image stolen from renegadegolftraining.com
You know those Staples commercials where they show corporate board meetings. Where it’s clear that the people who made the commercial never had a job. That’s what my office looks like. Dark veneered wood. Gray file cabinets. A conference room where dumb platitudes are projected in Microsoft Powerpoint. I am wearing a bad suit. Other men in bad suits walk behind me chattering. They say numbers and facts about money into phones. They pause to listen to other numbers and facts about money. I look at a monitor. On it is a white spreadsheet with information about money. I look for the cell that tells me about someone’s money. Find it. I pick up a phone with many lights and buttons. Push numbers. Ask a secretary for the person with money. If he– and it’s always he– if he picks up I talk to him about his money. I do this for most of the day, most days, so my boss who is rich can be more rich. His office has golf trophies and two big windows. My office only has one window. But it overlooks a golf course. This is desirable. I have a view of a water hazard. It pleases me when the hazard disrupts a golf game. They look like ants from my window but I can read their frustration. Life is only good when someone has it worse.
What about you.
delicioustacos 
Sometimes I cause little boxes to move around on a screen and make little things happen when you click on them. Other times I make little charts and widgets pop up when you type some numbers and press a button. When I cause something really colorful to come up on the screen, it’s fun because it looks like the screens they have in the movies.
I rarely use any math past fourth grade algebra, and the entire process frequently feels more like a kindergartener drawing things on pieces of paper, cutting them up, and putting them together in different ways than it should.
This process infinitesimally enables the extraction of hydrocarbons from the earth, which near-psychotically fuels every bad and good thing there is. Of course, each hour I work is well arbitraged beyond what I am paid.
I enjoy being able to put complicated looking things in front of me and just space out for a couple of minutes. It looks like I’m focused on a difficult problem, instead of sexually fantasizing or melancholically daydreaming.
Thanks for the confessional, DT.
Ha, i enjoyed this post.
I work for a home-builder as an outsourced laborer. My day pretty much consists of me shovelling snow off of foundations or out of basement windows in negative celsius temperatures. That, or I move materials around or do some other bullshit task.
The upside however, is that there is minimal supervision, and if I’d like, I can drink and/or do drugs on the job, which of course is not recommended considering the heavy machinery sometimes present. The downside is when I have to shit, it’s in a portable that is often to be found in awful conditions. Oh, and I work 7:30 to 5.
Meh.
I was actually about to sit down and write my own innovative response to this prompt. Thank you for giving me a base of ideas. I will take some splicing of the tacos interpretation and anonymous’, as the combination of these two pretty aptly summarize my own career.
I was thinking about launching a tirade against all these women who give that trite “I love my job” BS. Maybe I’ll include that too. Maybe I’ll say making a dollar for every 73 cents you make just to piss them off. I’ll post the update.