Early on a Friday reminds me that, while I would never express the sentiment out loud, I really do feel a certain resentment over the fact that certain people are allowed to work from home a couple of days a week while the proles and trolls do not. I worked at home for 20 years and know how to do it better than anybody. But consideration for that perk is based on seniority and rank, and I of course molder away at the bottom of the org chart. I’m probably not even on it. There is supposed to be a PDF org chart of this company on the Intranet but the link to it is not working.
I remember a school org chart for Chamberlain High School in Tampa. I had one friend who went to school there, and Iassume that connection is what brought me into possession of the school’s org chart. Naturally enough it listed the school prinicpal and vice-principal and whoever else was in charge at the very top, as the organizational veins of the school spread beneath, with (to the best of my memory, this was over 30 years ago) a bunch of mid-level administrators, then maybe it was teachers ranked by graes they instructed, then I think it was lower-level administration and maintenance… and at the very bottom, in a single box, after you’d trickled down as far as you possibly could trickle, there they were: STUDENTS. They were so crushed underneath the layers and layers of bureaucracy that their presence seemed like an afterthought, at least according to my interpretation of this chart. My thought was simple: Turn this chart upside down. Put the students on top, and trace the layers of the organization in the order in which students would experience or interact with the rest of the school population.
There is probably a science to org charts, or a study of them. I think it was Vonnegut who wrote, fictitiously, that one could analyze the relationships of people written about in a book by the way they were indexed. I am probably not remembering that thoroughly. But like Vonnegut’s fictional analysis of a book’s index, there must be a nuance to org charts that is not lost on a certain type of aesthete.
But returning to my initial grievance, my complaint and abhorance… I would not really want to work from home in this current role. Part of what makes it impossible for me to do meaningful work at home is the fact that I did it for so long. The space itself feels heavy and weighted upon my outlook. My grievance is focused on the influence of rank and stature within the company that allows some people to skip the commute and all the discomfort and annoyances that can comprise while most of us must submit to it, at our own expense.
The dude who took a shit next to me yesterday (was it yesterday? Yes, it had to be) just missed me this time. I took a stupendous, mostly unexpected dump between the last paragraph and this one. Minutes after exiting and sitting down to bask in the afterglow I saw this person arrive and head straight for the shitter. He was in there about 10 minutes. I heard the flush moments before his reappearance. I can’t believe that person yesterday just walked into the bathroom and took the stall next to me when there was another one that would have at least left a little bit of butt-breathing room between us. He could hear the crinkling, burrowing sounds of the not-awful toilet paper ransacking my anus of all possible fecality. I know he was listening. That’s what people do. Fucking pervert.
