The Tragedy of the Office Park Lunch Line

Now that the rush is over the stragglers start to come in.  These people fit into two categories: workaholics with low blood sugar and your average joe slacker who doesn’t want to deal with the long line.

They have one thing in common; they both want coffee.

Workaholic is on his cell phone.  No earpiece, he doesn’t have time to set up shit like that.  He doesn’t even have time to eat, but he doesn’t want to pass out later, so he’s forced to have to deal with these slow pokes. Seriously how fucking long does it take to make a burrito?  He pays and exits as if his ass is on fire and the pool is just outside the door. 

Then there’s the slacker dude.  Notice the waft in the air.  He totally just smoked a fatty in his honda hatch back during lunch.  He is the kindest of all customers to the cafeteria staff and the only one who gets extra toppings on whatever he wants for free.  He exits the establishment and heads to his desk where he will do two things: Eat and play on myspace.

Do you know what all of these people have in common?  They spend the majority of their time doing something that doesn’t really matter to them.

It is a truly lucky person that gets to actually do something they love for a living.  The rest of the population does what they have to do to get by.  

Because their professions are so meaningless to them they focus on figuring out who they want to be outside of work.  Barb scapbooks, Ken fucks up n00bs with his boys on Halo, Ralph spends a lot of time sitting on equipment at the gym.  They have to find some way to validate their existence in their free time or their reason for being on this planet come down to nothing more than keystrokes and PDF reports.   

And just in case you thought I was gonna let myself out of this one with no recourse let me inform you that you are wrong.

Hi, I’m Summer!  You didn’t see me today in the lunch room because I brought in 98 cents worth of fat free Chef Boyardee.  It tastes and smells terrible, but this is what I have to eat because I’m a poor fat ass that also joined a gym in an effort to lose weight (14 pounds in December baby!).  And I think most of you already know one of the ways I validate my existence but let me give you a few other examples.  I write a fan fiction in which I am one of the characters.  This puts me in the upper echelons of geekdom.  I also host a podcast so I can pretend I’m on the radio.  And if I’m not doing that I’m drinking and shooting the shit with my best friend.  In these discussions topics are anywhere from’Which Battlestar Galactica character do you want to have sex with?’ all the way to ‘Don’t you wish aliens would come down from the skies and take about 90 percent of the worlds population to another system so that way we can loot and live in a mansion?’

The point is that while you may not have a ‘real job’ you have something that the people of corporate America can’t have anymore.  You have the ability to say ‘Screw this place.  One day I’m gonna make it big somewhere.’ corporate whores are paid (and get by with) just enough to be too comfortable to leave.  And that’s why the world has more douche bags.

Viva la Office Park Lunch Facility!