Fear and Loathing in the Break Room
I can't manage it every day, but when possible, I try to repair to the break room during lunch, to eat my meal in peace with the company of a good book. Right now I'm working on "Spanking the Donkey" by Matt Taibbi, a chronicle of his chronicles of the previous presidential election. Aside from having an awesome first name, Mr. Taibbi is a killer writer. Reading his stuff while at work is both edifying and depressing: the former because it's good to know someone is carrying Hunter S. Thompson's mantle without so much of his drug baggage; the latter because it's exactly the kind of stuff I could be writing at this very moment if my life had taken a different turn, if I had but world enough and time.
While enjoying my few moments of unmonitored peace, some tightwad dipshit comes into the break room to purchase snacks. The machine craps out on him, prompting him to bang on the glass ineffectually. Soon, a small committee of Tim Allens descends on the machine, each of them offering advice as to how to fix this quandary. All of the advice translates into banging and shaking the stingy machine some more. I recognize their voices. They are the Strange Tall British Men who helm one of our bigger publications. Their accents are universally northern, so that they sound like the Beatles; hearing them talk, you would expect them to jump out on the fire escape to the tune of "Can't Buy Me Love". Except that I'm sure the Beatles didn't scream and drop the c-bomb every time they were unhappy with a retouch job on a photo.
Though the beefeaters stand literally inches behind me, I don't dare turn around and look. I know that if I do so, they will ask me how to fix this machine. When you're a Big Shot, any non-Big Shot person in the vicinity is immediately called upon to solve a problem that involves getting dirty or using brute force. This is how I wound up being the de facto copy machine repairman/tech support guy in some of the smaller offices to employ me over the years. The last thing I want is to become Snack Machine Douche because a bunch of cheap limeys who pull in six figures can't be bothered to eat 50 cents and go to a deli to get a bag of pretzels.
I immerse myself in my Taibbi, focusing on the struggles of the campaign trail. Eventually, Dexy's Midnight Runners give up the Great Pretzel Struggle and I am left alone for a moment. But the silence is subsumed once more when a trio of interns takes up a table nearby. I don't have to worry about being accosted by them--they are far too fashionista to even notice me. Even though they don't talk very loud, however, they sit close enough that their conversation intrudes my auditory canal, making it hard for me to focus on my book. The girls discuss upcoming weddings they must attend, and of course, the crippling diets they're on in preparation for the Happy Event. "Do you ever get...cravings?" one of them asks, like she's sheepishly talking to her mother in a Summer's Eve commercial. The other girl reassures her, "Oh yeah, sometimes I just totally feel like having a hamburger, AND I HAVE ONE." This would be a killer sarcastic response, but the second girl's tone indicated that this admission was so NAUGHTY, so EVIL, oooh, someone should SPANK HER!
These girls encapsulate another, non-British faction of the office, which is the Girly Contingent. Real Sex and the City types, the kind who go nuts after work with a couple of apple martinis or mojitos and try get their hooks into a lawyer or someone else equally well-heeled and boring as fuck. The kind of chicks who will forever dot their I's with little hearts, who truly think feminism means being able to buy whatever you want, for whom Paris Hilton is a spiritual leader. People with these kind of sensibilities are responsible for the horrible layouts in some of our magazines, where it looks like a Crayola 96 box threw up on the page, and every conceivable color is used simply because it exists and it looks BRIGHT and FUN and OMG IT'S SO FUN TO BE PART OF THE MACHINE!!!1! Boxes of green on magenta? Three drop shadows, each a neon color so it makes your eyes tremble to look at it? A design scheme constructed by someone with attention deficit disorder? THAT'S HOT! (c)
I can only look to Mr. Taibbi for advice, and he summed it up well when talking about his experiences on the press plane that followed around Kerry:
From the very first moment I stepped on the plane, I knew I was in the presence of profound ugliness. It was a tangible, visceral thing that I was conscious of every minute, like cold air or a bad smell. It was not an amusing kind of ugliness, not kitschy like a Brooklyn social club full of mobsters. This level was a serious ideological threat to people like me, that is, small-time losers. But what exactly the source of it was, it was impossible to say.
Matt, I would trade your plane for my lunchroom in a heartbeat.