For exactly one year, I was working in a cubicle for a prominent toy company, the first and last time I ever set foot in an office environment.
The company in question had fallen ass backwards into a massively successful property, that they had no idea what to do with, and so were expanding their art department at a ludicrous rate, just gobbling up every available artist they could find and offering good salaries with benefits.
Now, up until that point, my entire adult working life had been spent being self-employed, taking short contracts depending on the project, working in studios or from home, so I was completely unprepared for what I was about to encounter.
It was the worst, most mind numbing, tedium I had ever experienced... the production schedule was completely wide open, there were no real deadlines to speak of, and the department was bloated with far too many people. Those in charge had never been involved in a creative endeavour, and the people they hired to oversee their project were taking them for one hell of a ride. Most of those in my department were recent graduates, and all it took was one meeting with my boss to get me a supervisory position, where all I really had to do was give direction and revisions to work that was, in all honesty, complete and utter shit.
I'd spend about a third of my day, every day, in meetings of absolutely no consequence. I'd sometimes have to pinch the inside of my forearm just to stay awake, as some representative of a separate department gave a monotonous update on the progress of their project, which didn't matter and would never get complete, and hadn't changed since the last meeting. Sitting in on conference calls with clients, where half the meeting is spent waiting for people to show up, or trying to figure out how to work the phone. Meetings about the direction the company was moving in, meetings looking for input for the safety council, meetings about organizing a holiday party, etc.
I'd take two hour lunches, or sometimes just randomly leave for hours at a time, and never got called out on it.
The actual amount of work I did each day could be completed in about 40 minutes.
The boredom was so intolerable that I decided to see how long I could go with doing no work at all, other than meetings. I brought an external drive to work full of movies and television shows, sat down in my cubicle, and went a full six business days accomplishing NOTHING before even that became boring.
I started putting on weight, started drinking at lunch, and on my one year work anniversary quit without warning and with no plans for the future just to get out of there before the damage got any worse, and I've never looked back.
My wife also works in an office environment, in a technical department, and informs me that my experiences are basically the norm. You basically pretend to work most of the day, spend a great deal of time in meetings listening to people talk about nonsense that doesn't matter, and just do your best not to go crazy from a lack of stimulation.
But what really gets me, what still amazes me about the people I encountered at this job, is how most of them seemed to be genuinely challenged and content with their work life... these people even complained that their work was difficult, that they were hard done by and deserved more praise and money. It wasn't any surprise to learn that most of them hadn't had any jobs prior to going to university, and started working in offices right out of school. They had no basis for comparison, to them, this was real work.
Then I think about how these are the people running things, that they make up the majority of workers, that administrative support is the largest occupational sector in the nation, and it just depresses me.
