Pointless Incessant Barking

Today is my division’s annual summer barbecue. For a cynical intern, the company picnic poses a real dilemma: the realization that there will be no one in the office during lunch clashes with primal lust for free food. (And lo, my virtue is being tested by the cases of barbecue-bound Diet Coke in our office, ripe for the stealing.) My current plan is to go, snag food, and slink back into the office to read uninterrupted. But the real danger is that in the process of food-snaggage, I will run into someone with whom I will then be forced to make actual conversation, completely destroying the sanctity of my lunch break. Despite my ambivalence about going at all, I signed up for a veggie burger, fruitlessly hoping that in some small way I was destroying their carefully designed system: “I’m not even going to eat my thirty-cent Gardenburger! Take that, fuckers!” O, the depths to which I have sunk.

Although yesterday was actually fairly busy, today has returned to usual. So far, I have had and completed one (1) task. My job was to deliver a package to another building in our complex, which, through extraordinary skill, I managed to stretch out into an hour. I easily could have accomplished the same feat in half that time—interns have access to little electric golf carts so as to deliver things quickly, but as far as I’m concerned, time is not of the essence. I hoofed it, thereby killing an eighth of the day. If that isn’t commitment, I really don’t know what is.

I take no enjoyment in time-wasting stunts of that nature, but with so little actual work and an entire day to kill, I have to find ways to avoid gouging my eyes out with a plastic spork stolen from the break room. On an average day, I’ll probably have about three actual tasks (“action items,” for Bureaucratese speakers). These take, on average, half an hour each. Like Peter in Office Space, “on a typical day, I probably do about an hour and a half of actual work.” Yet there is little joy in shirking duties when there are no duties to shirk.

The total futility of my working existence was confirmed when my fellow intern and I recently realized that our (admittedly generous) pay doesn’t even come out of our office’s budget, so productivity is not an issue. It’s both comforting and depressing now that I realize that it honestly makes no difference to my supervisors whether I do a good job, a bad job, or no job at all.

Fuck it. I’m taking the Diet Coke.