Ubuntucat

Okay. I confess. I work an exempt job that makes sense to have hours for, since I am also the receptionist for my office, so I have to be ready in case the phone rings, or at least be able to get back to the phone message quickly if I miss the call.

Some other people have exempt jobs that require them to work very hard all the time. And then there are the non-exempt folks who get paid by the hour.

But I know a lot of people who work salaried, exempt jobs and who have to be at work from a fixed hour to another fixed hour, regardless of how much work they have to do. That I find silly. If your job doesn’t require meeting people who randomly walk in or answering random phone calls, you should be paid to do your job, and not to be in an office for a specified number of hours.

But the culture of the American office workforce is “Work these hours,” not “get this job done.” Because of that culture, millions of employees spend hours of their time “on the job” talking with each other at the water cooler about what happened on some TV show the night before or surfing the internet and doing some online shopping. The best is the employee who spends all her time complaining to her co-workers about how busy she is (uh… the time you’re spending complaining about how busy you are? You could use that time to actually get your work done and then be a little less busy).

Imagine if you were a manager and had a project you wanted to be done well, do you think you’d get a better result saying, “Do as good a job on this project as you can. I’m going to be judging the project by how well it’s done. I don’t care if it takes you two hours or two weeks to do. Whenever you’re done with the project, go home” or saying “Do this project. No matter how good a job you do on this project, you have to be here from 9:00 AM to 5:30 PM”?

I had a job once that was a lot like the latter. People would always marvel at how quickly I got things done, but I think that’s just because they had no incentive to get things done quickly… or even well. All they knew is they had to be in by a certain hour in the morning and leave by a certain hour in the evening. That’s it. What gets done or doesn’t get done in the meantime, for a lot of office workers, is just enough not to get fired.

Am I alone in thinking this way? Can my readers from other countries shed some light on whether this is a uniquely American phenomenon or not?

When I was growing up, I never understood that saying about the way to a man’s heart being through his stomach. I got it intellectually. I knew it meant it’s about feeding the man to make him happy. I just didn’t get it get it.

It’s sad to say, but when I was growing up, I didn’t eat much good food. Neither of my parents prided themselves on being cooks. And when we ate out, it tended to be at chain restaurants instead of local mom-and-pop eateries. Pizza Hut is what we considered gourmet.

Generally, my wife and I fix our own meals (we don’t have similar food tastes). We also tend not to fit into traditional gender roles. But I do feel like that stereotypical think-with-your-stomach man every now and then. Last night was one of those nights. Every time I have one of Park Chow‘s apple pies a la mode, I’m in food heaven and definitely feel the link between my stomach and my heart. I hope my wife wasn’t too embarrassed that I practically licked the plate clean.

Park… Chow… apple pie…

The recent news about Wikipedia being blocked in the UK (not totally but mostly) because of album cover art in an article about a 70s band being possibly child pornography got me thinking about censorship and consumption.

Generally, the debates I’ve heard about censorship are polarized. On the one hand, I hear the “decency” folks saying there are some things that cross the line and shouldn’t ever exist. On the other hand, I hear the “freedom” folks saying if you don’t like it, don’t look at it or buy it.

But what if you don’t like it and you still look at it? If I watch Deep Throat in a Women’s Studies class in college for the purposes of dissecting it and analyzing it, is that different from watching it at home for sexual stimulation… or laughs? This goes back to a debate I used to have with some of my fellow department members when I was an English teacher. Some English teachers think the job of an English teacher is to expose students to “great literature.” I disagree completely. I don’t think The Scarlet Letter, for example, is well-written or even interesting any more from a literary perspective. It is, however, historically significant, and it, like any work of fiction, can be analyzed and argued over. The point of teaching English is to get students to think critically about what they consume—not to consume blindly, but to see that every work of art (visual art, comic book art, music, film, novels, poetry) conveys its author’s worldview or agenda, even if the author herself is not conscious of that.

I like to think I can analyze and distance myself from anything I consume, but sometimes I can’t. I’m not a big fan of visual or audio displays of torture, for example. It’s very possible that these could be presented within the framework of a well-crafted artistic work with a good social agenda. Nevertheless, I am human and not an intellectual machine. I still experience human emotions and horror.

This is also why I find it hard to believe politicians (especially male ones) who actively campaign against pornography and even show “exhibits” in hearings on pornography are able to fully distance themselves from the material they’re criticizing, especially since they’re usually criticizing it by arguing that it affects people’s morality (so it affects other people’s morality, but not your morality?)

When confronted with works of art that are controversial, we all should remember that we are both human and intellectual. We can be subject to raw emotion and gut reactions but we can also distance ourselves and analyze what we see. I don’t see enough of that tension in discussions about censorship. I’d like to see it more often.

I have two souvenirs from my last two jobs that I basically thought were junk when I first got them.

The first was from an advisee I had. It was my first year in the private high school scene, and I wasn’t used to getting gifts from students. For Christmas, one of my ninth-grade advisees gave me a pair of foot duvets. My immediate thought was, “Gee, thanks. What the hell would I ever use these for?” I already had dreams of stashing them into the remotest corner of our apartment and not seeing them again until years later when I would throw them out. I’ve had them for seven years now, and I’m still using them. They come in really handy when it gets cold in our apartment and I don’t want to wear socks, or when we stay over at other people’s apartments that are a little bit on the chilly side. Who knew? I’d never even heard of a foot duvet before then.

My last job was a cubicle job (my first one). Since there was a lag time between my predecessor’s departure and my arrival, there was a lot of junk in that cubicle I had to clean out. Some things I reorganized. Some things I threw out, shredded, or recycled. A few things I kept. One of them was a Wells Fargo cooler bag. It was ugly as sin. But it was a cooler bag, and I thought, “Hey, this may get a couple of uses out of it. Or maybe I’ll throw it away later.” Again, years later, my wife and I are still using this thing to haul around refrigerables and cooked items (our hard-case cooler is too heavy sometimes). Maybe some day we’ll get a good-looking cooler bag. Until then, it’s Wells all the way.

Of course, we also had a ton of stuff we actually bought that we thought we’d always use but ended up being junk… stories for another time.

Every now and then, I feel like an alien, especially when I’m surrounded by these humans obsessed with Thanksgiving food. In America, we have this holiday called Thanksgiving. Supposedly, it’s based on some myth of pilgrims and native Americans sharing a meal together in a harsh winter and getting along for a short bit before the pilgrims started taking over all the land and massacring or exiling the native Americans. From that, we’re supposed to give thanks. Really, though, it’s about the food.

And that’s why I feel like an alien.

Last week, I was surrounded by co-workers and friends practically drooling as they thought about and got prepared to eat turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and gravy. Meanwhile, I shrugged my shoulders and thought about how it’s good having a few days off from work. Mashed potatoes are okay. I can do without the gravy and all the other stuff.

Now, after Thanksgiving weekend is over, I can finally give thanks for no longer feeling like an alien. Life goes on, and I’m not bombarded with people talking endlessly about food I find disgusting.