Office blues

Oh, how easy it is to forget about offices. How easy to forget the constant desk-based negotiations between web-surfing and writing, or rather, obviously doing something other than work, or subtlely doing something other than work. But, of course, in both cases not having any actual work to do. If you’re typing, in an innocuous word document say, it must be work, even when it’s categorically not. But reading The New Yorker online, which is probably more work-related (because it makes me smartah) than what I’m doing now, is somehow illicit. This is especially true when computer screens are visible to all passersby. This is surely a time-saving technique, but it is also a soul sucking one. There’s nothing worse than feeling as though you have to hunch your shoulders to obscure the screen, or to be constantly flexing your mouse finger, in case you have to minimize in a hurry. It’s just a picture of Brad and Angelina anyway, not a crime!
Maybe I’m talking about a particular kind of office to begin with—one where people have to do some actual work because, if nothing else, there’s this nominal paper coming out sometime in the immediate future. So procrastinating is somehow frowned upon, even though we all do it. But at Wernham and Hogg, or Dundler Mifflin (that’d be a fun game, coming up with potential Office companies), or what have you, do they have to do any work? Or do they just have to sit there and waste time? Which would be really hard work, but of a different, spirit crushing, kind. That’s something the British version did a lot better than the American, suggesting that people actually did work and it hurt them, with all the wordless shots of people at their desks and the occasional sales call, which no one on the American Office ever makes.
I enjoy the American version’s Jim and Pam more than Tim and Dawn, largely because J&P seem a better fit, as people, than T&D, and then also because Jim and Pam are both really awesome and funny (especially Jim) and I want to be friends with them. And though I like, and even more importantly hurt for, Tim and Dawn, I think we would only be friends if we were forced to work together in an office, in which case I’d be obsessed with them. But Jim and Pam, especially Jim, are so great that it makes absolutely no sense that they would be working at a place like Dundler Mifflin [Two people in this office, in discussion of the illuminating covers of today’s Post and News, are currently screeching, “That Britney Spears is such trash.” “Such Trash.” “Trailer trash.” End scene]. He’s cute and funny and wicked smart. And the whole transferring plot suggests that he can be motivated (even though his motivation that time was obviously Pam). This is a totally tired point, that the British Office is way more realistic than the American version, but it’s still true. Jim really doesn’t belong at a place like Dundler Mifflin. How did he end up there? Tim could have worked there because he wasn’t that cute and he wasn’t that smooth, because he couldn’t sack up and tell Dawn he loved her and smooch her, and because he had this obvious streak of bitter and a real, painful insecurity about him, that Jim just doesn’t have. Jim’s doesn’t believe he’s a loser. He doesn’t carry himself like a loser and he doesn’t really carry himself like a slacker. I love watching him, so I’m only complaining a little, but it doesn’t make sense that he’s there, or not the emotionally real kind of sense that the British Office always made.