Modern Ruins
The other two books secured for the failed date night: “Vanishing America: The End of Main Street Diners, Drive-Ins, Donut Shops, and Other Everyday Monuments” and “Ruin: Photographs of a Vanishing America.”
I don’t know if it seems strange that I would plan a date night around leafing through images of bombed out buildings and decrepit relics of American ruination. I tend to think that such images inspire better conversation than do beautiful things. Indeed, I believe that blanks walls and empty spaces inspire the creative mind for more robustly than feeding off the content of others, and I believe that mediocrity inspires greatness with a motivational canny that the masterworks cannot deliver.
I would rather have a window view of urban blight or a seedy street corner than of a park or a beach, for there is nothing so boring as a beautiful view.
At my first real job in New York I started as a temporary word processing operator, sitting at a makeshift desk in a hallway, my very self an object of idle fascination to the many people who passed by each and every hour of each and every day. As I progressed through the org-chart I found myself in a series of inside offices, some of which appeared to have been re-purposed storage closets. Those offices are where I felt I worked best, but progress comes with compromise and as I reached the pinnacle of my travels through that particular corporate sprawl I found myself in an office space with a floor-to-ceiling view of Central Park. The months spent at that desk were among the laziest and least productive I can remember, my presence in that space seemingly imbued more with prestige than substance.
Similar experiences followed years later as I found myself in ever-larger corner suites and palatial conference-rooms-turned-into-my-office. The hugeness of these spaces made me feel conspicuous. This was not strictly on account of self-consciousness but also because I felt that the work I did and the contributions I made toward society whilst at these jobs did not merit the prestige assumed to surround those who occupy such grandiose spaces. At one point I was in a corner office that was about five times the size of my first apartment in New York, about twice the size of my second apartment, and possibly the same size as my third apartment in this town.
An office is, of course, a place to work, yet the aspirational innards of corporate culture suggest that office space is a reflection of prestige, and esteem and personality within the organization. The costs of office space and the various services expected therein add considerable financial overhead to corporate employment. If public filings of employee compensation at corporate entities appears considerably inflated when compared to said employees’ actual take-home pay this is most likely because the full cost of employing a human being at a company goes well beyond their paycheck. Office space, health insurance, support personnel, etc., are all part of the snowball of money that surrounds an employee. I am no economist but if you ask me, the economics of corporate employment scarcely make any sense.
These economic facts are occasional targets of corporate design consultants and Human Resources directors who determine that cost-savings and efficiencies that will save the company from ruin will materialize when office space is combined and the organizational hierarchy of the company is flattened. Offices are chosen randomly. 30-year veterans of the company will find themselves sitting in an inside closet-turned-office as easily as the summer interns might find themselves in offices the size of their college stadium.
Some consultants will attempt to reverse the status quo by putting Vice-Presidents and Directors in inside offices and open pods, while secretaries and temporary word processing operators sat in 8-window corner spectaculars. According to corporate design fads of the 1990s this would maximize productivity on all sides, a theory I find impossible to believe, but which I think might have merit insofar as the “upper level” workers are involved. Lower-level workers are not the most aspirational members of the corporate milieu, and offering extravagant accommodations in which to perform menial tasks will not raise their enthusiasm or sense of privilege. It will simply raise their conspicuity, and expose their weaknesses. (That term “lower-level” makes me wince, but so does almost everything else under discussion here.) Executive-level workers, on the other hand, could be motivated not by beautiful oak desks and in-office cappuccino machines but by their outsize salaries and irrational compensation structure, as well as the authority they wield over their underlings in the corner office.
I don’t think I buy it, though. To be sure, there is a distinct personality type which simply does not care what kind of office space they occupy. Within reasonable scenarios such workers can focus on their job anywhere, at any time. For the most part, though, I believe that Important People need their Big Offices.
I don’t know when I might have the privilege of the date night in which to share and discuss the pages of the picture books of ruin which presently sit on the table next to the couch. If/when such an event occurs I do not think that the 100ft Ethernet Network Internet Cable which also appears on this receipt will make an appearance, but you never know. I bought two of those cables as backup in case one of the cables currently in use fails, or slithers away. I could imagine using these extra cables as examples of waste, or potential waste, in keeping with the spirit of the books of ruin, and in keeping with a senselessly compelling desire to rationalize the simultaneous purchase of photo books and ethernet cables.
