American Fez

What Will I Do Tomorrow?

Having lost my job, I can no longer ruminate upon its limitless absurdities, nor regale readers with the adventures of my many worthless colleagues. I feel rather like a stand-up comedian suddenly bereft of his best material; speechless before an invisible audience yet unable to avoid the gleaming microphone that has become his burden.

Perhaps this is 'all good,' as they say these days. After all, my duties were such antediluvian tasks that I could've been recounting the labors of a papyrus harvester from antiquity. I doubt any modern office staffer knows what an inkjet printer is but those preposterous machines remained the bane of my existence until quite recently: see my previous posts on surviving the terrors of the working day.

My resume, such as it is, might as well be printed on parchment and written in Cyrillic. It begins with my first job, roughly around the time the wheel was invented, and ends today, where I am still entrenched in the Industrial Revolution. A long litany of experience, but, alas, has little relevance to the age of artificial intelligence, wasted intelligence, and no intelligence whatsoever.

The scrapheap beckons. But it is no worse than the ant heap of the busy office building. From the scrapheap it is at least possible I can salvage some neglected skills, however rusted or cobwebbed, with which I can continue to earn my daily crust. The ant heap, on the other hand, offers nothing but the possibility of being trampled underfoot by automatons dressed in business casual while staring at digital tablets and spouting gibberish. Maybe, you know, I can even work from home?

The Docent

I was wandering around the Museum of My Life (MoML) with the audio guide, which you can purchase for a nominal sum along with your museum ticket when you are born. (However, this ticket does not include entrance to the Tour of Ornamental Gardens, unfortunately, which I've always considered a rip-off, to be honest. I mean, c'mon). Anyway, after strolling through the frankly predictable and underwhelming Hall of Awkward Teenage, I came to the Young Adult Exhibit, or Number 16 as it is called on the museum's Audio Guide controls. I pressed the appropriate button and waited for the narration to begin.

But instead of a brief synopsis and scholarly critique of my young adult years, all I heard through the guide's headphones was a burst of maniacal laughter that continued for some time. And that was all. 

Perhaps there was some sort of malfunction with the guide? A digital glitch or something along those lines. Sure, my young adult years weren't exactly Malte Laurids Brigge standard but were definitely worth a short considered analysis, even if the final verdict proved unfavorable. I mean, c'mon.

Disconcerted, I switched the audio guide off and made my way back to the ticket office. I obviously needed some respite from these oppressive galleries of artifacts from various stages of my life. I had hoped to gaze in awe at a personal equivalent of Michelangelo's David but found myself confronted by a series of Giacometti rejects instead.

Perhaps it was not too late to join the Ornamental Garden Tour? I was pretty vague about what the Ornamental Garden of My Life would look like, but even if was just a sad goldfish floating around an overgrown pond at least I would be outside in the fresh air, not stuck in a marble mezzanine between rooms of exhibits I'd rather forget.