#this was back in the early 1990s so I'm thinking the cake is no longer made. Not hopeful ill ever find it again- but i still remember it.

[themollyzone]

why should i change? he's the one who sucks

On my friend Abbey's recommendation, last night after getting home from dinner I put on the movie Office Space. It is possible I have seen this movie 30 times before, but all 30 of those times occurred when I was in high school. Now I have been working 'office' jobs for 10 years and so I can Identify in a different way.

The visual language of office culture in the 1990s is obviously dated. Highway traffic jams, kitsch-forward fast-casual restaurants, faulty beige computer equipment, headset phones, the nubbly gray walls of a cubicle (perfectly setting off the gleaming red Swingline stapler). There's a great visual gag where the protagonists walk back to the office from getting coffee and have to stumble down and back up a corporate park grass gulch in order to get there. An important plot point hinges on the insertion of a floppy disk. Everyone wears short-sleeved button-downs and ties, just like Dilbert.

All of that is gone now, at work. The gray cubicle was replaced by the tyranny of the open floor plan, where everyone can see exactly what you're doing on your computer all the time. Office dress codes relaxed, and redundant memos about TPS reports turned into meetings that could have been emails. The signifiers change, but as Tom Delonge once sang, work sucks, and always will.

When I was a teenager I thought the Milton "I believe you have my stapler" shit was hilarious. Same with the bit with Jennifer Aniston's character's pieces of flair, as well as the incongruous use of the Geto Boys song "Damn It Feels Good To Be A Gangsta." Now the most striking thing about Office Space to me is the plot point that kicks off Peter Gibbons' anti-work journey. He begrudgingly attends a hypnotherapy session with his girlfriend, and when it's his turn, he asks the hypnotherapist: "Is there any way that you could just zonk me out so that I don't know that I'm at work? Could I come home and think that I've been fishing all day or something?"

The hypnotherapist says no, but proceeds to hypnotize Peter anyway. "Your concern about your job melts away," he says. Then before he can snap Peter out of this relaxed state, he keels overs and dies. Through a few moments of hypnosis, Peter sheds decades of ingrained indoctrination to office culture. He no longer feels the need to listen to anything his shitty boss says, or to show up on time (or at all). He is no longer concerned.

Office Space's humor comes from satirizing the dull corporate culture of the '90s—the yammering, overreaching bosses in suspenders, the sad grocery store birthday cakes for coworker birthdays—but it also comes from what now in 2022 feels like a universal truth about a certain kind of job: that work sucks not because your boss sucks or the job requirements suck, but because it is apparently necessary to be so concerned about it. Peter stops caring and the illusion is revealed. You do not need to wear a tie to edit code to prepare for Y2K. You do not need to put a cover on the TPS report. You don't even need to file a TPS report in the first place. Why should I change? He's the one who sucks.

As a millennial, when I entered the workplace in the early 2010s, the indoctrination had already gotten underway. I should network whenever possible. I should "rise and grind" as well as "hustle." Work achievements counted extra "as a woman" because it was part of my journey toward becoming a "girlboss." At my job, I was meant to wear "many hats" and be part of a "scrappy team." And after the 2008 crash, of course, I was lucky to have a job at all. I was supposed to find fulfillment through achievement and advancement, and I was supposed to feel like it was a literal moral obligation to do a good job. This led to situations like me being proud of myself for being willing to come in on a Saturday at a job where I was getting paid $50 a day, pre-tax, and the Saturday didn't count as one of those paid days. Lord, I wish someone had hypnotized me then to not be so concerned.

At the end of the movie, Peter becomes a construction worker. In some ways, this is a fantasy vision of what an authentic, bullshit-less job is. Physical labor is hard and there is probably plenty of bullshit to be found at a construction site. But it is as Peter's guileless drywall-installing neighbor says earlier in the film: in taking the construction job, Peter will never again hear a colleague say "Sounds like someone has a case of the Mondays," because "I believe you get your ass kicked saying something like that."