Not everyone works in an office, asshole

Not everyone works in an office, asshole.

What’s up with all these websites out there assuming that everyone works in an office?

NEWSFLASH: Not everybody works at “the office”.

If you were to go by all the job-related articles on the internet, you’d never guess that there were non-office jobs.

In a way, this is a relief, since any alien invasion fleet planning to invade would first do recon by investigating our internet communications. Said alien fleet would assume that we’re just a bunch of wimpy cubicle drones and would dramatically underestimate our capabilities. It would be this scene played out across the globe a billion-fold:

WELCOME TO EARF, BITCH

 

Imagine an alien fleet coming to Earth expecting a bunch of pasty white-collar office drones, and instead being greeted by an army of angry retail workers looking for an outlet to vent their frustrations on. WELCOME TO EARF BITCH. Anyone who’s ever done time in retail hell knows, the collective anger of retail employees could fuel space travel to three galaxies over. Get on it, Elon Musk.

As someone who has spent many a year in food service as well as other customer service related jobs and is currently serving on the front lines as an assistant deli manager, nothing irritates me more than the people who assume that everyone works in an office.

99.8% of job-related advice on the internet is geared towards people who work in an office. And holy shit, offices are apparently the most awesome laid-back places to work. In an office job, you can apparently:

  • Drop everything to take a walk.
  • Start exercising in the middle of your cubicle.
  • Meditate.
  • Listen to music.
  • Complain about anything and everything to a Human Resources department.
  • Contemplate suicide as you stare at three walls five days a week for the rest of your fucking life.

 

Office jobs tend to suck.

Who’d want to work an office job? Anyone who’s ever actually worked an office job will tell you how mind-numbingly painful it is. It’s not like an episode of The Drew Carey Show, with witty and whacky shenanigans. It’s more like the movie Office Space, with equipment that doesn’t work, coworkers that won’t leave you the hell alone, jerks swiping stuff from your desk, and incompetent middle management who piggybacks off the hard work of the people beneath them. Office Space is less like a movie and more like a documentary on working an office job.

The worst part is, you need a college degree to obtain most office jobs. 

While this might make sense for office jobs like accounting or IT, even the most rudimentary office jobs now require a college degree. Do I need a degree for data entry or working the mail room or answering phones? Apparently, according to most of the job postings I came across.

The diarrhea icing on this shit-cake? It doesn’t even matter what your degree is in. No, I’m not exaggerating for effect on this one. These places just want to see that you possess a college degree in literally anything, even something completely unrelated to the position you’re applying for. The cop-out they use is “It helps weed out hundreds of applicants”. Meanwhile, that guy who spent 4 years and $30,000 to obtain that B.A. in Market Analysis is making $10 an hour to be some executive’s errand boy. What a fucking joke, I’m glad I dropped out of college in my second semester and didn’t waste any more than a year on that shit.

Something else that confuses the hell out of me about office jobs is the abundance of pictures I see of workers (usually millennials) playing with toys on the job.

I have friends who work office jobs, and if any of them tried the shit I see other office workers doing in pictures they’d be looking for another $10 an hour job to pay off their Political Science B.A. I saw a picture of two people fighting with those big foam Hulk gloves. What kind of office actually allows people to do that? I suspect most of these “offices” are little tech “start-ups” out in California, and probably don’t last much longer than a year. Only a millennial would think it’s a good idea to play with toys on the job instead of actually working. Hell, most millennials probably feel they’re entitled to play instead of work.

 

Got a complaint? Take it up with HR!

By far though, my favorite thing is when people suggest office workers go to a Human Resources person with their (mostly silly) complaints.

In my line of work, we don’t have an HR department to cry to when our bosses act like jerk-offs. We don’t have “sick days”. We can’t call for a sit-down with an aggressor in the boss’s office. There’s none of this “taking a break to go meditate” shit when a customer or employee pisses us off. We have to deal with things the old fashioned way: By dealing with them ourselves.

Some of the stories I’ve read are just downright silly. I could write an entire novel based on refrigerator stories alone.

You have bitches like Sexual Harassment Susan, who wears low-cut blouses and flirts with guys, only to cry to HR when one of them has the nerve to ask her out on a date. Or the ever-popular Music Mike, who thinks everyone within a 5 cubicle radius needs to hear his shitty music (SIDE TANGENT: Music Mike has a Puerto Rican cousin named Hernandez who thinks that everybody wants to hear his stupid ass coming from 4 blocks away and drives a $500 car with a $5,000 sound system; Hernandez of course lives in my neighborhood and is unemployed, allowing him to drive around all hours of the day and night shaking houses with his shit taste in music). These are typical problems office workers have to deal with.

None of this shit would fly in my job. Sexual Harassment Susan might get away with one or two complaints, but eventually she’ll get called the fuck out on her shit not just by management but other women. Music Mike would be told to turn that shit the fuck off, and if he didn’t someone would “accidentally” break his Bluetooth speaker. And the refrigerator? If someone stole my food or threw away my shit I’d break their fucking jaw, to the approval of my boss.

The idea of being able to “sit down” over a petty grievance is hilariously laughable to me. First of all, I can’t even have a meeting with my store director to review sales figures for the week without being interrupted by others several times. Asking for a private sit-down to whine about how I feel like someone is being mean to me? The store director would laugh in my fucking face and literally tell me to fuck off. I’m not exaggerating here, he’s done exactly that to people. Is he a tyrant? No, he just doesn’t live in Candyland like some of these office workers seem to. I’ve had no qualms over the years openly calling various bosses out on their shit, and rarely do I involve a higher power in my disputes.

 

Your weekends and holidays are actually luxuries, assholes.

Also, fuck people who assume everyone has the weekends or holidays off.

I don’t even know what a weekend is. My one day off a week is in the middle of the week.

Holidays? The only holiday I get off for is Christmas Day, and I’ve even worked other jobs that made me work Christmas Day. In my line of work, holidays generally mean we’re expected to work harder and put up with more bullshit from the assholes who think they’re better than us because they work jobs that give them off for holidays and weekends (or since this is Philly, assholes who don’t have jobs and live off of my tax dollars yet still somehow think they’re better than me). The only saving grace to this is that we get paid overtime rates on holidays, and usually we close up earlier than normal.

The company Christmas party? We have two: The “official” one where my deli department has to make and provide the food that gets put in the break room for all the employees to touch with their grubby fingers, and the unofficial one, where a handful of us go to the bar and get fucking hammered. We used to have actual Christmas parties, but the owner stopped doing them because they were shit-shows. Picture your high school prom. Now picture grown ass adults behaving five times worse than the kids at your high school prom did. People were literally fucking in corners, shit was ridiculous.

I don’t blame the owner one bit for no longer doing them, but all the rank-and-file employees continually cry about this. As the manager it’s my duty to ensure employee morale, so whenever they start complaining I address their concerns by telling them to shut the fuck up and stop being ungrateful little chodes. Sometimes they protest this. Sometimes I make them do manual labor. That usually settles things.

 

Office life isn’t for me.

Can you imagine if I worked in an office?

There’s not much manual labor to be done there, how the hell would I keep anyone in line? You can only have someone move heavy stacks of copy paper so many times before the big bosses catch on. Conversely, that floor or those walls can always be cleaner. Never know when the Board of Health is gonna walk in, we need this place in shipshape!

And god forbid somebody on the office floor were to challenge my dominance. At my job, if someone challenges my dominance I usually catch them later in the freezers and cold-cock them with a right cross like my hero Iron Mike Tyson. Everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the mouth. Can’t do that shit in an office, there’s way too many cameras and lawyers.

I just want to conquer people and their souls. Working in an office prevents that, mostly because the company itself wants to conquer people and their souls. By implementing my management techniques in an office environment, I’d be effectively stealing from the company.

While it sucks that I only have off one day a week, it sure beats dealing with the bullshit that comes with working a dead-end office job for the rest of my life.

Fuck offices, fuck retail, and fuck you.

By Angry_Jerk

The CEO/Editor-in-chief of AJnet, and the current king of internet ranting. Hailing from the fine village of Northeast Philadelphia, AJ has been creating content on the internet for over 15 years. None of it has really been funny or entertaining, but he keeps trying anyway. When he’s not creating new articles for the site, he can be found hitting the weights, watching anime, or playing retro video games.