Work It Out

Having a job is awesome. That pretty much goes without saying, especially since a big part of having a job is being able to afford things like food and shelter.

In fact, the general consensus is that anyone ever is lucky to have any kind of job. Ever. This is true from a morally relativistic standpoint, because having a shitty job is still better than having a sucking chest wound or worrying about where you're going to sleep and eat every day.

But I'm not here to talk about how losing an arm is pretty good because some people out there have lost both arms. That's too much pressure.

Instead I'll touch on some of what makes jobs awesome. Bear in mind that when I say "job" I mean "office job". If you find the right office job, it can be like you're going to several of your favorite places all at once every day, for 40+ hours a week.

Starbucks

Starbucks is a pretty good place if you like really dark coffee and/or blended drinks with coffee in them. And lattes. My biggest problem with Starbucks is that all of their things cost money -- and some of them cost several money. What if it was all free, and terrible quality? If you have a job, you get to live out your free, low-quality Starbucks fantasies. Get a job and you can drink anemic coffee all day long. There's will be no end to the coffee you drink. You want the pink sweetener? You got the pink sweetener. You want non-dairy creamer? You got non-dairy creamer. All you can eat. And after one cup turns into three and three cups turn into three in the morning and three in the afternoon, the splitting headaches will prevent from ever looking back at a time where you turned your nose up at shitty coffee.

A job is a coffee buffet, but like the kind of buffet where you're chained to it forever.

Kinko's

Kinko's (FedEx Kinko's, if you're a pedantic ass) is another awesome place to be. If you want to hob nob with harried small business owners in sweatpants and community college students, there's no better place to do it. If your printer breaks and you'd rather put $20.00 towards four color front/back fliers than a new printer cartridge, Kinko's is the place to do it. But therein lies part of the problem; printing stuff there isn't free. You get lured in by their bright lighting and their 24 hours but when it's all said and done, you just spent a lot of money.

Enter The Job. What if you could spend all day surrounded by computers and printers -- and you could print for free? As much as you want! Never go without concert tickets or confirmation statements of online orders again. Print two of each, just in case!

If you could spend the business hours of every day in a Kinko's that had been rented out for a printing party, that's a little bit of what a job is like. Speaking of parties...

A Mutual Friend's Boring Party

Parties are fun, but when you know everyone there well and you're all drunk and all having a good time they can be too much fun. You may want the party to keep going, especially when there isn't a string of halted conversations and bored looks during which you can excuse yourself. A boring party can still have fun moments, like when you discreetly joke about how boring it is, but that can only get you so far before you want to leave.

That's work! Work is a boring party you want to leave all day. Every two hours, someone says or does something interesting, everyone has a chuckle and then goes back to writing and responding to e-mails. It definitely isn't a fun party, because by the end of the day you're ready to go. Also, no one is drunk and no one is actually having a good time. As with a bad party, the best you can hope for is "inoffensive" and "plenty of snacks".

Also you spend the whole time dicking around with your phone playing games and reading blogs.

Work is a boring party with okay snacks where nothing terrible happens, but nothing good happens either.

Synergize!

You may be thinking that spending all day in a Kinko's, Starbucks, or at a mutual friend's boring party only sounds OK. But you're missing the power of synergy, wherein the sum of all of these parts is greater than the whole.

Work takes all of these elements and runs them through a synergizing device (it looks a lot like a parking garage) and out of the other side comes something slightly less underwhelming than any of these things individually.

Three cheers for work!