they pay me a salary but i don't do any work.

i'm a security guard at an internationally prominent arts institution. the bosses expect moi to stand around, stay alert, make happy faces, and answer all questions visitors choose to pepper me with. i do none of this.

instead, i read all day. when i'm not reading, i'm avoiding and hiding from visitors. and when i'm not able to hide, i growl - at the visitors. i give them a taliban stare and the nice visitors shy away. when i do answer a question, i keep the response lifeless and monosyllabic or gestural or i combine multiple words into a single garbled neologism, like any good brooklyn mobster can do.

i try to ignore all that is going on around me, although i can't do that completely, and end up dividing my attention between the book and professional responsibilities (i.e. staying alert).

sometimes i can't read because i'm too exposed, too out in the public eye. reading, ya see, is against the rules. it amounts to a (sort of) serious infraction and multiple offenses can result in dismissal. i don't fear that too much because of the precautions i take. but i do hate not being productive. yes, somewhere under the scowl there is a conscious. i hate feeling stuck, going nowhere, doing and being nothing, feeling like a pathological failure. but, hey, at least i'm earning a salary while doing virtually nothing.

so what's your story ?

quote:

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Originally posted by syzygy:
they pay me a salary but i don't do any work.

i'm a security guard at an internationally prominent arts institution. the bosses expect moi to stand around, stay alert, make happy faces, and answer all questions visitors choose to pepper me with. i do none of this.

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So, that's what happened to The Scream and the Madonna!!!

oh, mr. philosopher, you're such a visitor.

they used a gun in that case. there is no derring-do when facing a gun in a public place. you're unarmed and not wearing a bullet-proof vest. they're innocents about. its only a painting. not worth your life or the lives others, etc. etc.

which points to another reason why i feel justified for being a slacker: they don't search or scan visitors who enter the place. they require bag inspections but any person without a bag walks in unbothered. in winter, a person can hide a kalishnikov under their black raincoat and not fear any questions as they walk in the front door grinning.

quote:

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Originally posted by syzygy:
oh, mr. philosopher, you're such a visitor. .

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I'm not sure how to take that...

Of course, I was kidding, but I'm pretty sure you knew that.

I wouldn't expect anyone (even an armed police officer) to take a bullet for property that wasn't their own. It's just stuff. It can be replaced.

I certainly can't criticize your slacking. Everyone slacks, to some degree, at work. Wandering the 'net, catching up on their talk radio, taking too many smoke breaks. It's part and parcel to working. My friend, who was a security guard for a college residence hall, used to sleep in the guard house, on the job. I don't think I could do that and not feel guilty...not because I broke an employment "contract" but because if something DID happen, I'd feel awful having let it. But your situation seems very different...

I'm def. an employed slacker. I work one day a week at an antique store that my neighbor owns. I fill in for him while he is out of town at a market.

Anywho, all I do is make sure no one steals anything while browsing the store. I'm supposed to greet and offer help when a customer walks in. But i don't do that, I'm usually sitting on my ass talking online or writing here on Meta. Lol!! Sure, i'll keep an eye out so that no one steals..i'd get my ass kicked if that happened...but, i'm not much for talking to strangers...especially the ones that come into the store. These people are WEIRD!

The funny thing is, I bring my own computer and music and comp. games with me, cause if i didn't, i'd go crazy from bordem..I almost did, the first day i worked there...after that, i make sure i don't leave the house without my laptop..I don't think the owner cares, really...

As of now, this is the only real job that i have..and it sucks cause its one day a week..i do a bunch of odd jobs for my sister and a friend throughout the week, but otherwise...i'm on vacation from school right now, so i sleep all day and go online the rest of the time...lol, i'm sad aren't I!?!

Employed slacker? Hell,yeah. I'm doin' this from work right now. All my posts are from work, and if you look down the bottom, you'll see thats a shipload of slacking.

Abbie Hoffmann says by far the most lucritive method of theft is on the job. When I work for a thankless corporation, I steal and give away as much as I possibly can while doing the minimum amount of work. But I'm not lazy. I keep the place clean and orderly and I serve customers well but the rest of the time is me time.

I think everyone here is at least a little bit of a slacker. I just figure I'll work hard when its busy and slack off the rest of the time - I'm an eternal crammer...

Office Space is one of the ultimate slacker films and it makes many good points. When you work for some bigass monopoly on the bottom rung, if you work really hard and sell a couple extra candy bars or a t-shirt, you gain no benefit whatsoever except to give Shell a few more pennies to poison the earth with. I don't understand the ethic behind people who actually try at those jobs.

quote:

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Originally posted by Filmore Holmes:
Office Space is one of the ultimate slacker films and it makes many good points. When you work for some bigass monopoly on the bottom rung, if you work really hard and sell a couple extra candy bars or a t-shirt, you gain no benefit whatsoever except to give Shell a few more pennies to poison the earth with. I don't understand the ethic behind people who actually try at those jobs.

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I am hesitant to reply to any of your posts, for fear that I might have miss-understood you, but ....here goes.
This topic has become deadly seriuos now, so I feel I should point out that some people have famalies and mouths to feed and don't have the luxury of being able to make concientious stands. They feel that thier position is tenuous at best, and they can't afford to make any mistakes, or appear in any way non-productive. I could be wrong about this, so don't hate me.

I know quite a few people who share Filmore's "screw the big corporation" attitude, and I certainly have some sympathy for it, but I tend not to lump all corporations together. If I were to decide to screw over a large company by "slacking," it would be based on the specific things it did and not based on the fact that it was a large company. I've worked for big companies that treated me well and small companies that treated me poorly.

As for not understanding why people try, I can only say that I have the Protestant work ethic ingrained in me that makes me try. For me, working hard is a way to make the day go by faster.

That being said, though, that's why I'm an academic. No "big brother" looking over my shoulder (until it comes time for tenure!), total freedom to do what I want, WHEN i want. But EVERYONE can find stuff to complain about at their job...I work for a top ten undergrad university. They charge the students over $40000 a year for tuition and board. And yet I STILL have to pay almost $400 for on-campus parking. This is made even worse by the fact that there isn't any affordable housing (for purchase) on the University's free shuttle line.

"Thats it Homer, stick it to the man."

I just think that in someways the onnus has been put on the "victim" here.

None of it really matters anyway. The capitalist system is fatally flawed. Many people are going to die soon because 99% of us are completely dependant of corporations to feed and clothe us. No one knows how to take care of themselves any more. I am going to find a plot of land and try to become as self-sufficient as possible before that happens. Anybody else who has spent the last 30 years wasting their lives giving their best for all those soulless corporations will die horribly as the people in charge dump them at the first sign of trouble. I'm not saying all corporations are the same but given enough time, they all are. They couldn't give a rats ass about any of us or the planet. But they won't be the ones to really suffer. The ones who will are the people who've worked extra hard for Shell and AolTimeWarnerDisney, whatever the hell it is now, and their worthless TV addict families will. I'm not going out like that. If you work for a corporation and don't steal and slack as much as possible, you are just another gear in a corrupt machine. I might be wrong about when capitalism will fall, as all civilizations do whether you want to admit it or not, but I sure as hell am not going to give my all to line the pockets of the rich and I try damn hard to see as little of the money I have going back those creeps.

quote:

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Originally posted by Filmore Holmes:
None of it really matters anyway. The capitalist system is fatally flawed. Many people are going to die soon because 99% of us are completely dependant of corporations to feed and clothe us. No one knows how to take care of themselves any more. I am going to find a plot of land and try to become as self-sufficient as possible before that happens. Anybody else who has spent the last 30 years wasting their lives giving their best for all those soulless corporations will die horribly as the people in charge dump them at the first sign of trouble. I'm not saying all corporations are the same but given enough time, they all are. They couldn't give a rats ass about any of us or the planet. But they won't be the ones to really suffer. The ones who will are the people who've worked extra hard for Shell and AolTimeWarnerDisney, whatever the hell it is now, and their worthless TV addict families will. I'm not going out like that. If you work for a corporation and don't steal and slack as much as possible, you are just another gear in a corrupt machine. I might be wrong about when capitalism will fall, as all civilizations do whether you want to admit it or not, but I sure as hell am not going to give my all to line the pockets of the rich and I try damn hard to see as little of the money I have going back those creeps.

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I see what we've got here. Our very own bina-fide anarchist. I've allways wanted to meet one of them. Why, your just an angry young man. I wanted to be the angry young man around here but I guess you got me covered. I only fit two of the criteria.

Filmore,sweaty, mellow out, and stop wishing death from above reign down on everybody. It'll happen soon enough.

quote:

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Originally posted by burning man:
I see what we've got here. Our very own bina-fide anarchist. I've allways wanted to meet one of them. Why, your just an angry young man. I wanted to be the angry young man around here but I guess you got me covered. I only fit two of the criteria.

Filmore,sweaty, mellow out, and stop wishing death from above reign down on everybody. It'll happen soon enough.

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If only I could understand most of this. I don't wish death to rain down on everyone, that's you reading into my words again, I just said it's gonna happen and that having a family is no excuse to become an ignorant corporate hack. When did I say I "wishing death from above reign down on everybody"? Just because I say whales are going extinct doesn't mean I wish it so. Millions of people are going to die. That's sad. I am, however, going to feel a lot less sorry for conformist corporate suck-ups who have wasted their lives chasing the 4 cornerstones of capitalist life (work, breed, buy, and die...there can be more to existance than that) than intelligent, free-thinking people. We'll all be killed by the same blade but at least some of us have put more into this world than just ways to get as much money from people as possible. C'est la vie.

I've left this alone until now because I thought I had possessed syzygy to start the topic. Actually, I'm an employed slacker who never slacks, but there's only so much you can try to cram down uncaring teenagers before either you or they explode. Learning is a two-way street. I teach at the opposite end of pE's spectrum; the kids I teach have spent most of their young lives ditching school, running with gangs, making babies through ignorance and teenageocity, and generally thinking that they have no hope of ever being part of any mainstream America. I mean, the majority of them are more concerned with whether somebody thinks their skin color or language skills are such that someone might consider them the dirtiest word there is...white.

I LOVE all my students, but besides trying to teach them the basics which they missed out on ten years ago, I have to teach them that what's inside is more important than what's outside, and that they should have more pride in doing a good job by themselves than what some idiot they don't even know thinks of them.

I take pride in the fact that some of them agree with me.

In addition to which you go out of your way to maintain and demonstrate good humor, kindness, and decency here every day?

You're one in a million, mark. Thanks. I mean that. Thanks.

Now Playing: South Park on Comedy Central...though I'm feeling like I oughta be doing something a bit more constructive all of a sudden...

quote:

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Originally posted by Filmore Holmes:
None of it really matters anyway. The capitalist system is fatally flawed.

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I'm curious, Filmore...what's your preferred social/economic/political option?

Given some of the things you've said about your view of humanity, on the whole, you seem to be a Pessimist Realist.

You seem to be too caring and concerned about the welfare of others to be a true Anarchist.

I could see you leaning toward Communitarian/Communalist/Communist/Socialist, but I can't be sure.

Don't get me wrong...I'm no pro-market capitalist. I've just never been swayed by the arguments, both theoretical and social scientific, for Realism, Anarchism, or Communitarianism. But I'm open to them, if you've got one.

quote:

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Originally posted by Filmore Holmes:

quote:

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Originally posted by burning man:
I see what we've got here. Our very own bina-fide anarchist. I've allways wanted to meet one of them. Why, your just an angry young man. I wanted to be the angry young man around here but I guess you got me covered. I only fit two of the criteria.

Filmore,sweaty, mellow out, and stop wishing death from above reign down on everybody. It'll happen soon enough.

---

If only I could understand most of this. I don't wish death to rain down on everyone, that's you reading into my words again, I just said it's gonna happen and that having a family is no excuse to become an ignorant corporate hack. When did I say I "wishing death from above reign down on everybody"? Just because I say whales are going extinct doesn't mean I wish it so. Millions of people are going to die. That's sad. I am, however, going to feel a lot less sorry for conformist corporate suck-ups who have wasted their lives chasing the 4 cornerstones of capitalist life (work, breed, buy, and die...there can be more to existance than that) than intelligent, free-thinking people. We'll all be killed by the same blade but at least some of us have put more into this world than just ways to get as much money from people as possible. C'est la vie.

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No, Filmore, I'm not making accusations, just observations. It seems strange to me that you can be so narcy on the one hand and so concerned on the other.

Man walks down the sreet and says
Why am I soft in the middle?
Why am I soft in the middle when the rest of my life is so hard?

Don't wanna end up a cartoon in a catoon graveyard.

God is talking to you, but you A-merry-cans are so busy yelling at each other, that you can't hear Him.

Sit the fuck down, and shut the fuck up.

LISTEN!