Corporate Work is a Humiliation Ritual
I stand there politely as the small Brazilian woman with a VP title and too many cell phones denies my request to leave early. I had the audacity to need a doctor during working hours. I can only assume this somehow affects shareholder value, so I deserve this public shaming.
Oh, you’re out of PTO? You can come in on Friday (a remote day when the office is empty) to make up the hours. Just sit there by yourself. No meetings, no colleagues. Just sit there and know your place.
For eight years, I’ve done everything asked of me. I’ve moved my family around the world, smiled and made small talk with rich douchebags, and wasted my waking hours putting numbers in little boxes on a screen. Team-building events with people I wouldn’t piss on if they were on fire. Countless hours of meetings that could have been emails.
Sometimes, while being reminded of my place in the machine, I like to remember that I use to have a purpose. There was fire in my veins. I used to be a terror on foreign battlefields. I’ve been in car chases with drug runners and fist fights with thugs. I’ve climbed mountains, dived remote reefs, explored ancient ruins, piloted an aircraft. I’ve been locked in the basement of an FBI field office, hooked up to a polygraph while an agent accused me of being a foreign asset.
But I traded those lives for a paycheck. A man must provide for his family after all. And so I became a corpo-rat, bowing and scraping in hopes of avoiding the next round of layoffs. I laugh at stupid jokes while quietly calculating the number of days until the annual bonus. I willingly submit to the daily humiliations that slowly and steadily strip me of my autonomy and my pride.
But hey, the stock price is up and the CEO was awarded an eight-figure equity payout after the last earnings call, so all is well with the world.