Greta Christina's 30 ways to improve your working life.
"If there's something you've got to do and a way to enjoy it, you'd be a fool to do it any other way."
Thomas Disch, "On Wings of Song"
Hello, and welcome to the Creative Employment Opportunity (CEO) School of Employee Empowerment. The following techniques will help make it possible for you to actually enjoy a reasonable portion of the long and tedious hours you spend creating profit for other people. With regular practice and steady application of these methods, you should be able to turn to your advantage any number of work situations that at best you'd rather not be at and at worst you despise down to the very nuclei of your blood cells. Please note: None of these techniques involves developing a good attitude, cultivating a genuine commitment to the company, or taking your job seriously.
1. Have sex fantasies (if you work in the sex industry, castration fantasies may be more effective for you).
2. Go into the bathroom and masturbate.
3. Call your friends on the phone.
4. Experiment with just how much you can make a personal phone call sound like company business.
5. Make friends with the people you work with. (Many pop psychologists disparage closeness with workmates, claiming that it dissolves important boundaries or creates a confusing work environment. This is corporate propaganda and, as such, should be ignored. It may not be a great idea to actually fuck the people you work with, but having genuine friends at your job can make working there somewhat less fossilizing and perhaps even marginally pleasant. It also makes it easier to waste valuable company time).
6. Impersonate your boss. (It is essential that you complete step 5 before attempting this technique. Failure to do so may result in severe embarrassment and/or loss of your job.
7. Talk about your life. This will help you remember that you have one. It has the additional benefit of wasting valuable company time. However, for the sake of your intelligence and imagination as well as the sanity of your workmates, please severely limit the amount of time you spend discussing television shows.
8. Have more sex fantasies. (Yes, we know, we said this already, but it's an important technique and is worth repeating. If you haven't had a good sex fantasy in the last hour, it's time for another. Try the one about the 13th century French Crusader and the Arabian aristocrat.)
9. Have non-sexual fantasies. Make up an elaborate imaginary world in which you are brilliant and fearless and noble and wise and charming and passionate and gifted and graceful and hauntingly beautiful to boot; a world in which everyone you touch is changed forever, even your enemies grudgingly admire you, and anyone who ever sneered at you finally realizes just how much they've misjudged you.
10. Make faces at people you talk to on the telephone.
11. Make faces at people who are trying to talk on the telephone.
12. Make faces at your boss behind his/her back.
13. Stare blankly out the window (assuming you have access to one. If you don't, the wall will do almost as well.) Hold a pen thoughtfully and purposefully in your hand: done correctly, this will deceive your boss into believing that you're actually thinking about your job.
14. Play weird little mind games with your mindless tasks. If you slave over endless pages of essentially random numbers, try to find weird mathematical patterns in them. If you word process, see how many paragraphs begin with the letter "W." If you do data entry, play a few good rollicking rounds of Guess The Zip Code. If you empty the wastebaskets, try to imagine the personalities of the people who use them.
15. Invent time-saving efficiency working techniques to give you more time in which to fuck off.
16. Invent new ways of making your personal projects look like company business.
17. Have even more sex fantasies. (I really can't emphasize strongly enough the importance of this technique. Keeping your libido alive is probably the most fun you can have subverting the dominant paradigm. If you're bored with the Crusades, try the one about the FBI agent and the bootlegger's lover.)
18. Experiment with just how far you can push the dress code.
19. Experiment with just how far you can stretch your breaktime/lunchtime/arrival-and-departure time.
20. Experiment with just how drunk/high you can get on your lunch hour without fucking up your position. (This technique only works if you are not an addict. If you are an addict, it will most likely have very limited entertainment value.)
21. Go into the bathroom and masturbate some more. (What are they going to do, give you grief about the amount of time you spend on the crapper? Well, okay, they might. If this happens, explain that you have stress-related constipation, and issue vaguely threatening hints about workman's compensation, rising insurance costs, and/or possible lawsuits.)
22. Use the word processor to write letters to your friends. Use the postage machine to mail them.
23. Find new and ingenious ways to annoy your boss that you can't actually be fired for.
24. Computer games, computer games, computer games!
25. Have another sex fantasy. Don't be shy--you owe it to yourself! Always remember that you are a beautiful and unique human being, no matter how crummy your job makes you feel. You deserve to have dozens of sex fantasies every day of your life.
26. Plan your evening.
27. Plan your weekend.
28. Plan your next vacation.
29. Plan your life after the workers' revolution comes and you don't have to work at this stupid fucking job anymore!
30. Plot the workers' revolution.
If you feel that this lesson has been helpful but are in need of further assistance, please consult our second-level instruction manuals, How To Look Industrious And Responsible While Doing Your Own Creative Work On Company Time and 101 Sex Fantasies To Keep You Entertained During An Otherwise Tedious Workday.
--Greta Christina
Many thanks to Marian Phillips for her valuable assistance, invaluable companionship, and really weird outlook on life.
Comments
This is a great article. Does
This is a great article. Does anyone know where any of these people who contributed to/wrote Processed World are now?
(Also bump as I added a picture, inspired by point 9)
Actually, I switch the
Actually, I switch the picture as I found a photo of a female office worker which seems more appropriate given the gender of the author. However I kind of think the one with the male office worker was a better picture…
Quote: 2. Go into the
So this came up recently and I was shocked how many people in my friendship circle had done this while at work. Not surprisingly it was more common with males, but female friends, too...
Thanks, I'm a big fan of
Thanks, I'm a big fan of processed world.
We had a few things that used
We had a few things that used to make our shop work go easier, even Revol jumped in ona few of these (he was always following my lead cos he looked up to me):
- serve customers in foreign accents while trying to keep a straight face
- throw invented words into dialogue with customers and see if they double-take
- when your workmate turns round to get some goods at the till (usually cigarettes), mash the keypad on their till so they ring in 5000000 packets and have to get a manager to come and cancel it
- take all the out of date stuff into the alleyway (the stuff you aren't taking home) and just smash it (we were actually pretty right-on and took most stuff to the local homeless shelter)
-take out of date stuff up 7 floors to the top of the fire escape and drop it, or throw it at the windows of the building opposite
- go exploring in your building, finds some rooms you've never been in, see if you can get on the roof
- in the stock room, put one of your mates up to doing a STUNTMAN DIVE into all the crisps
- play baseball with a broom handle and assorted pieces of stock
- play penalty shootouts with some chairs and assorted stock
- randomly change the volume on the shop music
When working in a grey prison
When working in a grey prison of a warehouse we developed a series of games to pass the time- some for when the management were about and some for when they were absent. Pallet racing was a favourite- the building was built with a natural slope from goods in to goods out- with an area for splitting into orders in the middle. You could start the pallet truck rolling as you took it off the truck and build up speed until you hit despatch then the skill was to drop the pallet enough to break the speed but not enough to strand the pallet and let the pallet truck carry on.
When we had slow moving goods in the store we would build the boxes into a labyrinth with a small room inside for card schools and sleeping.
We drew a target high on a wall and every time we took a pallet of nail varnish past (at speed) we would try to hit the target .
We took a delivery of thousands (literally thousands) of scatter cushions, we climbed into the roof and dived into the pile- free style bungee jumping- one colleague got his nose broken during a spectacular tandem dive so we staged an accident by turning a truck over and he got three weeks off and a compensation pay out and a new pair of specs- we also used the accident as evidence that we needed a designated cleaner to keep the work space safe.
If the boss was not around we just played football.
The best day I spent there was when one of the lads was clearing out the loft space above the office suite and discovered a pot of blue dye and the feed tank to the bosses personal shower. - I just remembered that when we closed down for a week all the batteries from the trucks were gone when we came back- I wondered how the drivers managed to get the whole crew drunk on the last Friday with our crap wages.
You and Revol worked
You and Revol worked together?! Fuck me, your poor manager.
I used to sell riding lawn mowers and we'd have competitions to see who could work the term "jerk you off" while giving a product demonstrations. As in, "You really have to be careful shifting gears while you're still moving because it will stall and jerk you off the machine". Probably inappropriate and pretty damn childish, but it did pass the time.
When I used to work in Argos,
When I used to work in Argos, we used to draw a dart board onto flatpack furniture and play darts with those little pens.
Chilli Sauce
Chilli Sauce
What? Why is this getting upped?! I just don't understand!
Tart wrote: We took a
Tart
amazing!
"15. Invent time-saving
"15. Invent time-saving efficiency working techniques to give you more time in which to fuck off."
When, formerly, I worked in a small shop, I used to work out ways of being less efficient. I was there to serve customers, but there were often no customers in the shop, at which times I was expected to stock the shelves. The thing was, I used to enjoy going into the back room, getting the step ladder out, and getting the boxes of crisps down from the top shelf. It was certainly more exciting than standing around in the shop. All the flavours of crisps were in boxes on the top shelf, in a line next to each other. So if I needed to stock up three flavours of crisps, I would go to the back room, get the stepladder out, climb it, take down the box of one required flavour, climb down the stepladder, put the stepladder away, then I would take the crisps and restock them. Then I would repeat the entire operation again, twice, once for each of the other two required flavours of crisp.
In my first ever job in a
In my first ever job in a fruit and veg shop my workmates invented some excellent ways to pass the time and make their jobs more enjoyable. These included putting teaspoons in a boiled kettle and then holding them on my neck until my skin blistered and hosing me down in the yard until i was soaked to the skin in the middle of winter.
I know this sounds a bit harsh but was justifiable really because as they pointed out, 'that's what you get for being a fucking poof.'
I suppose it was fair enough but I really would have preferred it if they had gone in to the toilet to masturbate.
Quote: What? Why is this
My guess is that it's because everyone loves getting paid for wanking in the carsi.