Be Awesome: Modern Life for Modern Ladies. Hadley Freeman

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, every week, until the day you die. Isn’t that awesome?⁶

       2. ‘The office keeps me from pursuing my dreams!’

      As anyone who works from home can tell you, unless your dreams are sitting at home, watching Loose Women and masturbating all day, the office is not keeping you from anything (and if you are ever tempted to do both of those activities at the same time, then it probably would be best if you stayed at home and out of society’s way).

      No doubt images of working to your own inner timetable instead of doing the 9–5 are dancing in your head: days that are peppered with spontaneous trips to museum exhibitions and mid-afternoon yoga classes in which you actually have space to do a warrior position, unlike in the overcrowded 6.30 p.m. classes in which all moves are accompanied by two slaps in the face and a kick in the butt from the people packed in next to you. Maybe you could even get on with writing that novel you’ve been thinking about for eight years but were prevented from starting by the office, yes, even on weekends, vacations and other days when you were not, literally speaking, in the office. It is still the office’s fault that the world has not been gifted with your creative talents.

      But such potential bonuses are the buttercream icing on your carrot cake, the occasional brilliant guest appearance on Saturday Night Live: insufficient compensation for a dreary base. Working from home requires relying on one’s own self-discipline to work from somewhere that probably has many more distractions than an average office does as well as that cruel bitch of a siren, that battery-powered heroin: the TV remote.

      If you should ever feel like maybe your home is getting a bit dull, then stay home to work one day and you will marvel at how you have been living in a veritable Disney World all these years without even noticing. Look at all these old copies of magazines you could spend the morning reading! And music playlists that need making! And old photos that require organising! (But don’t stay home two days in a row because at that point your home will start to feel more like a prison and you’ll probably have to move.)

      Although the internet has now made shopping from the office possible, the threat of your boss walking up behind you generally acts as a dissuasion from clicking on net-a-porter and topshop.com more than twice an hour. The office is a similarly excellent preventative against obesity and food poisoning, if only because it is physically separating you from your fridge which, unlike the office canteen, is open for business allllll dayyyyyy lonnnnng. And, Jesus Christ, free! Free food – all day! How have you not noticed this before about your home? You would not believe how delicious that three-days-out-of-date pot of hummus will look when you have a deadline.

      The downside to the free food, though, is that working from home will turn you feral. Never mind that old saw about not getting dressed until 2 p.m. if you work from home – try having to test your toothbrush for residues of wetness before opening the door for a delivery at 5 p.m. because you can’t remember if you brushed your teeth today yet or not. That’s when you know you have gone fully homeworker feral and you will probably never be fit to be socialised ever again.

      In short, the office is daycare for adults. And do you know how much daycare for kids costs these days? And you’re getting this daycare, not just for free, but for minus free in that they’re paying you to be there! How totally baller is that?⁷

       3. ‘I hate my job!’

      I’m not here to help you love your job. I’m here to help you love the office. Next!

       4. ‘Everyone in my office drives me insane!’

      You don’t need to be a screenwriter for The Office, either the original UK or the far superior (whoa, controversial!) US version to know that there are little glimpses of joy to be found in the world of office dynamics. But you also don’t need to have worked in an office for three decades to know that ‘little glimpses of joy’ means ‘long stretches of intense irritation’.

      Most humans like companionship but most humans would also like to choose who their companions are and not have to spend most of their waking hours with people they barely know and like less every day, for years and years and years on end. Arranged marriage is illegal in western countries yet at least in an arranged marriage you can get out of the house and away from your non-chosen one; there is no such escape in an office environment. In order to be able to do crazy things like eat and pay your rent, you need to spend long swathes of time with your assigned companions.⁸ Irritation in these instances is inevitable, but not for the seemingly obvious reason.

      The truth is, the natural human condition can be summed up as, ‘increasingly irritated and resentfully unsatisfied’. This irritation comes from the gaseous formation, Irritationium, which resides behind everyone’s eyeballs and when a human begins to roll their eyes, this is like turning a doorknob and opening the door to release the Irritationium. The first thing Irritationium does is seek out its opposite force, dopamine. When dopamine floods the brain, making you happy, Irritationium immediately follows it, dulling down your happiness receptors and sensitising the parts of your brain that make you aware of being bored, grumpy and in the line that is moving slowest. This is why, by the third day of being on the holiday of your dreams, the initial appreciation of the idyllic white sandy beaches and abject self-indulgence will have faded and all you’ll be able to see is how that fat guy from room 202 always gets the best beach chair and that the waiter with the glasses never serves you first.

      But Irritationium doesn’t need dopamine to work. It is just as effective with black holes or, as you know them, wasted moments of boredom that you won’t even remember at the end of the day, let alone at the end of your life. Nature abhors a vacuum and so Irritationium swiftly fills it with questions about why you ALWAYS get stuck behind the tall guy at the cinema.

      Human beings need something on which to focus their irritation like they need toilets for their waste products: office colleagues are the receptacles СКАЧАТЬ