I’d like to sit down with Miss Martha and ask her what things were like in the Clink.
Specifically, did The Man try to institutionalize the decorating goddess right on out of her? I wonder if they forbid her to knit an afghan for her bunk bed or use flowers indigenous in the prison yard to make swags for her barred windows. I wonder if they said the big “no” if she tried to hang pictures of her previously created meals and spectacularly adorned cocktails. I’d have to assume “no” – which leads me to my current conclusion.
The Cube Farm is worse than prison.
The space I live in is approximately a 5-foot cube, smaller than your standard jail cell, which I guess is fair, since I rarely sleep here (unless I’ve been out drinking with the girls the night before and can somehow manage to cradle my forehead in my hands and look like I’m intently reading “Developing the Extraordinary Organization”).
My main source of decoration is a series of 3” black binders that encircle my cube wall, occasionally broken up by a pile of scrap paper and two very out-of-date phone books. I have a black computer monitor, a beige telephone (almost black from the Ghosts of Grubby Hands Past) and an ergonomically correct keyboard. That’s it. Nothing else. (Ok, there might also be a few empty diet Coke cans and several ill-attended dust bunnies, but that's it).
My dilemma is – I’m a decorating fool. I like having things on my walls and desk that say “a funky, fun woman works here”. My new “workspace” resides in the land of vanilla and there is very little that is deemed “appropriate” in our little hamlet of Blandville.
But last night, I broke down. I decided to take a leap and make my little fabric cell a little homier. I found some great little prints at my most favoritest store (rhymes with Smarget) and brought them in to display. I even came in a little early; to make sure I wasn’t using company time to do frivolous things like make my workspace bearable. They are these great prints (from the 30s or 40s, I think) that are old-time advertisements of Martini and Rossi. They have these funky mime guys on them and one has this awesome “man in the moon” licking his lips. They were fun. They were artsy. They were up for approximately 9 minutes before a manager swung by and most grievously told me that they should come down because of their content (i.e. booze).
Did you all just think “COME ON!”? Because that’s what I thought. I thought it so loud I was sure that my head would explode and decorate my cube walls with bits of brain matter and mucus, which I’m sure is also inappropriate for the Farm.
And no, I wasn’t upset with the poor Manager. It must be hard enforcing rules that you think are ridiculous. No, I think I’m upset with political correctness. Political correctness has run Camp Goodtimes right into the ground. Everything is offensive. Everything is skeptical. Everything is bad and should not be said or shown. Political correctness is a big ol' stick up the corporate ass.
Political correctness sucks the big one. And if Martha bothered to answer any of my phone calls I just know she'd agree.
9 comments:
We definitely have to make the truffle business a going concern and get you out of the cube farm. We can change stuff around in the Red Barn studio whenever we like. In fact, we could set up a bar with ALL of our bottles of alcohol and thumb our noses at whether or not it is politically correct. Then drink to whatever we decide!
Amen, sister! (Sidenote: there will be no getting up at 3:22a.m. Ouch.)
Being politically correct isn't necessarily bad — it's difficult to argue that we're not a better nation because the majority of us don't freely toss about racial epithets or degrading comments about women. Those actions have consequences and have a clear, detrimental effect on others within our society.
I realize hardcore libertarians will say I'm on a slippery slope — denouncing the heavy handed tack on morality and booze while celebrating the values that prevent Imus from getting a free pass when he demeans a group of talented women basketball players. But the differences aren't that hard to deduce. It's clear to me there are individual actions — whom I sleep with, how much I drink when I'm not driving, whether or not I smoke pot, if a poster in my office has a bottle of booze in it — that have zero effect on the larger American population.
Policing these areas isn't political correctness — it's Puritan and authoritarian.
I don't know why the blog has such an early time. I wrote that at about 7:30AM. And I agree, there will be no getting up at 3:22AM. Staying up until then, maybe.
BL5, holy crow - now that's passion! Yes, it's nice that people don't openly call others demeaning and hurtful things. But that doesn't mean they aren't thinking them and until we can change that - I'm gonna bitch about the Farm ;-)
Oh, feel free to bitch about the Farm. It's an Orwellian Fascist sort of place — the kind of place the neo-cons who trample individual freedoms would love. See, if your workplace was truly conservative in the libertarian sense, it would have zero issues with your posters. Instead, they're worried about offending religious types who fear the demon rum. Maybe it's semantics but I don't think your manager was being politically correct. A tool, for sure, but not politically correct.
Oh, feel free to bitch about the Farm. It's an Orwellian Fascist sort of place — the kind of place the neo-cons who trample individual freedoms would love. See, if your workplace was truly conservative in the libertarian sense, it would have zero issues with your posters. Instead, they're worried about offending religious types who fear the demon rum. Maybe it's semantics but I don't think your manager was being politically correct. A tool, for sure, but not politically correct.
Not that my last comment was so nice it needed to be posted twice. Sorry about that.
It seems to me that each political camp blames the other for the current ridiculous state of affairs. I absolutely hate (woops, dislike) this whole concept of political correctness. What happened to just plain ol' Correctness? Shouting racial epitaphs is wrong. Hanging up a picture of a wine bottle in a soulless cube is okay. There's a clear distinction between the two. It's the hypersensitivity to imagined slights that skews everything. Do we really need to rename the Green Bay Packers the Green Bay Six Packers to avoid offending our vegetarian friends, as one group once advocated?
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