CorpAmerica
Ish. I officially hate corporate America.
This morning, the mini-mes and I took an excursion on the 4F bus downtown to see "Shark Tale" for free at Block E. Several observations I made:
1) Although St. Paul buses are ghetto and scary, I really love the 4F. Since it was early in the morning, it was filled with really darling people headed off to work. There was one guy who was all-out London street with plaid and a blazer and his stylish earphones and his busboy cap...I wanted to smush him in my hand.
2) Block E is amazing. Even though it was kind of like surburban-urban and outrageously luxurious, it was still fun to experience stadium seating and cinema at it's most comfortable. The only thing that marred the experience were these campers from the Phyllis Wheatley Summer Achievement Programme (something like that) whose counselors were communist slave-drivers who kept yelling at them through the whole thing. This one woman in particular kept walking back and forth through the aisles, picking out innocent victims to sit next to her.
But now for the true reason why corporate America makes me vom.
So the kids' dad works at Target Corp. and they wanted to go see him, so we traversed Nicollet Mall to find his workplace. Downtown Minneapolis is really delightful around noontime, when the farmer's market is alive, everyone is decked out in vivid hues, and there is such a culture to the whole environment. Even though you still feel you're in the Midwest downtown, it was definitely a nice change of pace from residential Minneapolis. Of course I felt like a real schmo with my Adidas shorts and my tank top and raucous kids who wouldn't settle down. It was like country hick meets urban chic.
So anyways, we finally find the Target building and go up the escalators to the real "offices" of Target. I'm sitting next to the security desk with the kids and elevator after elevator brings eager young people in their 30s, thinking they owned the world in their stripey, starched shirts and their ironed dress pants and their hair gelled and their cell phones a-buzz. The whole atmosphere just screamed all the qualities I had hated so much about MUNUC--everyone thinking of themselves as a public deity, worthy of praise and respect and bravura. There was no uniqueness to them, nothing that made them stand apart from each other. And they just kept on coming and I was so relieved when their dad finally showed up and we went to lunch.
Post-lunch, we went to their dad's cubicle so the kids could play on their dad's computer for a while. On the way up, the elevator stopped at every single floor, and on the wall facing the elevator doors on every floor were these disgusting posters asking, "What makes the best company?" followed by reasons why Target fit such a model. And then we got off on the 10th floor and it was just a gigantic gray mass. I hate cubicles! They're so gray and bland and uniform, and nothing anyone does can lift the desperate cubicle from it's plight. I mean, these were the workspaces of Target's top architects and they were just so... ugly.
Vom.
This morning, the mini-mes and I took an excursion on the 4F bus downtown to see "Shark Tale" for free at Block E. Several observations I made:
1) Although St. Paul buses are ghetto and scary, I really love the 4F. Since it was early in the morning, it was filled with really darling people headed off to work. There was one guy who was all-out London street with plaid and a blazer and his stylish earphones and his busboy cap...I wanted to smush him in my hand.
2) Block E is amazing. Even though it was kind of like surburban-urban and outrageously luxurious, it was still fun to experience stadium seating and cinema at it's most comfortable. The only thing that marred the experience were these campers from the Phyllis Wheatley Summer Achievement Programme (something like that) whose counselors were communist slave-drivers who kept yelling at them through the whole thing. This one woman in particular kept walking back and forth through the aisles, picking out innocent victims to sit next to her.
But now for the true reason why corporate America makes me vom.
So the kids' dad works at Target Corp. and they wanted to go see him, so we traversed Nicollet Mall to find his workplace. Downtown Minneapolis is really delightful around noontime, when the farmer's market is alive, everyone is decked out in vivid hues, and there is such a culture to the whole environment. Even though you still feel you're in the Midwest downtown, it was definitely a nice change of pace from residential Minneapolis. Of course I felt like a real schmo with my Adidas shorts and my tank top and raucous kids who wouldn't settle down. It was like country hick meets urban chic.
So anyways, we finally find the Target building and go up the escalators to the real "offices" of Target. I'm sitting next to the security desk with the kids and elevator after elevator brings eager young people in their 30s, thinking they owned the world in their stripey, starched shirts and their ironed dress pants and their hair gelled and their cell phones a-buzz. The whole atmosphere just screamed all the qualities I had hated so much about MUNUC--everyone thinking of themselves as a public deity, worthy of praise and respect and bravura. There was no uniqueness to them, nothing that made them stand apart from each other. And they just kept on coming and I was so relieved when their dad finally showed up and we went to lunch.
Post-lunch, we went to their dad's cubicle so the kids could play on their dad's computer for a while. On the way up, the elevator stopped at every single floor, and on the wall facing the elevator doors on every floor were these disgusting posters asking, "What makes the best company?" followed by reasons why Target fit such a model. And then we got off on the 10th floor and it was just a gigantic gray mass. I hate cubicles! They're so gray and bland and uniform, and nothing anyone does can lift the desperate cubicle from it's plight. I mean, these were the workspaces of Target's top architects and they were just so... ugly.
Vom.