Buildings Of Grass

I’m not sure how to write this, or what to say. It’s been so long since I wrote anything that I’m afraid that I’ve lost the hang of it.

I take my fingers off the keyboard and sit for a moment with my hands in my lap. The cursor blinks at me like the warning light of a cartoon boiler edging towards higher and higher pressures. What are you doing, you worthless fuck? It says with a sneer. Wasting time. That’s what you’re doing. My eye tracks to a terminal window open on my right. I’m Ok. Everything’s fine. But when I put my hands back on the home row, gently stroking the nubs of the F and J keys, they shake just a bit. A tiny, tiny bit. But I can feel it.

I need to tell someone. I need to make something. I’ve got to make something. Anything will do, but what my mind returns to again and again (like a fly to a pile of shit, I think mostly) is writing. Telling someone, even just myself- that I’m doing nothing.

It’s my job to do nothing. I do it for nine hours a day, five or six days a week. I have meetings about what I haven’t done with other people and they share what they haven’t done with me. We write specifications describing what we won’t be making and requirements codifying the things we won’t build and file them on a server where no one will ever read them.

People complain bitterly about things like “crunch time” and “productivity bottle-necks” and ask each other to come in on Saturday to do nothing. We have quarterly all-hands meetings where supervisors praise each other for doing nothing more efficiently and graphs are shared and analyzed showing that we’ve increased our production of nothing by 3.4% over last quarter and no one ever mentions, just in fucking passing, just says -- hey guys, we’re not fucking doing fucking anything.

My fingers (which had begun to move more and more quickly as I reached the last words) lift suddenly from the keyboard, still twitching. I feel the urge to pound out a few more iterations of the word fuck, but I’m afraid that once I start going I’ll just hit caps-lock and never stop. That’s how you know you’ve finally cracked- when you write a lengthy manifesto and find that it’s just variations of the word FUCK for fifty or sixty pages.

The most horrifying thing about such a manifesto is that it might be the most productive thing I could do with my time.

I read what I’ve written. It’s not good. It probably never will be, even if I write it again. I wasn’t ever actually good at writing. I read insatiably as a kid. Over the short distance (the sprint, so to speak) I could throw together half-remembered phrases that seemed to fit and I had an intuitive understanding of how words went together. The longer I wrote the more obvious it became that I wasn’t any good at it. I just regurgitate what I’ve read.

With an internal flinch, I realize that I’m staring at the ever-present terminal window and a line of red is cutting through the reassuring black and gray:

[ 20450912 log::level::error ] connection handshake with network supervisor (port 7300)

I slam a key combination into my company-issued keyboard so hard that I feel as if I’ve bruised the tips of my fingers. The text editor and the logging window both vanish and are replaced by a new revision of the division design document on one screen and the requirements database on another. A soft tone tells me that another log message has been created and I don’t have to look to know what it says:

[ 20450912 log::level::error ] connection established with network supervisor (port 7300)

Someone is watching everything I do.

Methodically, I copy the contents of one cell in the requirements database into a table in the document. It says that information within section 12.3.7.21.1.3 of the requirements database SHALL be statements of the form “<item> SHALL be <property>". I feel an intense urge to giggle. I carefully format the cell in the document to match the font, spacing and weight of the requirements database cell. This will be a point of contention at the document review.

There is a vocal minority in my department who believe that documents should be formatted differently from requirements. Their argument is that the font and weight of the text in the requirements software is limited to the built-in options and there is no reason to adopt these constraints in traditional word processing software.

These people are fucking maniacs.

For twelve and a half minutes, I carefully add information to the design document, adjusting the formatting of the text as I go. It seems like twelve and a half years. Finally, another tone sounds, signaling the departure of my invisible visitor.

I bring up the terminal window first, just to make sure:

[ 20450912 log::level::error ] connection lost with network supervisor (port 7300)

I’m no longer being directly watched. Now I just have to worry about the activity monitor, the application usage tracking and the always-active key-logger that flags statements that may include sensitive data or intellectual property.

I bring up my document again and stare at it. After a minute or two, I close it without adding anything else. A dialog asks me if I want to save my work (Yes/No) and I hesitate. What’s the goddamn point? What am I going to do with my awkward, disjointed, meandering manifesto? Publish it?

That’s a joke. Seriously.

No one would read it if I did. No one would care if they did read it. No one would do anything if they cared. I’d get fired if they did anything and jobs have become less plentiful in the last ten years. I hover over the No button for a split second and then quickly hit Yes and enter to accept 'untitled' as the file name.

I don’t actually work in an office that’s owned by the company. I work in a fabricated block of offices that allow anyone associated with a partner corporation to work from the building. From a distance, the entire structure looks like a stack of bricks left behind after a bombing and I can’t help but think of it as Office.

Not offices- but Office. A smooth mass of Office. Office as a concept, extruded onto the city. A pile of Office left by an enormous dog on a front lawn the size and approximate shape of a city.

Buildings as grass.