Hi friends,
This is a fragment from one of my stories that I think epitomizes what white-collar work means to me...
At his desk, Russell checked his over-night jobs, responded to e-mails that piled up from the previous night and this morning, and returned to the problem he had been presented with yesterday. He’d been just too tired to deal with it, then - exhausted as if someone had syringed all the gray matter out of his cranium.
Now he was rested and ready to deal with it, even though it frightened him somewhat and excited at the same time. Russell felt the fright because he knew he would have to dig deep to brace himself for this mental effort. At the same time, he craved the experience - he knew, should he concentrate hard enough and give himself completely to it - the award would be oblivion.
Russell loved these moments of oblivion. The subject matter consumed him so much that he would lose awareness of who he was: an alive organism somewhere in the space-time continuum, an informational unit tracked by his social security number, bank account number, credit card number, employee number, FICO score, amount of money in his the bank account, amount on his paycheck, number of his dependents…. But, mostly, it afforded an escape from the realization that, despite all his efforts, his life didn’t amount to anything special and he couldn’t rise above being just a statistic, even in his own eyes.