The real world is horrifying.
The normal words of douchey condescension — the warnings of the difficulty of the job search, bills, early mornings, whatever — in the end turn out to be pure bullshit.
Job search. You send out resumes. You interview. You get hired.
Early mornings. You suck it up and get out of bed every day.
Bills. You show up to work. You get paychecks. You use said paychecks to survive and/or have Happy Fun Time.
Granted, these steps all have their complications (the first one especially), but the horror? It’s not in the difficulty.
It’s in the monotony.
Shit’s boring in the real world, and the total lack of interesting conversation accounts for a huge slab of the boredom.
This fact reared its unfortunately banal head during my second week of work.
Due to the apparently rare habit I have of reading things, I had just read an article accompanying a picture of a man — a man in an unbuttoned dress shirt with “feminine” hair and make-up.
The photo pretty brilliantly points out that the illegality of women baring their chests in public is problematic. The reasoning is well ingrained: Women, obviously, have breasts, and breasts aren’t just body parts. They’re scary, private body parts meant for sexy time and sexy time only.
(1. That was sarcasm. 2. The tangent regarding what makes a body part erotic and what makes erotic bad is an important one, but as I’m shooting for 750 words here, it’ll have to wait.)
I found the picture and article important and fascinating, so much so that I felt pulled to what I thought was the sane & expected course of action.
I wanted to talk about it.
Fast-forward to about 7:45 a.m. a few days later, when a co-worker and I were alone in the five-person office I helped occupy at the time. I already knew that she was smart and at least slightly feminist, so my guppy, post-college brain figured the picture would be perfect discussion fodder.
As anyone who has worked in an office for more than three months can probably attest, I was horribly wrong.
“I agree that the image is provocative,” she said, picking each word with care, as usual, as though the slightest misspeak would set off some office bomb detonated by casual or interesting conversation. “But I think that the laws regarding women exposing their chests should remain in place.”
To this day I can only understand such lines of reason hypothetically; I can grasp that people think that way, but I’m totally lost as to the how or why of it. (The same applies to people who take the Bible literally and those who genuinely think Everybody Loves Raymond is funny.)
So I pressed on.
“Why, though?” was my innocuous-enough question. “What is it about certain body parts that makes them somehow dirty?”
She stumbled through a couple citations of irrelevant statistics, mainly involving, I think, male arousal at the sight of naked ladies. I pointed out that numbers aren’t actually arguments, but as the option of concepts was lost on her, the conversation eventually died.
The failure of that exchange bothered me for days; the almost-chat was my first hint of the scarcity of the chances to have an interesting conversation outside a university.
Turns out, though, that the issue went beyond stubbornly literal thinkers, something my boss pointed out during the performance evaluation I had after two weeks at my job.
“Katie, you’re remarkably self-assured for a 22-year-old,” he began, looking across the desk to where I sat, straight-backed but comfortable.
“Well, thank you,” I said, unsure of whether the emphasis was meant to be on “remarkably self-assured” or “for a 22-year-old.”
“However,” he said, face firm with the discomfort of someone who abhors confrontation, “some topics of conversation are too — well — personal for office talk.”
It’s been almost three months and I still reel at that word. If he had said “academic” or “non-bullshit-small-talk-y” or even “political,” I’d have been on board — annoyed, but on board.
And so I learned that the office is a bit like a public high school: The nerds have to stay silent to avoid disrupting the social order and causing, you know, thought to happen.
Because one of the horrors of the real world is that non-corporate brainpower is a serious no-no.
So yes, I work full-time. I pay my bills. I feed myself. No big — we get a blueprint for all that.
I just wish someone had warned me of what my boss’s intended descriptor for the topics forbidden at work —
“Interesting.”
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