{"id":15010,"date":"2014-07-17T11:28:15","date_gmt":"2014-07-17T18:28:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=15010"},"modified":"2014-07-17T13:48:58","modified_gmt":"2014-07-17T20:48:58","slug":"death-by-cubicle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=15010","title":{"rendered":"Death by Cubicle"},"content":{"rendered":"

I always feel bad when I don’t finish a book, especially when it’s kind of an assignment, as in the book club selection I gave up on last week. Book club selections are by majority rule;\u00a0sometimes I’m in the minority and the book\u00a0is one I wouldn’t have read on my own. Other members don’t seem to have a problem not reading books they’re not interested in (we haven’t had a meeting yet where every single one of us finished that month’s\u00a0selection),\u00a0but when it’s me I feel I’m letting\u00a0the team down.<\/p>\n

I’m good for July’s meeting. We decided\u00a0to read a hard-boiled detective novel, so we picked Dennis Lehane’s Darkness, Take My Hand<\/em>. I didn’t think it was all that hard-boiled, but I did read it and am ready to talk about it this Saturday. It’s the August book I gave up on, Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace<\/em>, by Nikil Saval. Saval really gets into his\u00a0subject:\u00a0the evolution of office work from\u00a0the days of Bartleby the Scrivener\u00a0to today; how poorly paid clerks became well paid white collar workers; how the introduction of women into the office changed business and\u00a0society.\u00a0He writes about it in a witty, breezy way,\u00a0and you could very well read it as a companion piece to a marathon Mad Men<\/em> rerun watching session. It’s a good book … and I think if Saval had written about almost any other subject I would have enjoyed it cover to cover.<\/p>\n

\"cubicles\"<\/p>\n

But office work? Sorry, can’t. If the only two labels I had to choose from were blue collar and white collar, I’d have to say my working life was primarily\u00a0white collar, but what I actually had was a\u00a0profession. For most of my working life — two and a half decades\u00a0— I was a military officer and fighter pilot, a profession that requires extensive and specialized education, a profession that demands expert application of mental and physical skills. It’s somehow both blue and white collar, and neither label is really satisfactory.<\/p>\n

After I retired from the Air Force I went to work as a contract instructor,\u00a0training fighter and reconnaissance pilots at bases in the US and overseas. Yeah, more white collar than anything else, but during those eight\u00a0years I was basically\u00a0a free agent. I built my lesson plans at home, occasionally dropped by\u00a0the home office in Memphis to coordinate with my bosses and the other instructors, but mostly traveled\u00a0and taught. Then I wound up managing\u00a0a team of\u00a0educational developers and graphic artists, responsible for producing lesson plans and study\u00a0materials for A-10 pilot training at Davis-Monthan AFB. I was finally stuck in\u00a0an\u00a0office — where I\u00a0quickly grew to hate the white collar life. By the time I quit\u00a0that job, four years later, I never wanted to see the inside of an office again. I went to work as a school bus driver, then as a handicapped van driver for the VA hospital in Tuscon, blue collar all the way. And though the driving jobs paid only a fraction of what I’d earned before, I enjoyed the work. I knew I was doing something of value, something fundamentally more important than anything I did in the four years I worked in that office. When I finally retired for good, I think it’s telling that I decided to volunteer as an air museum docent, a job that keeps me on my feet, leading walking tours and talking to museum visitors, almost the very opposite of an office routine.<\/p>\n

When I started reading Saval’s book, everything bad about my\u00a0four years in a cubicle\u00a0came rushing back: the politics, the meaningless meetings, the make-work, the politics, the back-biting, the politics … and I just couldn’t read another damn page. I lived it; no amount of humor or good writing will ever make me want to\u00a0revisit\u00a0it.<\/p>\n

If you can do it, kids, train for a profession where you’ll use both your body and your brain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I always feel bad when I don’t finish a book, especially when it’s kind of an assignment, as in the book club selection I gave up on last week. Book club selections are by majority rule;\u00a0sometimes I’m in the minority and the book\u00a0is one I wouldn’t have read on my own. Other members don’t seem […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[412,2,30],"tags":[1605,1603,1606,1604],"class_list":["post-15010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-reviews","category-personal","category-reviews","tag-blue-collar","tag-office-work","tag-professions","tag-white-collar"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15010"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15010\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15015,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15010\/revisions\/15015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}