My Office Garden

I sometimes fantisize that the soul-crushingly dank hole I work in is a garden. It's a lovely garden filled with gorgeous, sweet-smelling flowers but also filled with choking, toxic weeds.

In reality it's a corporate nightmare of bland grey carpets and even blander grey cubicle dividers, but that's no fun to talk about, now is it? But a garden is something I can really get behind.

Over there you've got a young rose bush. Sure, she's pretty, and all the bees can't get enough of her sweet perfume, but wasn't it Outkast who said "roses really smell like boo-boo." She's no prize and she knows it. She's rotten underneath the surface, and will lash out at you with her thorns without so much as a moment's notice.

I suppose this guy over here would be crabgrass. You know the type; not exactly virulent to the plants around it, but a mild annoyance. You'd really rather he wasn't there, but since he is you just lightly sigh and shrug whenever he goes by, jackassing it up.

Then over there is the innocent daisy. She's fresh out of college and hasn't yet really sunken deep into the sadistic headgames we call office politics. She's all sunshine and lollipops, and I go back and forth on whether her earnestness is refreshing or grating. Exactly how I feel about daisies, oddly enough.

Then there's me. I'm not sure where I fit into this picture. I don't really have the colorful and sunny disposition to be any kind of flower, but neither am I a malevolent, grasping weed either. At least, I'd like to think not. I suppose maybe I'm the oddball here. I'm the one plant in the garden that doesn't fit in. I'm the basil plant stuck smack into a bed of deceptive flowers and monstrous weeds.

And we're all divided and sub-divided by hedgerows and planter boxes, and winding paths and water features. Yes, cubicle walls and water coolers and hallways, it all fits. The more and more I explore my fantasy, the more it seems to fit.

Like any garden we've also got worms that crawl on their bellys and leave a slime trail, and even a garter snake or two. The snakes can be scary when they show themselves, but they might as well be toothless when it comes down to it: no venom.

I'm sure if my boss could hear all these ideas he would fancy himself the gardener. With his hard work and due diligence things manage to thrive around here. Unfortunately for us, this could not be farther from the truth. No, Stan is more the blundering rabbit or gopher who scrabbles his way in and mucks up the whole damn thing. You're a happy little plant, taking in some sun and pushing out some new shoots and BAM! In comes Stan, digging and nibbling away.

And I suppose in that way, my whole metaphor comes crashing down around my ears, doesn't it? There doesn't seem to be any gardener here. There is no one at the helm of the ship. There is no light on in the attic. Beam me up Scotty there is no intelligent life down here.

The company seems to be so massive, so monolithic that even a mountain of ineptitude can't seem to bring it down. Systems theory will tell you that eventually a system can reach a certain magnitude that it takes on almost a life of it's own. A human society, for example, can begin to churn out results that it's consituent members are largely very unhappy with, but each individual one of them is powerless until the very nature of the system is changed at its roots. This company has, like many systems before it, gained a life of it's own. We are merely organs in the beast, chugging away to keep it lumbering along.

So much for gardens.