Takin' Out My Life
By: Pete Phillips
March 19, 2007

I bet you didn't even know there was an OfficeCam

Work is for suckas. Don't let anybody tell you anything different either. If you ever work in an office setting, you'll have a few things by default. From working as an FAA intern in high school all the way to a full time job at an undisclosed institution now, I've always had some things at all of these jobs. The first thing I've gotten is a writing utensil, though you may not always have a thing to write on. Some employers feel that your hand is a fine substitute for expensive papers and pads. The second thing that has always been available to me at work is a surplus of paper clips. At home I find several uses for paper clips, but have none. At work I have hundreds, but no use for them. The last thing I get is a trashcan. See, when you're an entry level person they always want you to be able to throw the stupid crap they have you working on in a receptacle.

With that belief in hand, when I started at my current place of employment, I was intimidated by the size of the trashcan. The square bin stood about three feet high and fit snug into the corner of my office walls. I worried that they expected me to fill this trashcan on a daily basis. It soon became clear that my job was mostly digital and I would rarely fill the trashcan. Maintenance men would joke that I did so little based on my trash output. I felt I was helping the earth by re-using paper for scrap and things like that. Evidently I was wrong.

Months would pass before I got used to putting big items in the trashcan. This would fill it fast, but not increase my trash output. It was a brilliant scheme, as the maintenance men thought I worked more often now. I started to regularly fill the trashcan, but no one congratulated me on my fake efficiency or productivity. People just picked up the trash and threw it away in the bigger trashcan on wheels. I didn't mind being ignored, until one day, the big trashcan (not on wheels) was gone. In its place was a small, round trashcan. Inside the trashcan was a liner that had gum on it already.

In a word, this was bogus. Unless you ever have the chance to work in an office that freely celebrates deign over conservative space, financial, and architectural expense, a round trashcan will never fit into the corner of your office. And round is very questionable too. For example, if you have a very round trashcan, like a sandbox, you'll need a big curve. They say that you can't put a square peg into a round hole. Likewise, you can't put a round trashcan into a 90º angled corner.

It seems that at the moment my trashcan went missing, though disarming and off-putting by itself, my life took a terrible turn for the worse. Since that day, things have been shitty-shitty-awful in life. The empty space in between the curve of the trashcan and the corner of the wall has become a vacuum of all good things in life. Where I used to "shoot" my trash into the "basket" of trash, now I miss almost every time. Likewise, my judgment in work, relationships, and creativity has been miss more often than hit in the past three months.

I've thought about what could've gone wrong. Lack of stimulus at work couldn't be the source of everything. Chameleon-esque women, though more annoying than pop country music and news about Anna Nicole Smith, could be why I temporarily lost faith in the gentler sex, but not humanity as a whole. The city surely was a source of depression, but I've been here for quite a while. Surely it can't just be hitting me now. None of these things could be to blame. The boredom and women, though new, were not significant enough for me. Tracing time-steps back and using the theory that a pebble in a lake causes a ripple across the whole body of water, I decided that all shifts could be traced back to a single event: the abduction of my large, square trashcan.

I became indignant. This is another recent side effect of my life. I threw trash at the trashcan and missed most of the time. I would pick up the trash after I got the trashcan, to be fair to the maintenance guys. But eventually I broke and never picked any of it up. The maintenance guys came later and later, and I'd never see their frustration in picking up after me. One day they came early and I asked what had happened to the old trashcan. Turns out they put it in a bathroom downstairs, where they saw a higher volume of trash. I was insulted. My good friend was now in a strange bathroom for men. I also understood the reasoning of the maintenance men. It doesn't mean I had to like it though. They still had to pick up trash off the floor, just in my office instead of in the bathroom.

When you get to this part of the story there is usually some sort of resolution and wrap-up. How did I manage to turn things around and make them all better? How has my life improved since I got my old trashcan back? Have I met a special lady who has one personality? Have things started to go my way? Is the future so bright, I gotta wear shades? Unfortunately, we're just at the start of this turning-back-point. During my lunch break today I drove over to Kmart and purchased a square trashcan. It's too late to report it as a work expense on my taxes, but it's good to have a square back in the corner. By this point in time, if you don't know, it's hip to be square. And by God, I'm back to hip, baby.¹

I have never been one to treat a maintenance man like a lesser employee than I am. In fact, these gentlemen know something as much as I do, just in a different area. I could fix a computer problem, but these guys could fix a heating problem (when they feel inspired of course). I recently learned that they have much more power than flipping switches or splicing wires. These men have the ability to change your fate, your mood, and your overall quality of life with something that may seem so small as a new trashcan. Certainly it's much more, and you'll never find out how much more until you bow down to their feet and worship them. I have only one God and I pray that he pulls me through these hard times into better days.

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1} Kudos to those of you who have noticed my two Huey Lewis & the News references in one paragraph.