Last updated: 73 weeks ago
Isn't that insane? 73 weeks ago. A year and a half. What have I done in the past year and a half? Not much and yet everything at the same time. Consecutive success and failure meticulously folded together into a nice, bittersweet package. My life has been consumed with Barnes & Noble, Inc. since I started there over two years ago. I used to be able to fool myself into thinking that I was working somewhere not-so-corporately corporate but, as time has told me, I was definitely wrong. The six months at work have been horrible and each day I grow less and less tolerant of being treated like the mindless fool that I'm not yet am forced to be via corporate dumbification. Every action is the result of someone else's order and everything is uniform. I stumbled on a community forum here on LiveJournal relating only to working and B & N and, in reading everyone's posts, it was reaffirmed that everything really is mechanistic. You (as an employee) are simply a body. Someone to fill a position that requires little to no intellectual capacity. In fact, all of the policies, procedures, stragies, and sales tactics could easily be taught to and performed by monkeys. Really, that is what all of the employees there are --- monkeys. I am merely one of 50,000+ monkeys nationwide trained to do none other than make someone else money. The most disheartening thing of it all, however, is that we are all fooled into complacency under the guise that we are performing our duty as a whole; as a team. It's an act that I am tiring of quickly. I struggle with this thought each day and with each day I also realize how this will never change. I look into the faces of some of my coworkers and, sadly for some, see no escape. I see that this is all that they know and all that they will ever do. Not because they love it, or even feel passion for it, but simply because they know it. Each one of them with hopes, desires, and dreams but very few of them with any drive, ambition, or intellectual capacity left to accomplish them. Then, past all of that, it becomes clear that this is hell. This is hell in the most literal sense of the word. A state of being comprised of nothingness where with each day that passes your higher functioning abilities atrophy and the corporate mind-set consumes you whole with no chance of escape.