#corplife

i wanted to do something totally irresponsible this evening (on a skool night!) so I YOLOed it and took 4 tabs and 2 caps of shrooms because man, I really needed a holiday, even if it’s only for 8 hours.

even if it’s still in my own house even if it’s just to watch these little wisps of smoke escape from the roaring furnace of my head and drift off into the middle distance

please, just leave me alone to write my trashy poetry whilst drugs for 7 hours. I really need this. 

I spend most of my waking hours attempting to trick the most abstract of machines into making the most ephemeral of mistakes. I press my own will up against digital steel until I bleed from it. And I do this over and over and over, trying, testing, tweaking, twisting the permutations. .. I do this until either the machine breaks or I do. overall, hacking is the ability to persist well past the point of constant failure until you careen in one crystalline moment of perfect realisation into this fleeting instant of success. 

and oh man, when you do beat it... honestly the rush is better than heroin. I say that straight-faced as an ex-opiate addict. no exaggeration. you get completely hooked to the little flashes of your own brilliance.... flashes of brilliance that come at the distinct cost of banging your head up against a heavily reinforced door for so long you actually got to get kind of good at doing it.

but god, I cannot think like this all the time.  I need to feel human again, so help me.

so i’m two hours into the trip and i’m deep in the grip of it, and the client messages about can I send him XYZ and it’s 8.30 in the evening

and no. 

no i can not fucking do it.

I’m am struggling to hold together an engagement that feels like its begin to collapse under its own weight: over-promised, under-resourced, I am feeling the intense corporate crunch of being trapped between two vast tectonic plates that are slowly grinding me into a fine undifferentiated dust

no i can not.

if I am honest with myself

i can not fucking do any of it any more.

maybe, just maybe, there is still some shit I will not eat.

some hollow rattle of a soul kicking around in this old tin can

just so were clear here I am a highly paid consultant currently in the employ of globally ranked top ten consulting firm (I’ll let you guess which one)

and this is my life now. I’m just one slim business card away from becoming patrick bateman. 

but tonight i will take some more valiums and try to go sleep and tomorrow I will wake up and hope I’m not still tripping and I guess then I will inevitably have to pay the piper but I am long gone beyond the point of any caring 

I am so... so burnt out.

- - - 

alarm set for 4 hours 26 minutes .... .hahahahahahah. then straight into a meeting with the client where we can explain away our failures in terms entirely other than simply not having enough time or enough people to meet the impossibly unrealistic set by our sales staff.

despite what we like to tell our clients my own private supply of miracles is actually very limited, and trying to pull out a whole unicorn from inside my asshole, fully-formed, with horn and all included, is quite a long, slow, and honestly a very arduous process, as I’m sure you can well imagine -- particularly considering the relative position of the anal canal, and the obvious lack of the all usual physical prerequisites generally considered as a practical necessity for attempting to give birth to something living.

Just got told I can’t put the 345 hours I worked on the last red team on my timesheet because the schedule had me billable for 50.

For some reason this feels like the last straw with this corporate bullshit for me. If they only want the hours they’ve got me in the schedule, why don’t they take those goddamn hours and put them directly in my timesheet? In august I’m entitled to 6 weeks more "long service leave” cos I’ve worked at this company (including before we were acquired) for 7 years. This will bring up my paid vacation days to OVER 136 DAYS OWED.  That is 136/5 = 27 weeks = 6 months paid vacation.

Which they will then be forced to pay out to me as a lump sum. :-)

After that I’m gonna find a smaller company to work for. A “boutique” as we say in the industry.

Yeah.

When they talk about diversity, they mean they have a (probably white) female HR director (who is extremely well-versed in the labor laws of the state and dedicated primarily to skirting just as close to the line between following them and breaking them as possible).

When they talk about work/life balance, they mean they have food and booze in the office and fooseball or cornhole in the breakroom, so do you really need a life outside of work at all?

When they talk about unlimited vacation, they mean vacation you will be soft-pressured into never taking, and that they don't have to pay you anything for if you're laid off with unused hours.

When they talk about pay equity, it's to gently remind you how discussing pay can cause strife between colleagues and is tacky besides.

Their goal is to sound woke and compassionate while actually doing the bare minimum allowed by law. Their goal is to attract young talent who will work harder for less pay and have no family or other obligations to take them away from the office.

Their goal is to emulate frat culture and late adolescence in a way that disguises the lack of actual value they're giving their employees back for their labor, while encouraging cultlike devotion to the company.