40 Hour Work Weak

There are only two ways this can end.  Both options are less than desirable.  I got a job.  The socially implanted feelings of worthlessness subsided after a week of work.  It’s not meaningful work.  So far, my work has come in eight hour chunks of pointless wandering.  Can I help you?  Do you need anything?  Yes sir, no ma’am.

My first week of work felt like the most subtle suicide imaginable.  IV drip death every minute, on the minute, until the end of an eight hour shift.  I feel like a marionette doll flashing a table saw smile, holding a lit match over my head, slowly burning through my own life lines.  And still, this maddening work soothed some of the futility that sat in the pit of my stomach. 

I’m working.  I’m doing the thing all of you collectively hate to do, yet you force it on the plate of others like a second serving at a Mexican family dinner.  Thank you.  I don’t feel worthless anymore.  I have value now.  A very specific value – nine dollars and zero cents an hour, with a raise after ninety days.  I should celebrate.

Somewhere around day three I realized the full spectrum of this working business.  How the whole structure is frailly held together with Elmer’s Glue and popsicle sticks.  They didn’t even have the common courtesy to buy new popsicle sticks.  They got second hand sticks, stained cherry red on one half and still reeking of adolescent breath.

The joke here is that work makes people smile.  Not out of their own joy, but out of requirement.  Rule number one – “Always smile.”  Or you’re fired.  Smiling and laughter are mandatory, it reassures the customers and some study shows that smiles are scientifically attached to consumers’ pocketbooks.   So we smile.  Like asses guided by barbed-wire bridles – we smile.

The management has realized that without this golden rule, smiling, they would be dealing with a powder keg for a workforce.  A workforce that is red in the face with resentment and frothing at the mouth.  Smiling is the dimmer switch.  When you first try it, a fake smile is like wearing a black eye.  It throbs, hurts when you talk, and you’re always aware that out of your peripheral vision, something is off.  But after a while, it begins to set, like wet cement in a tombstone mold. It doesn’t take long to completely forget the origin of that fake smile.  A fake smile can even fool your laughter.  You were already smiling, that’s half the battle.  Now your smile fits like a ball-gag, why not go ahead and add imitation laughter?  

Hehehe Hahaha Hohoho and you continue making these fabricated noises until the timecard has been stamped.  At the end of the day you’re an echoing carcass of all things work related.  Coworkers, the grinning fools you shook your head at on the first day, they have already rubbed off on you.  Those fake smiles, forged laughter, it’s all floating in your head now.  But it’s okay – you’re a contributing member of society.

My foresight tells me I can’t keep this up long.  I already feel the vein in my forehead flexing like a greased bicep.  The first plausible ending starts there.  A bursting vein in the brain, nature’s ejection lever; instead of firing into the air, my ending will be face down in my own drool.  Preferably at work.  Preferably at the feet of my coworkers, so in my last breath, I can watch their fake smiles evaporate like a bite for a napalm fortune cookie.

There won’t be much of a warning; shortness of breath, momentary dizziness, and then the sound of an underwater fart somewhere on the right side of my brain.  They’ll try CPR, but my dead corpse won’t kiss back. 

I’ve tried to express my apathy through the prosthetic smile.  It doesn’t show.  The only other option is indiscriminant aggression.  Surely they’ll recognize that.  A bone rattling shout, no one has to get hurt. I’m only trying to show them that their fake smile doesn’t fit my mouth.  I’ve tried it on, felt the confusion in my nose, but that’s the best I can do.

Unwanted work is a jail sentence.  An eight hour bid, six days a week.  So what – they’ll send you a check twice a month.  What good is a check when my self-inflicted knife wound turns me into a human piggy bank?

I’ve always been a shattered pig.  I don’t want your money.  I don’t need your value.