I recently went to a work meeting where senior management spent 4 hours telling everyone that what we were doing was great, we were the best zone in the company, and that in general, market share was up in pretty much all worldwide markets. Which is all well and good, but it doesn’t change that fact that despite all of this, management has decided to quit stocking the break rooms with things like disposable forks, plates, and coffee. They say it’s too expensive, which in senior management terms means “you’re not worth utensils and we would prefer that you eat your food off the floor like a dog.”

See, I understand a smaller company really feeling the effects of providing these kinds of things for their employees. But I don’t work for a smaller company. I work for a multi-billion dollar corporation that loves to release homepage headlines about how it’s a great place to work and the CEO was voted This Best Something Or Other. My company one of the Top 10 Largest Companies In the World. It grows and buys other companies like crazy. Which I guess makes sense, because you don’t get that much money by treating your employees like human beings.

Also I didn’t get a job I interviewed for. It was the same job I interviewed for back in January, the one where the hiring manager told me that I couldn’t have done any better in my interview, and that if it weren’t for someone with a finance degree who applied, I would have been their choice. So when another version of the same position opened up, I applied and I got an interview. This interview was not as good as their first one. It felt like they were asking twisted versions of the same questions, and changing those questions when I was already halfway through my answer. It felt unfocused, and I knew I was sunk when the manager asked if I’d developed any accounting experience since the last time we’d spoken.

“No,” I replied, “but it’s only been a couple of months.”

“Oh, I’d say it’s been 8 or 10 months, at least.”

So, red flag. I understand that some people are busy, but a grossly distorted sense of time is not usually a good sign. I didn’t correct her, though, just like I didn’t point out that several of my friends already work in that department, and that none of them had any official accounting experience, and while we’re on that topic, the official accounting experience she suggested – taking an entry level course – was not going to help me in any position, because since when has anything you learned in a community college 101 course been at all applicable to your real professional life?

This manager is leaving the company, I should point out, and again, I don’t ever say who I work for, give anyone’s names, etc. Anyone who would like to remind me about the dangers of talking about work on the Internet can keep all that stuff in mind and suck my dick, because you try going to work at a job you despise so much that you’ve developed heartburn and a pinched nerve because of it, and when you do, then you can tell me how to talk.

If I could credit my job for anything (besides a salary and health insurance, but really, neither of those are so great), it would be that my misery there pushes me to excel at the things I do outside of work. Writing, for example. I have one definite show and another possible/hopeful/ohmanitwouldbesofuckingcool show lined up so far this month, as well as three upcoming album reviews by artists I’m really excited about. Going to shows on weeknights makes me tired and I can understand the compulsion some writers indulge to phone it in, but really, sitting down and making sense of my notes, coming up with words, fleshing out these amoebic concepts drifting through my head, taking a purely relative and usually personal experience and making it not only definite but as universal as I can, that’s fucking awesome. I mean that literally. I am awed by some of the shit I come up with. Not because all of it’s that good – I happen to think that most of my stuff is good and if it wasn’t then I wouldn’t submit it for publishing, but I do admit that some of it sounds lazy or confused and that’s just the way I am sometimes – but because it blows my mind that someone lets me say these things and asks people I don’t even know to read them. That’s nuts. That’s why I keep trying to write well instead of churning out tired old cliché out of every tired old issue of post-1996 Rolling Stone. At the top of every document I create are the following:

COMPLETE THOUGHTS

and

BE FUCKING RELEVANT

Because to me, that’s writing I want to see. I’m sick of writers (ahem, mostly on Thought Catalog) publishing these half-assed barely-there thoughts that makes a reader think everything ends in a question mark even when it doesn’t. I’m sick of people still trying to blog/Tweet/Tumbl in order to attract the attention of the famous person they’ve been trying to sleep with for the past five years. I’m sick of self-congratulatory hipster douchebag dreck that derides people for not recognizing Terry Richardsons’s brilliance and outright bullies them for saying anything bad about Zooey Deschanel. I’m sick of stuff like this, an article I shared with someone because it has a great title and I cannot get enough of the thought that Lana Del Rey is dating Axl Rose, but one that is less fitting for the lit mag that published it (although the author is the editor, so whatever) and more so for a personal blog, which happens to feature an awful lot of girls who wear tights. My god, you assholes, who even cares? I’m certainly not saving the world with what I think about albums I listen to while sitting at my dining room table in a pair of sweat yoga fat pants, but jesus christ. Get it together, and stop standing pigeon-toed in every picture.

In the interest of complete thoughts and being relevant, I’m going to go deal with the treadmill while watching Airborne or Shaun of the Dead. I can’t decide which one is more relevant at this juncture, but Internet, feel free to correct me.