Corporate rocket

(originally published in The Outreach Connection in May 1999)

I am no great symbol of any aspect of corporate culture, but the new satire Office Space catches me at a convenient time in my personal history. After twelve years on the ladder, I recently quit, and at the time of writing I’m serving out an extended notice period. I have a feeler on another job, representing a modest change of direction, but it may very well not work out, in which case I’ll be looking in the short term at unemployment. What could have possessed me? Frustration, arrogance, idiocy, idealism? Certainly all of those. But perhaps it was primarily an act of imagination. I’d been complaining for years on and off about my career track, and how I felt I was painting myself into a corner, but it kept meeting various objective measures of success, so I kept going. I needed to evolve a vision of how to quit, to approach my dilemma creatively, to craft a vision of how my soul would hold up under all the alternative scenarios. After that it became easy, even inevitable. Right now I feel great. Of course, that may not last (see above comment re unemployment).

Downsize this!

This all gives me a greater than academic interest in the central conceit of Office Space: the idea of packing it all in, of not playing the game anymore. Variety predicted in its review that the movie might become a cult comedy for office workers, with repeat viewings tacked on to happy hour. I went to see it on a Friday lunchtime – a perfect time to spot such individuals playing hooky (I hasten to clarify that in my closing days on the job I’m being paid only for a 75% week, making my own presence there quite legitimate). But there wasn’t a tie or briefcase in sight. Of course, casual Fridays are so pervasive now that it’s hard to tell who’s working and who’s en route to the golf course. I’ve always refused to do casual Fridays. Before I quit, that was my primary act of rebellion (that and the Exposed movie poster in my office), and you know you’ve been around too long when your primary act of rebellion involves choosing to wear a tie.

Anyway, the central character of Office Space, drowning in a monotonous corporate culture, finds himself suddenly liberated, to the point of recklessness, after an overstimulating hypnotherapy session. He starts coming in to work only when he feels like it, speaking his mind without caring about the consequences, dressing casually (and I don’t mean business-casually). He just doesn’t care anymore. But instead of getting him fired, even as the firm downsizes ruthlessly around him, his candor and individuality earn him a promotion. Not that it makes him care a jot more. When his by-the-book buttoned-down buddies get the axe, the three decide to take their revenge by ripping off the company. And then there’s more plot-driven kind of stuff.

The grass is greener

When you hear that his new attitude also enables him to reel in Jennifer Aniston as his romantic interest, you may guess that Office Space allows itself a little too much latitude in the area of wish fulfilment. The film’s early stretches contain some reasonably effective potshots at the usual Dilbert-type targets, but the second half is little more than an extended wrap-up (with developments such as his break-up and reunification with Aniston leaving as much impression as an empty toner bag). And if there’s a message more profound in there than that corporate life kind of sucks and it’d be kind of neat to do your own thing, it bypassed my in-tray.

But there are obvious reasons of self-preservation for why most of us stay at our desks. Maybe Office Space is just a big whine about the grass being greener (it persistently mocks a waiter who immerses himself too ingratiatingly in his restaurant’s upbeat ethos, but what’s wrong with adapting to your situation?) I don’t want to get all pious about this, but another new film reminds us how lucky we are to have the desk and the commute and, maybe most of all, the air conditioner. In October Sky, based on a true story, a teenage boy dreams of escaping from his dire home town, where a career down the local coal mine is taken to be as inevitable as night following day. It’s 1957, the time of the Sputnik launch, and the protagonist and his friends start to experiment with homemade rocket science.

Alternative histories

This has the practical upside of providing a possible ticket to the science fair, a winning scholarship, and escape. But much of the film’s surprising emotional punch comes, I think, from the potency of the recurring images of the homemade rockets – once they’ve got them to work – traveling crisply into the heavens, their scissor-straight tails slicing the blue sky. It’s a compelling, sleek evocation of limitless escape, touching as a contrast to the soul-destroying grimness of the town. The movie gets so much play from the wretched existence represented by the mine (embodied through a standard-issue conflict between blinkered father and dreaming son) that it’s almost Dickensian, although in the end – perhaps aware of the dangers of condescension to the blue-collar segment of the audience – it makes a game attempt at asserting that the mining life isn’t inferior; it’s just different.

But few career hazards could hold the sheer disgust of having one’s lungs fill up with coal dust. My Welsh ancestors were primarily farmers, but my grandfather was a minister, spending much of his career in mining towns. He went down the mine shaft once, and never forgot the experience. It all seems pretty distant, sitting in downtown Toronto. And one can’t measure one’s own happiness by dwelling on the alternative histories that were narrowly missed by the accident of a generation here or a bloodline there. Still, October Sky almost made me inclined to reconceptualize the downtown office core as my personal Cape Canaveral, and to rush to beg for acceptance back into white-collar security. Almost, but not quite. Even after writing this article, and thereby thinking about the whole thing too much, my imagination’s still buzzing. For today, I’m still wallowing in the idea of escape.