LITMIR.BIZ

      The office of magical thinking

      Here are five of rules of thumb, should all the fingers on one of your hands turn into thumbs and you decide to rule them.

      Four of these are true. And one – is wrong! Damn wrong!

      ‘Yay, I’m in the office!’ is not a sentence one frequently hears, or at least not uncoated in the gloopy marinade of heavy sarcasm. ‘Yeah, I’m stuck in the office,’ is the more common phraseology.

      Indeed, ‘an office job’ is often held up as precisely the opposite of human aspiration. ‘Pen-pusher’, ‘office lackey’, ‘wage slave’: the derogatory terms for a person devoted to the office life are many. The only positive one, really, is ‘boss’, and even that’s only a good thing if it’s you that has the title.

      Oh sure, there is the whole ‘trapped sitting at the same desk every day, year upon year, watching your life go by as you work in this soul-crushing, dehumanising place doing a wholly pointless job’ element. Then there’s what Joshua Ferris described in his office-based novel, Then We Came to the End: ‘sitting all morning next to someone you deliberately cross the road to avoid at lunchtime’. (Although as true office devotees know, you don’t go out to eat your lunch: you eat at your desk while surfing the internet, thereby reducing your daily movement to a level one can only describe as ‘paraplegic’.)

      But in the main, antipathy towards the office is merely a hangover from the teenage mentality that dominates so much of adult life. An example of this is the frisson that exists around alcohol twenty years after one is allowed to drink it legally, expressed in the faux-shamefaced boasting about how hilariously wasted one was the night before. You know, only really COOL people are allowed to buy alcohol.

      But the most obvious manifestation of this mentality is in regard to the office. To work in an office is the adult equivalent of studying for an English test and giving the answers that you know will get you a decent grade as opposed to riffing off on your own torturously thought-out theories to express your individuality (working in the creative arts); crossing your fingers and hoping for the best (freelancing); or cheating (living off someone else). It’s the coward’s way, in other words, the approach that is boring and safe, in which the reliability of the outcome is in no way worth the monotony of the process.

      But like telling the teacher what they want to hear in order to get on with your life as quickly and painlessly as possible, the office is deeply underrated. Far from being the place where your soul goes to die, it is the ideal environment for the human being, providing occupation, companionship, identity, shelter, food and water; in other words, all anyone needs to survive physically and emotionally. It is the Serengeti to your inner pinstriped tiger. And, of course, it also has that most basic of human requirements, too, the one God gifted to Moses on the Mount: free internet access.

      In order to appreciate this, you have to leave the Office of Conditioned Responses and transfer yourself to the Office of Magical Thinking, and to help facilitate this, all your concerns will now be dealt with by HR, point by point. Tea and coffee will be available. Well, they are wherever you are reading this, presumably. And if they’re not, then this book is insulted that you are reading it in such a poor environment. No wonder you have trouble in the office, you anti-social weirdo.

       1. ‘Office life is so predictable and always the same!’

      Along with Manhattan and Paris, the office is one of only three places on earth that looks EXACTLY how it is portrayed in the movies. The Apartment, Working Girl, Being John Malkovich, Wall Street, Office Space, Lost in America, The Secret of my Success: all these movies are not just set in offices but are pretty much predicated on the fascinating dynamics thereof. Not always in a positive manner, admittedly, but still. Do you know how hard it is to break into the movies?

      The filmmakers do not prettify or uglify the offices as they do to, say, London, but rather keep them looking wholly realistic and utterly recognisable, meaning, ergo and thusly, that the office is inherently perfect. Any of those offices could be your office, if your office had people in it who look like Harrison Ford and with the comic timing of Jack Lemmon.

      But whereas the synchronicity between the cinematic and the reality is seen as proof of Manhattan and Paris’s miraculous aesthetics, with skyscrapers that twinkle in the night like promises and elegant cobbled streets lit by Beaux Arts street lamps, it is seen in a somewhat less affirmative light in regard to the office, with its aisles of filing cabinets bedecked with three-month-old Styrofoam coffee cups with odd semicircle chunks ripped out along the rims.

      Whenever a location scores a long-term gig to appear onscreen, this is generally considered an enormous compliment to the venue. So great, even, that it may become something of an annoyance to those who dwell there in real life, judging from the sign outside the house in New York that was used as the setting for Carrie’s apartment in Sex and the City. Across the beautiful high steps that front this elegant brownstone house is a long thick chain and on which a sign hangs that snarls, pit bull-like: ‘Tourists: FUCK OFF.’ I paraphrase, but only slightly.

      Yet even though the office setting has appeared in more films than desert islands, no one ever stands in the middle of an office, arms akimbo, digital camera at the ready and says, ‘Wow, it’s just like being in a movie!’

      So the office slogs on. It is the location equivalent of one of those great character actors who everyone dimly recognises but no one appreciates, who gets steady work but never a good table at Spago’s. Really, what does a location have to do to get some validation in this town?

      This outrageous double standard is a tragedy, not just because it has blinded that ultimate peddler of visual clichés, Woody Allen, to the obvious idea of making an office-based movie;⁵ it also means millions, nay, BILLIONS of people fail to realise, daily, that, far from throwing their lives down the plughole of monotony, they are living the Hollywood dream. Mia Farrow in Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo had to wait for an invitation from Jeff Daniels before she could step into the world of cinema. You, on the other hand, get to do it effortlessly five days a week,

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