Chapter 1 of Comfortably Awkward

            “You think I got to where I am today by working a lousy fifty hours a week? I work fifty hours from Monday to Thursday, alone. You have to work seven days a week to get on my level. I’ve been doing this shit for over thirty years and I can’t remember the last day I took off. I work harder than any son of a bitch in this god damn city and my bank account shows it.” I had a question for him after he told me this.

            “What was more recent, the last time you took a day off or the last time you got laid?” Of course I didn’t actually ask that, but it would have been great if I did. As much as I wanted to embarrass the guy, I’m not that stupid. I wanted this job, so I had to play the game. And play I did. Just like Mr. Weese told us to do.

            Mr. Weese was one of my English professors during my college career at St. Franklin‘s University. He felt that the most important thing he could do was prepare us for Corporate America. It was the first time I ever heard anyone use the name Corporate America. It wasn’t too long after that when I realized Corporate America was its own planet.

            We are being trained from college how to act and how to look for our future jobs. This made me think of robots. Robots are programmed to work a certain way according to their creator. America is training robots, who can’t think for themselves, to work in their cities or at least, that’s what it feels like. Mr. Weese told us that we had to play the company’s game and tell them what they wanted to hear. He said that they also want to see leadership and independence in you. I never understood how they could find leadership in a person when they will only hire you if you tell them the answer that you were trained to say. If you were trained and coached to answer a certain way, the whole concept of uniqueness is gone. If an employer wants leadership out of a possible employee, shouldn’t he look for things that are different in the person? Instead, the employers will look for things that make you similar to them.

            It’s similar to selling your soul or signing yourself over like a piece of property. You agree to talk, dress, and act like the person employing you. By doing this, they will treat you like one of them. They will treat you like the robots who are already in the company. Good performance is sometimes rewarded, but bad performance is always punishable. You’ll have to spend your days, nights, and weekends pleasing the people who are employing you. You will have to do everything they tell you to do and then they will ask you why you didn’t do more than what they told you to do. Corporate America is its own inner circle and you can be inside of it if you agree to lose all of your unique qualities that make you your own person.

            For some people, this lifestyle is a dream come true. Working from the break of dawn till eight at night is as good as it gets for them. These same people just worked their asses off in college for four, or even seven years if they earned a Masters degree. If they went to a decent university, they have probably paid or owe over $100,000. So how is it that they are so ecstatic about making $35,000 a year? You won’t be able to spend money on anything you want until you have been working for a few years and isn’t that all we want to do? We want to buy nice things. We want to spend our hard-earned money on things we like. We want to buy things for the people we love. How can you be happy when you’re working your whole life without doing the things you love? There’s just no way. How can you be happy with your life when you are spending every day in an office or giving a lecture? When do you make time to have fun in a life like that? We are only on this planet for a certain amount of time and we should enjoy ourselves as best we can, as long as we aren’t hurting anyone.

            There are so many people who swear by their corporate jobs so there must be a reason why I have the wrong attitude towards working for a big company. Working in a big office in New York City is the American dream. You work hard all day and go out for drinks after work. You make big bucks after you are established in the company and you even get to dress-up in a fancy suit every day. You are viewed differently by the world when it’s known that you are an educated individual working in an office.