photo credit: coolmonfrere
In the last
seven weeks or so, since I started working my office job, I’ve noticed something rather curious about my trains of thought. University work life has the luxury of being tailored to the individual, i.e. you can come and go however you please, as long as you get the work done to the satisfaction of your supervisor (and, in some cases, you don’t even really need to do that). As such, there were long hours spent within the confines of my uni office where I was doing anything but work. I read an astonishingly broad array of news articles and essays, commented on blogs, and, the perennial favourite, completed a whole bunch of in-browser flash games. And that was fine and good: after all, you can’t write, edit, and review a thesis without allowing yourself downtime between milestones*.
However, in a corporate environment, downtime is a luxury, not a given. One half-hour lunch break and two short coffee breaks are all that are allowed, and the rest of the time you are expected to be at your desk, churning away at whatever it is you are being paid cash money to do. I’m aware that this isn’t a new concept, and I’m not here to bleat about how time-poor I am, or how cruel the corporate world is. I understand the economics, and I’m happy to offer my services in exchange for the weekly injection of fluid cash into the desiccated landscape of my savings account. The monotony of the work was not unexpected, but what I have been surprised by is my gas-like ability to fill the container within which I am placed. I have offered absolutely no resistance to the change in focus that moving from a uni-based, research position to an 8-4:30, full-time workplace brings. Yes, it’s early days–seven weeks is hardly long enough for the novelty to have worn off, given that this is the most significant change in lifestyle I’ve had in 8 years–but I’d have expected something. Some discomfort at the shift, some sign that this was not something I could easily keep doing for another 3 months after my contract finishes, then another 6 months after that, then another year, and so on, and so forth.
As a result of the smooth transition, I’m experiencing a narrowing of focus that is sometimes almost comical in nature. During our week of overtime, when the team was running 10 hour days plus Saturday shifts, I found myself almost bursting with unbridled joy when I discovered that a customer had correctly filled out their application forms. Emotions that I hadn’t experienced in my most proud moments of, say, getting published, or having particularly awesome sex, I was suddenly feeling on behalf of an anonymous stranger that had accomplished the momentous tasks of correctly filling in their name and ticking a box. This narrowing has me a little confused; should I be happy that I can focus so exclusively on the task placed in front of me, no matter how trivial? Or should I be worried that I am apparently unconcerned with what it is I do, as long as it’s something I can find some aspects with which I can engage?
Perhaps I’m looking into it a bit too much. After all, I’m not going to be doing this kind of mind-numbing work forever, and it has the advantage of being able to be told firmly to sit and stay at the sliding doors of the office. But I think I need to make sure I am doing something every day that isn’t just fuzz. My routine for most of the weeks has been to come home and play video games for the remainder of the night, cook dinner, and go to sleep. So perhaps more blogging, more writing, and more action that engages the manual shift in my brain’s transmission might be a good idea. Starting with this here blog post. (:
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* The possibility that my milestones may have been a tad bit too finely-spaced didn’t escape my notice, as my self-imposed, 6-month-long guilt-trip will attest.
