This is your American Government

Andrew Bird told me a couple of times that "life is too long to be a whale in a cubicle." Well I have a response for you, you violin plucking mother. "Yes. Thank you for telling me that. That surely would be a tragedy if it occurred." Seriously, although I had never wanted to spend my life as a blubbery sea mammal in a cubicle, life was threatening to turn me into just that if I did not motivate myself to change it. I wanted to take a few minutes to paint a Jackson Pollock of what my job is/was like so that you realize how easy it was for me to want to change it.

I was going to show you a picture of the amazing view I get from my 8 ft. x8 ft. cube, but the Man tells me I can't take pictures in here. The scuffed up mail room door is top secret. I can't even really tell you where I work. Sounds cool, right? Wrong. Working in the government is the equivalent of watching a gigantic snail crawl across a massive log...while it's raining cat piss. It's cool for the first few seconds, but after a year and 8 months, a bullet starts to look pretty tasty.

It doesn't help that I read an article about the level of job satisfaction being at an all time low. Nonetheless, I wanted to run through a few key points about my (soon to be former) job that excite/depress me.

First, the metro ride. I ride the metro. I'll admit it. The DC metro is like smoking. It's expensive, it's bad for your health, and it is rarely on schedule. That last point is not really like smoking at all, but I bet your little emo brain can come up with some way in which they correlate. The best part about the metro ride is this: getting out of the station.

A typical sunny summer day in Rosslyn:

After arriving and receiving a message from my boss asking me to do something I already did a few months ago, I get my coffee. I like my coffee black, so I can taste the flavor. Well, there ain't much flavor in the coffee around my area. Actually, I take that back. There is plenty of flavor in the coffee. I'd say it tastes remarkably like slow moving river water about 10 yards from a dog feces processing plant.

I usually ask my self several times a day, "What if God smoked cannabis?" and, between my boss and her favorite designer, I am answered within seconds. I won't go into detail, but my branch has a higher turnover rate than the baggers at my local grocery store. I have been there the longest (by several months, including my boss) and I've only been there for a year and 8 months. That is an infant blinking in government terms. I have colleagues in other branches who have been there for easily 700 years. Easily.

I'm not even going to go into the trillions of subtleties that made me initially reconsider my career. I can say that when I am done with this place, I will miss a few things. I will miss the tender touch of my contractors' hands. I will miss the people who are loud and belch in the cubicles around me. I will miss the naivety (or cunning, I haven't figured it out) of some of my co-workers. I will miss the booze that is to be had at every party (and every ludicrous reason to have a party). I will miss Satan's kitchen being right across the street. But most of all, I will miss the friends I have made and the copious amounts of free time I had earned through the deceptive cover of "updating spreadsheets."

The new found freedoms I will earn in 9 working days, 1 hour and 59 minutes will most likely make me forget all about my job, the degree I earned leading up to it, or even the mundane high school years that were so important to my development as the adult I have blossomed into (half-blossomed, half-stolen by Golden Eye and Legend of Zelda). I plan on ending up like the jabbering man who sits outside the Starbucks and jumps out at people after he lathers up in Vaseline. No joke I saw that guy listening to a Fisher Price baby monitor like it was a boom box and dancing like he belonged in 1987.