Going Postal

I have some more words/phrases for youm courtesy of my lovely job:

Customer-centric
Articulate the value proposition
Generate excitement, passion and motivation to do business (perfectly acceptable, language-wise, but wanky nonetheless)
We’re doing x through our transformation piece
Building business value

Maybe I should start a regular column dedicated to corporate bullshit. In the absence of in-house lexicographers to chart these new terms, which are multiplying at an unnatural rate, turning up all over the place, a whole new independent language could evolve and we’d suddenly find ourselves completely unable to communicate with the outside world.

I wish I'd had the balls to come in extremely late today. Both my bosses are away – one’s out of mobile phone range, and the other is in a time zone that’s 2 hours behind here, so it’s doubtful they’d ever find out. Yet, here I am. I only arrived my usual 5 minutes late despite the best efforts of Sydney public transport to delay me.

It’s quite tiring travelling in to work every morning. It’s not so much each individual journey that is tiring, but the combined effects of knowing you have to battle the bodies to get on your bus/train every morning. Buses drive past you, full, all the time, and when you do get on one, you’ve got to squeeze on and dangle from the hand rails, trying to balance with your bags while not slamming into anyone. The trains are the same. This morning I actually had to pull my stomach in so that people could get past – and I’m NOT that fat – whilst my bag was repeatedly jerked back and forth by the passing passengers – sorry ‘customers’. It’s so unpleasant, and at the end of it all you are sweating and your hair has turned into fuzz. At least it’s colder now so I can keep it tucked under my jacket hood.

God, it’s appalling to me when I think that unless something happens, I will be working full time now until I reach my sixties. Relentlessly boring jobs with long hours make people ugly and stupid, and I wonder what I’ll be like at the end of it. I’m already beginning to dislike the person I’m becoming. I feel like I’m losing myself, like I can’t even hear my own thoughts any more over the din of work.

I wonder if it’s possible to love other people fully when you’re a work drone. If you have less personality than before, how can you love your nearest and dearest as much? I mean, surely it’s the personal, individual part of you that is responsible for love. I can honestly say that my day-to-day job is much more real to me, much more immediately significant than my poor parents and brothers, many thousands of miles away. And even though the Man lives with me, my head is still in another place on week nights, even when I don’t have ballet. By the time I’ve managed to get home, all I want is time to clear a few things up, maybe snatch a bit of reading or television time and then get to bed early enough that I won’t be exhausted half way through the next working day. I know that he hasn’t done anything especially interesting as he’s been at work all day too, so I can hardly be bothered with any in depth communication with him. I mean, I try sometimes, but it’s not like I really care. Isn’t that awful? When we have so much history together, so much that is special and removed from our employers.

Maybe the memories that make me are slowly but surely being replaced by machine-like tendencies, to better serve the company. Eventually I’ll be nothing but a machine. When I read biographies of dancers I often find myself thinking what incredibly interesting lives they’ve had. Then I remember that my past is fairly interesting too (not as much though, of course!) but I forget that sometimes because I’m now becoming so boring. It’s like I’m living somebody else’s life.

So, will I still be doing this boring crap when I’m sixty? I have just the tiniest stab of empathy for those people that ‘go postal’ and turn up to work one day with a gun. There must be a lot of North Sydneys in this world.