From bi284@FreeNet.Carleton.CA Thu Apr 29 01:36:40 1999 Date: 16 Sep 1997 06:20:37 GMT From: Charlotte Ashley Newsgroups: alt.gothic Subject: Corporate America (It's more like Corporate Canada, really, but it just doesn't have that same time-tested ring to it. "Corporate Canada" no, it sounds like a very bad ad campaign) I've been working for a NotCorporation for about three weeks now. All is fine and dandy except when you get down to the *corporate* bit of it all. I won't go ranting now about how I went into the Harvey's over lunch hour and found it packed full of people sitting alone talking to cell phones. What I would like to address is our photocopier. Call me a small town gal, but I remember xerox machines being the size of a water cooler ( <- fancy-ass corporate lingo) or perhaps a desk if it's the colour sort. So you can imagine my surprise when they lead me through the Door at the End of the Hall to find a huge beast of teflon and stainless steel no lesser than a neon, or perhaps a sunfire XT. "make 500 copies of this, and make sure they get stapled together." I'm not entirely sure where to put the paper. I settle for an opening in the top with feeler-like hairs in it. It seems to fit. Now, I start hitting buttons that I normally would, hoping to, well, make it make copies. before I could hit "start" though, Erin comes running at me and (somewhat hystericallly) shouts "NO WAIT! Don't forget to STAPLE them!!!! It's then that I realize that manual staplers were a thing of 1993, remaining only now in underfunded schools in northern ontario. I'm not sure I see thw wisdom in giving a high-preformance stapler to a two-tonne computer with wheels. Sure enough, with the help of a few more buttons, this multi tasking machine can order, copy, stack *and* staple everything I have, all in lazer perfection. Swell. Except for this little paranoid science fiction freak screaming out inside me. I have just given possibly dangerous instructions to something with the strength, power and intelligence to crush me like the bug I am. This thing has *wheels* Four wheel drive too, I'm sure. This fucker could hunt me if it wanted to. Well. Looking into the clear open top, I catch a glimpse of what happens inside this Secretorial Shrine. There are my two peices of paper, being tossed about at a speed faster than that of sound. Wow, thinks I, you could get a pretty mean paper cut from that. Wow, it's a good thing the lid is.... Oh shit. You think they build safty checks into these bringers of death? Oooooh no sir!!! As if it only needed the suggestion, the lid I forgot to clamp down springs open with a high-powered spring [that can probably only be bought with jewels and complicated sexual favors] and out come hurling, frightningly on-target, my two papers. Well fuck, I wasn't going to just *stand* there! Who knows how many more papers were zipping about in that thing? And I didn't want to be there when the cover of the stapler flew off.... Twenty minutes later Erin coaxes me back into the Room at the End of the Hall, waving the unplugged cord at me like a truce flag. The Machine is beyond silent. I know it's waiting. Only two hundred more copies need to be made, but Erin lets me leave them 'til wednesday. She says I can use the smaller machine, one I can stand a chance at overpowering. She says they still sell manual staplers somewhere, possibly second hand stores or Wal-Mart. I'm not very fond of corporate america. leanan sidhe -- http://www.ncf.carleton.ca/~bi284 Life is one big ink blot.