Open Journal Montreal

by Risa Dickens.

Have you ever worked for a mega corporation? There is something that happens to your brain as you learn the manual and are drilled in the peppy but all-too serious collective rhetoric. It is simply how things are done, and everyone gets comfortable shuttling along following a plan from above. To survive the numbness of having the part of our brains that can see good ways of doing things made subserviant to a monstrously unchangeable system, we started drinking heavily and rubbing up against each other at office parties. The hypocracy became apparent to those of us inside the company pretty quickly. But once I had a little invested in the job, and they had me thinking I was valued, and that there would be legitimate opportunities for advance, I got defensive. The way it is done does make sense, the surfaces they show you are not artificial- they are, they have to be, real. In the end I was glad to be fired, and two years later the poor guy who had fired me was fired, and a year later I went back and the sweet guy who had hired both of us had been sacked as well. It took a while for me to shake the corporate brain frame, and then i was happy to no longer be selling my energy to a machine that would never see me.

I can throw tomatoes all I like at the business and governement leaders who make attempts and fail, and registering protest is a crucial communicative act that keeps us trying, I think, but it does not begin to address the “how?” How to do it better, how to, in business language, break the compromises we are making all the time that have our hackles up. Compromises that constitute the loss of independant power that would let me make a change. Aquiesing to a system that is destructive in some way. For example, everytime my time of the month goes around i think of the piles of pads and tampons, and then diapers, out there not decomposing. I think- someone should make millions on thinking up a better way. I tried the keeper- a small rubber cup- but that comes with it’s own compromises- mess, for one, not to mention that for me it’s not that comfortable. They at least offer a ‘return it and we’ll melt it down and make a new one’ policy.
I look around and feel the wieght of all those kinds of compromises, things i know feel deeply wrong but that i don’t know enough about to fix or even meaningfully protest. How can any one person know it all, hold it all together, save the planet and go to school and pay the rent? This is where the business impetus is born, I think. This is the desire, other to greed, that motivates organization and innovation- in all of these crossed wires, small failures and delusions, and people just trying to make it through the day, someone sees one small way through that could be better. One tweak in the program that would make their own life better- and from there the rest is history. History is all of these disparate ideas and attempts rising, accumulating, converging into Mega and colliding with our fallabilty, greed, and heroism and coincedence.

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[ originally posted on Monday, December 6th, 2004 at 1:43 pm and is filed under Everything, Writing. ]