Just another cog in the machine? September 16, 1985

 

 Stuck again. Temperature gauge slowly returning to normal. I should be careful; I tend to forget that my car may need simple things such as water, such as on Sunday morning when I left the car in drive when I parked and went to get the newspaper.

Maybe this time it’s only water; maybe it’s something else.

Meanwhile, I back sitting on the side of the road, surprising less disturbed by the fact than I have in the past. Perhaps it is because I’m close enough I could walk home if I wanted, leave the car and the dastardly situation behind.

I’ve already called in sick at the job, telling Fotomat I can’t make it in this time – just making the call is an accomplishment.

Lately, I’ve been giving too much to the other guys and not enough to me.

I’m just an industrial slave, watching the system suck up my soul, kowtowing to the social order, bending too much to social pressure.

This isn’t just a matter of corporate greed; everybody does it, including the tree huggers and the so-called new hippies. If you don’t follow the party line you get excommunicated or worse.

Fotomat is just symptomatic of a particularly sick obsession with routine.

Pauly once said everybody in Fotomat is a mental case and the more I look at it the more his assessment seems accurate to me.

And then I look beyond Fotomat and realize everything is like that, people stuck in the mechanism of the machine and expected to function like robots, pretending to still be human.

We have Bill Peebles, a mild-mannered man with fluttering eye lashes and an intense endurance to pain. Bob Adams calls him superman, at the same time, the man terrifies Bob – despite his admiration.

Bob cringes a lot when it comes to upper management, and is even more terrified by his new boss, Zelly, a two-faced corporate rat that makes him perfect for his role as overseer.

Safire noticed Bob’s fear of Zelly the last time at the office. Bob doesn’t hide his emotions well but insists nothing is wrong. But Bob has a career to worry about, and fears what the machine can do if he doesn’t comply, and his terror of Zelly trickles down to the rest of us less significant machine pieces almost as if by osmosis.

There is a terror in the work places everywhere that has workers going home to lovers and wives, mothers and husbands, brothers and fathers, unable to love or be loved, suspicious because suspicion is how they survive in the work world and can’t be scrapped off the heals of their shoes on the mat at the door.

I wish I knew what the answer was. We used to talk a lot about dropping out. But that only works if you have something you can drop out into. We used to wear patches and buttons of protest, learning much too late that revolution tends only to change masters, not their habits.

My answer is not to take too seriously those in power or accept the pressure peers put on me to comply. I go along with rules and regulations only to make these people go away, then live by my own rules, or use one powerful person to off set another powerful person, as I get out of the way of their conflict.

Above all, I depend on nobody for anything.

 

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