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Desk Jockey
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I sometimes dream about desks, the ones at the office where I worked for 30-odd years. I was employed by an insurance company in Hartford until I took early retirement a 20-odd years ago. At the start of my career, I sat at a gunmetal gray desk among rows of such desks on the third floor of a glass high-rise. In time I moved into a cubicle with a larger wood-laminate steel desk and matching cadenza. Eventually I got my own office with a real wooden desk, matching furniture and a door with a brass nameplate on it. Such was my career trajectory as calibrated in office furniture.
There were rules, both written and unwritten, governing the square footage of one’s work space, the size and placement of the desk, the cadenza and the wastebasket, as well as one’s proximity to a window. You know you had arrived when you got to select art for your walls and plants that were watered regularly by an outside vendor. But just when you got settled in, there would be a corporate reorganization or periodic renovation of office space that would result in everyone being moved around. This always created a great deal of uncertainty among staff, especially if it involved replacing old furniture with new furniture. Would I have more or less workspace? Would I be closer to a window? Would my new desk be bigger than my old desk?
Years ago I worked with a man whose whole life was the company. When I was just starting out there, he was already well into middle age and had never married. For years he had dated a woman in our department. But he could never commit to marry her, so eventually she gave up on him and found someone else. This man lived with his mother until she died, then moved into a third-floor walkup in the apartment building he owned. One day there was a departmental reorganization, and he now found himself reporting to a former peer. This meant his desk would be smaller, and he would be moved out of his cubicle by the window. He suffered a heart attack shortly after the announcement was made. He was in the hospital for a while, and when he got out, he insisted on hauling his own suitcase up two flights of stairs to his apartment. He had a second heart attack and died on the landing. At the time I was young and mostly struck by the absurdity of dying over the size and placement of your desk.
Until the day I retired, I never truly appreciated how the whole matter of desks had sunk into the marrow of my being. I left my career with barely a backward glance and busied myself with many other things. I had trouble even remembering the name of my poor colleague who suffered the fatal heart attack so many years earlier. And yet even now I catch myself having dreams about desks, mostly reflecting anxiety about having to give up my walled office or finding myself once again sitting at a gunmetal gray desk amid rows of other such desks.
Of all types of social organization, corporations are undoubtedly the most peculiar. They may make sense as a legal entity or economic enterprise, but less so in human terms. Legally, a corporation has been regarded as a person since the 19th century. But as one labor organizer remarked at the time, a corporation is a person with no ass to kick and no soul to save. Fatuous CEOs are fond of telling their employees that the company is like one big family, but when was the last time anyone got laid off by his or her family? As a member of a family or a tribe or a church, you know what your place is, and you don’t have to worry about losing it over a downturn in the economy.
The insurance company where I was employed for those 30-odd years was not such a bad place to work as corporations go. But as my long-departed colleague so tragically demonstrated, you don’t want to try to put down roots there. You can work your way up from a row of desks to a cubicle by the window, perhaps even to a walled office with artwork and plants. But the truth is you never really know what your place is. As a human institution, a corporation has no ass to kick and no soul to save. One day you can show up at work and discover that your desk has been moved – or that there is no longer a place there for you at all.
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