Checked Out
by Dorothy—Age 27—New York, NY
I used to think that I was self-directed, but lately, I can’t seem to work anymore. I come to the office and stare at my computer screen. I open my email, answer a few, open the other windows I have to open, look at stuff. Open a few other windows of personal things: Gmail, Arts & Letters Daily, the New York Times. I click among windows for a couple of hours. I iChat with friends. Eventually I make a list of the things I have to do, and I do the bare minimum. My assistant sits over there on the other side of the table farm. She can’t see what’s on my computer screen and I can’t see what’s on hers, but I’m reasonably sure that she’s working and I’m not.
A friend of mine described the media office where I work as an “intellectual sweatshop.” I work in “the pit,” where eight or ten editors and editorial assistants and their computers, telephones, wires and papers huddle under a fluorescent sky. It’s deadly quiet except for the tapping, the polite and fake-outgoing tones of the occasional telephone interview, and the periodic intrusion of the corporate types from the other side of the office. It’s when they stride purposefully through in their suits and their expensive leather shoes, sometimes with special visitors from outside, that I feel most like an intellectual galley slave, or a crazy-faced Jack-in-the-Box shoved down into its dark chamber.
I really wanted this job before I got it. And even though coming to work every day always made me feel a little trapped, I learned a lot at the beginning. I’m not learning anymore. The person who hired me left the company, and I exist now in a management vacuum. Nobody really knows what I do all day, and as a result, I do as little as I can. I used to think that this kind of arrangement would feel good, but it doesn’t; I just feel guilty and bored. There’s nowhere in this company that I want to ‘advance’ to; I need to start applying for other jobs, but this one has me a little ground down. Sometimes I wonder whether looking at the computer all day, clicking, never focusing for more than a few seconds, is actually making me stupid. What, I worry for an anxious second, if I’ve become too dumb to leave?
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