Rare Meat on a Sideboard

Posted on June 4, 2005 in Disappointment Silicon Valley

They say that one sure sign that a person is wasted in her or his job is that she or he multi-tasks. I did that when I worked for a living. I would have several projects going and be making regular trips out into the factory just to see what was being squirted out of the presses. My manager, I think, liked to see me wasted. He never liked the energy that wanted releasing for the turning of a new idea or the polishing of a fine concept. There was never much in the way of change in that place: the computers dated back to the Jurassic and we had dinosaurs blowing their hot breath into the injection molding machines. OK, that last sentence was fanciful, but the mentality of the Piltdown Man — a fraud of doing business that insisted on never improving, never taking risks, building one kludge upon another — dominated company thinking.

It drove me mad. I do not doubt that sometimes my mania rose under those circumstances. In fact, I used that job as a means of keeping myself from having wild visions. Nothing quite works like being surrounded by spiritless men and women. I did not write and I did not dream. For two years, I took courses in photography, but ultimately, in the end, I put myself on a platter of humiliation and watched my blood pool.

Go out into America today and you will find others like me. Now and then a piece of rare meat rises from the sideboard and says “End this for me. I am tired of being nothing more than lunch.”