The Office Job

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One of my summer jobs for the past few years has been to work for one of the more hated branches of the government. Kind of goes against all of my liberal feminist ideas but a job that pays is a job that pays, I’m a college student, I can’t afford to have ideals.

I work in an office full of really nice people who all do just about the same damned thing every day.

If this job has taught me anything it has taught me that sitting in an office for the next forty years is not how I want to spend it. They don’t give me enough to do, first of all. Which you wouldn’t think would be a problem but I am one of those folks with an attention span of 0 which means if I am not doing a bazillion things at once I am not paying attention. As far as I can tell by the prevalence of people getting paid much more than I do just standing around and chatting on a regular basis¹, that would not improve by taking a government job post graduation.

The Office is stagnant. It takes years for things to change, something that is more obvious to me as I only return over the summer. The people are the same. They dress the same. They eat the same lunches. They drink the same Starbucks drinks. They are in the same office cliques.

I crave change. Real pressure, real use of hard earned leadership skills. Is The Office going to give that to me?

In our service oriented post industrial society that is the United States, what the hell else is there to do but work in an office? I could create a company that becomes a maze of dozens or thousands of people working for me. That would be fun. But still in an office. I could be a professor, but then I’d still have to deal with the cattiness and competition that is the academic world. And there would still be an office environment. I could go to law school, but that would still probably involve working in an office.

Almost any road I peek down inevitably involves plugging away in an office somewhere for an undetermined amount of time.

Part of me is bitter about that. I am going to graduate with a private liberal arts education (and $30,000 +/- in debt) that has taught me that I Can Do Anything. Only, I know that in the real world it doesn’t really work that way and that so many of the things I have learned won’t necessarily apply.

I have learned that change can happen if I am motivated and organized enough for it to do so, I have learned to analyze and research and to form at least somewhat coherent arguments. Upon graduation I have international experience, a first hand look at the effect of globalization, and three years of a leadership training program under my belt in addition to my B.A. I have learned many things in my three years at school, and I am sure I will learn many more before I graduate. But what is the point really? Why did I make myself a well rounded person with a very expensive piece of paper if I could have done what most office jobs do with a year of on the job training? Where do I go now, with my fancy degree?

This is a problem of the middle class American college student and I know that. Poor me, my options might be limited to sitting on my ass all day and poking around on the internet in order to pay for my comfy lifestyle. I could be working for minimum wage in a factory putting one cog into another cog and grateful for the job because it pays for my food. I could be a mother in Cambodia with three children, trying to make a living washing clothes for Western tourists who spend more in a week than I make in an entire year – and I am still better off than my rural counterpart.

I am so privelaged with the life I got at random that I don’t know what to do with it and I am so afraid that it will go to waste in the short time I have.

¹ A generalization, of course. There are a lot of hard working people too, I’ve met them and they’re really kind of crazy about their job and don’t have a life outside of it. Kudos to them, I guess.

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