YOUR OFFICE TIME
by TONY LEONARDO

Last week: You worked at a magazine, which was subsidiary of another magazine and owned by a small media duchy. It was recently sold for capital, bought to complete the business end of another media empire now larderered with freelancers, like yourself, in the marketing division.

$65/hour PowerPoint. You had a fast, fast ride. You used them and they used you and neither one cared. You fantasized everytime you saw the old cover; blown-up and gracing the west wall, burnished in cheap plastic, framed in black aluminum, that read "Free Agent Nation!" in big, red-white-and-blue type. Rule, you thought. An aristocracy of freelancers will someday rule the world, the whole damn world. Temporarily, of course.
   

 
Queen For A Day
*FLASH* Monkeys Work Too

This week: You are working at a private bank which merged with a public bank to form a financial investing behemoth, a giant fiduciary banking institution hell-bent on market capitalizations and manager-managing for fundrunning fortune-investors. But no, it ain't you. You ain't no military's son.

You work making bankrolls for the agency, and someday, you think to yourself, the head of a major bank like this one will be employed from an agency like yours. An agency with a different specialization, one that supplies interchangeable craniums to the Board. This agency only sends out stocky, well-cropped heads, each one responding crisply with readymade orders, to its name, which is Jurgen.

In secret, they will clone a few Jurgen heads and raise them to executive-manage a new order. You've never met anyone quite like them before. Oh, they've got green eyes. Oh, they've got blue eyes. Oh, they've got greyyyy eyes. I'm sorry, that was unnecessary you think to yourself, still humming that tune.

 

   

 
Standing Tall
Spun Out
 

Next week: You will be working: sanding the rough edges of a pamphlet, mitering a hanging widow and bringing the lathe to work an unjustified text box into a beautifully-shaped two-column table leg at some big office in the sky, maybe the sky down over Water street. You will dress casually, business casually, and wear the same pair of shoes for two weeks straight. You will type notation and control-shift-spacebar, control-V and command-1 until somehow your nineteen inches of screen view makes proportional sense, fitting snugly in your window of reality. And then you will take that little window of reality, print eight copies, and give them to your direct report who is paying your agency all this money to have self-fulfilling prophecies delivered ipso pronto.

Later in the day you will buy a coffee, fax in your timesheet, take your vitamins and confirm with a Jurgen your agreement to speak at the multi-country talks on bilateral renegotiations - the ones you weren't invited to two years ago.


• • •

Issue: March 5 - March 11, 2001

Insatiable
BY SARI COLT

Doyle
BY CHRISTOPHER CURRY

Psychoanalytic Analysis
RIVATIVE IN ANXIETY


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