing the position, a round table of misery experts realized they could make my shitty data entry jobs infinitely less enjoyable by arbitrarily scheduling them at six fucking thirty in the morning. Networking (at CPU, in Casper) almost broke me. Yahoo almost broke me. I left both of them. I’m no longer in a position to leave jobs, and that factors into my depression. It’s like having to serve a prison sentence (I imagine), knowing there’s no way out of it. Oh, and you’re innocent.

Let me briefly describe this week to you: For Monday through Wednesday, I showed up at six fucking thirty, to stand in a room and run copies of legal documents off for no reason. Hundreds, thousands of forms. “That doesn’t sound so bad,” you think, “at least it’s a paycheck.” But it’s not the job, but the subtler, more psychological factors. Today was a slight change of pace, but the novelty wore off quickly; I sat at a computer, looking at hundreds and hundreds of scanned legal documents, and typed key information from them into fields in another program. Again, the work is dumb, mind-numbing, and unforgivingly tedious, but I don’t think that’s what has me stewing all day, every day. Why does the corporate environment remind me so strongly of grade school? Not high school. Grade school. It’s fucking embarrassing. For example, today I came back in from one of my “holy shit, fifteen minutes already?” breaks, and HR was setting up a table of fucking cupcakes, while automatons filed out of their cubicles to line up. For cupcakes. I walked past the line, went back to my computer, put my headphones in, and went back to typing up bullshit. A woman later came in and asked “did everybody get their cupcakes?” I didn’t respond, because I figured silence meant that my mouth was chock full of cupcake or something, but she then specifically targeted me to make sure I got my cupcake. This woman didn’t do anything wrong. I was just so unbelievably annoyed by the whole thing. I was going to say “no,” but then realized that I would have to explain to her that I don’t particularly like sweets, or, you know, that I’m an adult, and have pretty much been over cupcakes for a good 19, 20 years. That sounded like more hassle than I was prepared to deal with, so I said “yes.”

Yes, I got my cupcake.

I’ve never felt so fucking stupid in my life. I remember at Yahoo, they were always trying to pull the “hip IT company” thing, and they’d do shit like buy everybody in the building a microbrew. Once they brought in a zillion bottles of wine and everybody got a couple glasses of wine. One day they came around with carts with hundreds and hundreds of pints of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. And every week we had bagel day, and pizza day, and we always had free vending, and onsite massage therapy. “This job is so awesome!” It’s not awesome, you fuckwit. This job is fucking awful, and they know it, and they’re pacifying you.

It’s the exact same case with the cupcakes. They know that everybody in this building has been coming in and sitting in a cubicle for eight hours a day, in many cases, for years. When you’re that fucking defeated, I bet cupcakes are fucking awesome. Probably almost as awesome as your wife deciding to have sex with you for the first time in three months. The other day, as I was standing at a counter and stamping COPY on about 1,000 copies, my 8th-grade-educated manager watched me stamp a couple, then slapped my shoulder and told me I was “doing a good job.” Really? Thank you for the validation! Not only could a monkey perform this job, he’d also be smart enough to fucking walk away from it. And again, like the cupcake lady, that guy didn’t do anything wrong. He probably thought he was being nice. But it came off as so unbelievably patronizing, as if he thought I’d stamp COPY even faster so that the next time he came around, he could tell me I was doing an even better job! I’m not here for the paycheck! I’m here for the approval! But that shit’s in my head. I’m sure that dude’s a good human being. Probably better than me, now that I think about it. I’m just so tired of being put in positions where I’m talked down to — intentionally or not — for several hours a day.

So things have been getting to me, and it’d be cool if I could channel this stress and frustration into something creative or productive, but it doesn’t happen. When I get off work, I want to sit and try and be happy that I’m not at work. Last week, I had my first night terror in months, during which I woke up screaming bloody fucking murder for several seconds, then spent some time hyperventilating and crying. That was fun. Night before last, I was so pissed off after work that, after picking Nina up and spending 20 minutes looking for a parking space, I finally cracked when this dumbshit driver did… something to piss me off, and all I was able to channel that into was busting my hand on the steering wheel and scaring the shit out of Nina (my friends know that in the past, I’ve had some “anger problems,” maybe. I thought I’d made great strides toward resolving them, but I think all I actually accomplished was putting up a dam; it didn’t really affect my breaking point at all, just allowed me to build up a nice reservoir of hate before the dam gives). Today, I was livid after work. Fucking. Livid. I got off at 3:15, but my new position requires me to fill out my timesheet in such a way that all the company’s clients get billed for the few minutes I spend on each project. It took me 15 minutes to fill out my time sheet. Do you know what 15 minutes feels like at that fucking place? Three lifetimes gnashing teeth in hell. I’m frantically clicking away in the shitty Java timesheet application, watching the computer’s clock as minute after minute tick by, and I’m just boiling because I’m there and not getting paid for every excruciating minute. The program needs to be a single checkbox, which says “I wasted another eight hours of my life, I agree to pretend this paycheck makes up for it.” So I’m running late to pick Nina up, still fuming because though I can leave that place, it doesn’t leave me, and after picking her up from school, I missed a turn on the highway. Normally, this would be a mild inconvenience, which resulted in my having to drive an additional 1.5 miles out of my way to flip around to get home, but today, remembering that I can’t be punching steering wheels with Nina around, I ended up breaking down and crying. Seriously. What the fuck is wrong with me? With any luck, it’s a brain tumor.

“What the fuck, Bill. Man up, do your fucking job.” This is the shit that pisses me off. My entire life, nobody has supported me in the idea that maybe, JUST FUCKING MAYBE, I am not designed to fit into that mold. I was telling my dad about this particularly demeaning, one-day-only, temp job that I took, and he said, “Yeah, but you do it for the dollar.” No, dad, you don’t just fucking do anything in the world for a buck. Especially at the expense of your own sanity, which is CLEARLY what years of this fucking bullshit is costing me. Any other outlet I ever had was a waste of time in his eyes. I remember after I moved to Portland, and I was telling him about the skateparks, he said “You’re still doing that shit?” What, desperately trying to enjoy half a fucking minute of my life? YEAH. I’M STILL DOING THAT SHIT.

Even discussing with friends, I end up getting the same, tired, condescending talk about pipe dreams, the real world, and my place in it. Can somebody accept the fucking fact that my brain is not wired for this shit? FACT: MY BRAIN IS NOT WIRED FOR THIS SHIT. I don’t think I’m better than the people that can live this way; I just personally cannot do it. Period. I should be a sound engineer, up at 3 in the morning on two pots of coffee, trying to find just the right combination of amp and mic to capture a band’s sound in the studio. I should be a writer, holed up in a den, wasting away on a whiskey diet and punching away at a book. I should be a stand up comic, full of coke and free liquor, bitter and cynical, bitching on a stage and making people laugh. Here’s an idea: I should be a professional fucking photographer, showing a gallery full of some bullshit to a bunch of high class art collector morons who act like they fucking understand me through my stupid fucking pictures. I should be anything but the fucking moron in the shirt and tie making your fucking computer talk to your fucking printer, or your other fucking computer. Or the fucking idiot on the other end of the phone trying to frantically get your shitty home business’ email working again while you call me a fucking idiot. Or the guy in the fucking copy room stamping COPY on three boxes of paper, who gets a fucking CUPCAKE once a month. I don’t want to count down the rest of my life in 8 hour, 5 day increments. That’s not my fucking place, I’ve fucking known it since I was a kid, and fuck you for trying to convince me otherwise. I’m a square fucking peg and if I can’t find my square fucking hole, I’m going to have to make my own, with or without your support.

Addendum:
I can look back on this post in two different ways. One will be, “Wow. That was a low point. Good thing it motivated me to do greater things with my life.” The other is, “Oh yeah, I remember that instant just before my spirit was finally broken once and for all. Life sure is fun here in the copy room. Happy 55th birthday to me!”

With any luck, it’s a brain tumor.