Office Deconstructed by Divya Maniar
Shorts editor Andrew Walker on today’s short: The office in monotonous: a conglomerate mess of ugly aesthetic and bored bodies. However, in "Office, Deconstructed", Divya Maniar pulls apart of the most mundane moments of work life and finds in between the fibers, humor and beauty. From the secrete stressors of your bosses to the sadness of plastic plants, Maniar paints enjoyment into a world full of fluorescent light and swivel chairs. Ignore that email from your boss a moment longer and find a way to sneak out of the all-staff. Clock in here, instead. Find your part in this system.
Office deconstructed
The Interns
The interns are here to do a job. The ‘job’ is a thing both unknown and known. Unknown, because what really is ‘the job,’ but known, because a job, ultimately, is a job, even if nothing else can or will ever be said about it. The interns are here to get coffee. The interns are here to steal paperclips. The interns are here to sell the paperclips back to us. We are in a deficit of red. The interns are here to put on disguises and disappear for days on end, bringing back pastel binders full of information gleaned through what you might think of as ‘corporate espionage,’ but which we call ‘a normal mode of B2B communication.’ The interns are here to organize the spreadsheets. Color code them. The interns are here to cut our mail open with sharp pen knives, and shoddily re-seal the envelopes, contents destroyed. At our desks, we peel these resealed envelopes apart to find nothing. Letters from old friends. Incinerated. Junk mail. Incinerated. Invoices. Incinerated. There’s a garbage chute in the break room. Every day they incinerate what falls out of it, all the way down, into a big, gaping metal container out front. Fire! Fire! Help! No, you know what, it’s fine. Ash coating the lower floor windows. Like snow. It’s really quite beautiful. Really quite pristine. There’s nothing like it on God’s green earth. You’ve got to see it. Have you been outside lately?
The Bosses
It’s never clear to us what The Bosses want, only that they want something. If you’re lucky, that something is ‘anything,’ and if you’re not, it’s ‘EVERYTHING!?!’ They only communicate by whispering so you have to get really close to them–like so unbelievably close–to even hear a lick of a request, and even then, it will be entirely unintelligible, as if they were speaking in a Parisian widow’s lightspeed French, mediated through snot and tears. There are many Bosses, but we only answer to one. We cannot tell you her name! Stop asking! If you spend long enough pacing right outside the Boss’ door, you might hear a low rumble, as if the earth had a stomach and was incredibly hungry, ravenous, but only for Instant Noodles. We asked the Boss for an Instant Noodle Vending Machine, and she said that she would think about it. Add it to the list of things she is thinking about. Nobody’s brain should hold so much. She is thinking about the weather, and the traffic. She is thinking about the end of the world. She is thinking about who to terminate. She does not have in hand so much as an ever-lit cigarette to express herself with. She is thinking about who to have an affair with. She is thinking about whether it would be possible to assemble an army of Interns. A real army. A true army. She is thinking about how one day her office will be empty. She is getting sad. She is thinking about an empty office at the end of the world. Big picture things. The future of the company. She comes out to give us instructions. She opens her mouth and regales us with Silence. We want to ask her for something, but we have to respect her sadness and stay quiet too. One of us holds his finger to his lips indefinitely. We are still walking back and forth in front of her door. We are waiting for her to open it again. None of us have seen what is inside. You only see that when you’re being told to leave.
The Plants
They are made of plastic, so they don’t know anything about what’s going on. We are jealous of the plastic plants. They are not biodegradable. Things that are not biodegradable are bad for the environment. But they are also closer to immortality than we could ever wish to be. This made us all desperately depressed.
The Computers
They watch us. They wait for us to fumble, to fail. They whir menacingly. They are rectangular. They are cruel. They contain nothing. They contain everything. Last week we took one of them to the break room and held it down on a table, two people on each side pressing on it so it could no longer resist us. Slowly and methodically we wrenched the screen away and started operating on it, using the tweezers we had bought to remove our nose-hairs. We picked at the gold, scratched at the Data. We wanted to know secrets, but we only heard a distant scream. We put it all back together at the end and took it back to its desk.
The Fish in the Fish Tank
The fish has been dead for a couple of months. Swimming in his own decay. A grim reminder of what is to come.
The Air Conditioning
Gills on the ceiling of the world. The building breathes stale air. Gratefully, we bathe in it. We asked if you had been outside lately. We haven’t. Or, at least, we barely remember it. There is only negative space, and here.
The Holiday Calendar
Birthdays highlighted in green Sharpie fluorescence. It’s company policy not to buy cake. It’s company policy to buy very little. We click and click. We add things to our cart. More paper for the printer. More candy for the bowl. Then we leave the page. The bowl is empty. The printer grinds inkless letters on air. It is Easter and we are still working. It is unfortunate to be working on the day He’s risen, but there’s really nothing else to do.
Us
Maybe we shouldn’t tell you all these things. Or maybe we should. It’s not like we’ve signed NDAs, or anything, and even if we did, we would have signed it in disappearing ink. Why? Because we are smart: too smart, sometimes, for our own good. But it is common knowledge that sharing these quiet private office things is a no-no. That’s why it’s fun. Having the authority to do something is never a prerequisite for doing it. Having the authority to do something takes all the fun out of it. Once it is legitimate, it is not real. We have spent our days Scrivening, like Bartleby. We have sought freedom and found only remorse. We have gone to work and gone home and gone to work again. Continuous cycle. Eternal damnation. No. That’s too dramatic. Look at the interns. They mock us. They throw blue-tack into our cups. Look at the Bosses. They glance at us in our cubicles. They have windows, doors. Spite. Endless Spite. But we have the last laugh.
Here: we do. The interns look forward. The bosses look back.
We have been interns. We may yet become Bosses.
All our envelopes are empty. But our chairs swivel. They swivel wildly, without control. And our heads. They swivel, too. Twirling, twirling. That’s us. We’re the ones looking all the way around.
Divya Maniar is a Singaporean writer and dancer. She has work in or forthcoming with The Rumpus, Sonora Review, Joyland and elsewhere. Divya tweets at @divyalymaniar More at divyamaniar.com
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