Much like Ricky Gervais and other really successful people, I always knew office life wasn't for me, from the very beginning of my post-college career. I adapted as much as I could to the guy who twitched all day long with no ramifications because he did the repetitive grunt work no one else wanted to do before they dumped him, or the violently aggressive secretary who's almost always desperately promiscuous because someone along the way encouraged this rather plain girl to use her looks to get ahead, putting a young woman in a seat of responsibility that even very beautiful women have trouble handling. How do you become a beauty on a typical office worker's salary? You don't, which is why most of the "office girls" go for men that they think have economic power to "liberate" them from the horrors of their own labors; an insanely fantastic proposition, if ever there was.
Why would most "suits" care what a woman wants, anyway? They're often as disposable as next year's younger, blonder, bustier model, leading to the next societal craze we're in right now called "reality t.v.", for the next generation of office bimbo turned alcoholic housewife. Ugh...shudder. She's the woman I've fought hard my entire life to never become, not that I could have done it easily. I love home economics and child rearing, since I've been running other people's households (and offices) for all of my life thus far, which has given me enough time to be here with you while at home, too. I've become the way to have it all that reveals how we, as women, can really do it without sacrificing our bodies and our sanity, though there's always some compromises to be made in any real life.
But growing up, we had precious few role models. I was lucky to have a classy, ethical mentor my first job out in the real world, though she does not have the traditional husband and kids, but a very long-term partnership with a man that has outlasted many marriages. There's a lot of good in it, but she realizes that if she changed one component of her very successful life, another would have to go out the window, and that was too much to sacrifice. The other model for older women in the workforce was the unfortunate 80s stereotype of the square-shouldered "power lesbian", a woman who mimicked the mannerisms of men to blend into the boy's club: definitely not the right choice for women who live openly with their beloved male counterparts, like I do. What would a masculine energy from me do for a hetero man? Not much, and I certainly don't want to be the man in my relationship.
And so I did what many healthy women in business have done before me, with their fingers crossed: I've worked hard daily to be the best, while relying on my naturally long-lived fertility that I was blessed to inherit while I jettisoned the many "Mr. Wrongs" who can't hold up their end of my relationships. And then I waited. And waited some more. And then, some more, working all the while. It takes faith, stamina, confidence, and an amazing amount of experience to master the art of patience, something my very dear maternal grandmother told me wisely more than once that I needed to learn, and her seeds of wisdom have never failed to blossom within me. She was that good, ya'll. But along the way, I've seen some really ugly stuff, tropes of broken women that I hope we successfully breed out forever.
Top of my list is the woman who picks a man to co-dependently enable by stroking his ego and feeding into his vanity, while spending his money as fast as she can, because that's the business arrangement they made. It's a form of prostitution to sell yourself short like that, one deeply rooted in a woman's insecurity and fear. Where would you be without your man? Dead?! How can that be, when we were made to live? It doesn't make any sense, and I've heard every type of justification from that type of woman that exists, shallow and dumb as they are. It's a deeply disturbing thing to do with one's life; throwing it away on the promise of a man-made freedom through money. Whatcho gonna do with all that money, any how? Sleep with it?
That's what my people told me all my life: money doesn't keep you warm at night. People do. Not that skipping through beds and partners should be a full-time thing. Every grown woman I know gravely looks forward to a good night's sleep free of night terrors (just look at her dark under-eye circles, man), be they from yo' man or yo' kids, right? If it ain't that, then it's the dog throwing up all night seeking comfort. Amen to a nice night at a hotel somewhere and just let me sleep! Lack of sleep makes a person desperate for relief, and that was a lot of the hurt that I saw playing itself out in offices throughout the world; women just trying to stay afloat, treading water and looking for help when none was given to them without some sort of price tag attached to it. Doesn't sound Christian or hetero to me at all. Does that sound normal to you?
So, I learned to live around other people's sexualities, preferences, and/or mental disorders, because during my entire time in other people's offices, the one common message I always got was this: you don't belong there, and that's actually true. I belong here, with all of you. Like, take this one typical dyed blond booby from Long Island; she stuffed every dopey cliche about receptionists into one horrible package, like a nightmare thing from someone else's fictional story, because I sure don't play that way. She was aggressive, gossipy, bitchy, stupid, angry, openly hostile and derisive, and when that didn't work, she tried sleeping with everyone in the office (I mean everyone, male or female) under the guise of her many storied disorders which were, of course, much more important than the good work that I did daily to pay her stupid bills, which were many, too.
Her "body image issues" were everyone else's fucking problems too, as were the gory details of her stupid sex life which, shocking and active as it was, sucked badly, because she couldn't figure out how to even do that right, even after all of her practice. She was a "poor lay" as they say, and that was the worst secret of them all, outside of her bisexual, daddy-molestation tales, told salaciously in the light of noon in a generic publishing office that was anything but the blandly raunchy bar she wanted it to be, which leads me to her classification as a day-to-day type that you all should not only run from, but fire immediately upon realization, and that is this: she was the perfect "Office Cow", a rightly demeaning term dubbed by my excellently clever ex-boyfriend from Colorado, bless his funny British/Scottish ass. You got me on that one, lad!
Kent and I met at the Denver-area recording studio that I worked at out west, after my brief marriage to an unsuitable partner was naturally dissolved with "no-fault" tied to either side (he can't fulfill normal marriage obligations due to his illnesses), and we immediately became friends. He's one smart muthfucka! We met over his low-budget punk rock project that overflowed with quick-witted lyrics and song titles. It was genius, man, and I loved him right away. We took to each other like soldiers fighting in his crazy Christian army, with his beautiful, classically-rendered tattoo of G-d's Rapture from a famous tattooist prominently displayed on his big meaty forearm proudly. I immediately loved the art behind it, like we were two angels fighting the "End of Days", thrown together by circumstance. We got on that well, initially. Even though we were actually more friends than romantic partners, we got on well enough to share home and hounds for a time.
You see, he had the same war stories of me, as the "big man on campus" who made an electrical engineers salary in an area that made him seem extremely desirable, except that he isn't, really. Not for an average office girl. My big lad from back then was a high-paid electrician (with the apprentice, equipment, and annually-renewed state license to prove it), a one-time sponsored downhill bike racer (I saw his lift ticket of him in sponsored gear from back in the day to prove it, because as big as he was, he could be dodgy on some of the details to impress me deliberately, which I actually found rather charming from a man of his size), and he had played with some of the most prominent punk bands from back in the day (making him a bona fide rock star to boot, because I saw the road pics of him as a backup guitarist with "Agression", a southern Californian skater band), and he became a private pilot during my watch, too. Top that, son!
Needless, I didn't have all that much competition from the local ladies. He told me they did weird stuff like look at his weekly pay-stubs to form dating strategies within earshot, as he passed through the office. Because they were too dumb to perform well at their jobs, they went looking for "Mr. Paycheck" instead, without taking the time to get to know him or share his interests, like I did. He told me that they brazenly gossiped in front of him (as their company's top earner), making him feel like an awful piece of meat every time he passed through the office (I saw some of the girls on one of our first dates:
a football-viewing Super Bowl party given at one of their homes. I wore my one and only Broncos jersey that's now long gone, New Yorkers), which was part of the point. To them, your participation is mandatory in their world, even though they practically live and die off of his salary and earning power. It was something that I immediately identified with, being a "big earner" myself.
Neither one of us wanted to be used for money, sensitive as we are to being seen as disposable by multiple-marriage families. His mum decided to just start a second family by adopting some junkie's kid on the cheap, as is so often the case with sick parents who create patterns of the same wrecked families, littered behind them as wreckage they see as acceptable to their selfish aims: the anti-thesis of family, if ever there was. I was reminded of him every time I encountered a disaster of a office gal. Each and every time I met one, I often laughed to myself as the sole sane witness to a highly repetitive calamity. It became no clearer to me than during one particularly ornery job, where I struggled to keep this family's guard dog on a leash tied to their front desk from tearing out my throat in blind envy, interspersed with her loudly vocalized eating disorder that was punctuated by "mm bitch" "mm" "bitch", every time some plain girl from the Midwest dared to bring in homemade baked goods into the office, because she (of course) did it to sabotage her on purpose.
Why else would she do it? What kind of sick person makes cookies at home to serve for family holidays, and then shares them with her co-workers by leaving a warm note on top of them in the company kitchen? The horror! It was just sick, man, the way this family allowed some sick bitch to foam at the mouth while gorging herself covertly on some young wife's attempt at domesticity in a city not of her choosing, and certainly not of her birth. I mean, how dare she? Who did she fucking think she was? Bitch! Ayelet was the lead girl, and we violated her corrupt controlling by freely eating the well-made baked goods of a Nebraskan farm girl who also liked to sew in her spare time, in over her head from both this high-stress job and her new marriage in our city of many lights. Go home! Go away! Get out! Who the fuck did you think you were anyway, Natasha? "Office Cow!"
