Working For A Living

I walked through the office and nodded at a few people I recognised. The taste of sleep still rested in the cleft of my gums, where the face meets the skull, and the coffee wasn't washing it away. I finally got to a door and went into my office, a lone desk by the window with a computer and chair. A large metal cabinet painted in red was against one of the walls. After turning on my computer I then begin the actual work of pretending.

For a few hours I sit and stare at the screen, doing completely nothing. Sometimes falling in and out of sleep, I could hear the office sounds around me. Telephones, shoes on cheap carpet, the hum of fluorescent lights, the occasional sneeze or cough, the barking of laughter. Now and then people pass my office door although nobody ever comes in. Once it reaches twelve I go for lunch, walking through the office corridors reading printed out spreadsheets, tiny on A4 paper. I stand in the kitchen and make brief conversation with others who happen to be there, before doing a lap of the buildings exterior. Eight hundred feet high, a mirror of the sky. I eat a packet of crisps behind some trees before heading back in. I pause at the end of the corridor. My office door was open. I walked towards it, checking my lapels for grains of salt before entering.
"Hello." I said, walking past two men and sitting back at my desk.
"Hiya. I hope you don't think me rude for asking, but who are you?" said the older of the two. I introduce myself.
"I don't think we've met. Who's your manager?"
"I wouldn't say I have a direct line manager per se." I say, wiggling the mouse to get rid of the screensaver.
"Percy?"
"Per se. As in, as is. I think anyway. You haven't heard that?"
"What is it you do here?"
"Most of my time is taken up by a side project. Excuse me, but I don't think you introduced yourself. Who's your manager?" I say, turning back towards them.
"I'm the head of HR. And I haven't heard from you. So I'm asking you again, who are you?"
"I said who I am. Who's this?" I say, nodding at a young lad in a tight suit.
"I'm Adam, the new social media manager. I'm confused, I thought this was my office?" he said to the head of HR.
"It is. Do you mind stepping out a moment?" he said. Adam leaves. The head of HR and I stare, fantasising about both being killed by and killing each other.
"I don't remember hiring you."
"I started about four months ago. Colin showed me around."
"Colin left four months ago."
"I wondered why I hadn't seen him."
"So what is it you've been doing?"
"I was given some photocopying to do." I say, nodding at a pile of neatly stacked papers.
"Then what? Why didn't you ask someone what to do?"
"No. Why would I?"
"Because you work here! You turn up here on your agreed hours and do whatever is required of you. What's your actual job title?"
"Assistant." I said.
"Come with me please." said the head of HR. I paused, weighing up the situation. Imagining potential endings to various strings of action, some ridiculous, others mundane. I got up and followed the head of HR towards the door before waiting for him to leave and then shutting it behind him. Lunging across the office I grab the edge of my desk and throw it back into the door, putting a large dint in the wood panelling. The head of HR and Adam both begin to rattle the handle of the door before there are murmurs.
"Open the door please." comes a muffled voice. Quickly I open the door of the cabinet and make some adjustments to its contents before closing and locking it. I swallow the key and walk towards the window. It had been painted shut, abandoned cobwebs spread like old ice across the sill. Placing both palms on the glass I begin to push, spreading the weight of my body across wide fingers. Sometimes an old window would just pop out. The head of HR meanwhile had managed to push the door open wide enough to reach a bare arm through it, it was quite odd. I took one of my shoes off and was about to hit the window with it when I felt him grip me around the waist, dragging me down towards the floor. The smell of Joop was overpowering as we wrestled on the carpet, pulling at each others clothes and quietly grunting.

Before long Adam and a security guard had arrived. The head of HR had overpowered me and I had my hands bound behind the back of my office chair.
"You captured him!" said Adam with glee.
"I'd like to let everyone know this is wrongful imprisonment and you should let me go immediately." I said.
"You're under citizens arrest for...posing as an employee at a private company."
"I am an employee though. I've just not done anything for months."
"He's right sir, I'm afraid he hasn't broken any laws technically speaking." said the security guard.
"What about vandalism? He broke that door!" shouted the head of HR.
"I was defending myself against false imprisonment and I failed. There's no need to make me feel bad about it as well."
"Let me untie you." said Adam.
"You'll do no such thing until he explains what's in this cabinet." said the head of HR, armpits damp with sweat that must have brushed cold against his underarms as he slapped the aluminium.
"My personal things are in there."
"It's company policy to allow us at any time to search through your belongings under suspicious circumstances."
"Is it?" said Adam.
"I swallowed the key."
"Darren, do we have any bolt cutters?" said the head of HR.
"I think we might." said the security guard called Darren.
"Fetch them up here will you." he said.

The three of us had been listening to each other breathe for ten minutes before Darren reappeared. Darren glided across the ribbed carpet before resting the teeth of the bolt cutters around the padlock. Although I'd been untied I remained sat in the chair and watched as the broken lock fell to the floor.
"Open it." said the head of HR. Darren nodded and swung open both doors. Inside the cabinet was a wall of soil kept in place with a series of planks that resembled the Slavonic cross. On the inside of the cabinet doors I had made many notes in my beautiful handwriting, along with diagrams. There was a true silence as they looked upon the things. Finally;
"What is it?"
"It is a diagram involving the infinity found inside pi, which in itself is found in all circles, both a positive and a negative infinite. The circle itself occurs in nature repeatedly, from a cell to a star. If seen at the right perspective a cell would eclipse a star. And in all of infinite is all of everything. All of the things possibly said, every molecule of DNA ever coded, every image that could be seen. All." I said, pointing at my notes.
"And the soil?" said the head of HR. I walk forward and pull at the central plank, causing an avalanche of blackness to flood the small office space along with a rotting pig.
"It is a grave." I said, picking up the carcass and looking at it, face to face. The skin had turned a bruised yellow and had begun to harden, shrinking tighter to the bone in some areas and bloating out in others. Worms festered in it's ears. I left the room and begin to walk through the corridors, carrying the pig. People were awed at the foul march as I made my way through every single office, the death stench hanging heavy in the air. Parts of the corpse had begun to fall off or leave big patches of rotten slime across my work clothes. An alarm wailed as I made my way out of a fire exit and across the car park. I carefully placed the thing in the back seat of my car and slowly drove away. In the rear mirror the office fades from view, around a corner, behind a tree. The traffic ahead swallows me into it. Summer is almost here.

Advertising 2.0

You turn on the television. An advert is on. You put the television on mute.
You go on the internet. You see a banner advertising a free ipod if you can shoot three ducks. You ignore it.
You are walking around in a city. You see a perfume advert on the side of a bus. You can't remember what it's for.

Welcome to the modern world. Media has never been so prolific in everything we do. Your fridge can download bread, you can watch films on your trainers and stream music that hasn't been performed directly into your pillow. In theory the advertising revenue from these services should be in the billions, perhaps even the trillions. Yet day by day advertising firms are failing, the men and women who write slogans line the walls of job centres across the country thinking of ways to rebrand themselves. The jingle writers have switched to making dub-rave subtunes. Celebrities offered millions in endorsements quickly falter on their contracts, such as Tiger Woods having sexual intercourse or Brad Pitt having a facelift. The adverts are there but nobody is watching. Some say that advertising as we know it will cease to exist ten years from know. Others have slightly different ideas.

Enter Tukanov Imaging, the brain child of Wanda Bellahyde. Her PR company is just a few years old yet is quickly climbing up as being one of the big hitters in advertising.
"One of our bigger problems came from Mad Men. All of a sudden everyone wanted to be an advertising exec. You'd see all these bright-eyed kids come straight from college willing to do work for free. It fucked up the whole system." she says, drinking from a glass of wine. We are sat in her company headquarters, the London skyline beyond the window is blocked by a slightly larger building. Though at just the right angle you can see through the windows across the road at parts of the cityscape. I ask her what made Tukanov Imaging so successful.
"It's all in the advertising babe. Any five year old can install adblock on his dad's pc, half the people nowadays would rather look at youtube for a funny video than watch a lager advert. It's awful. Well, at least for the other dinosaurs. At Tukanov Imaging we're rebranding branding. We're looking into the future, y'know?" she says, leaning forward slightly. I ask her what that even means.
"Advertising 2.0. Though now I'm saying it out loud I'm wondering why the .0, it's not like there's going to be advertising 2.1 or 2.6 is there? Whatever babe, the point is...well it's people, right? You walk past a restaurant, you see a lot of people inside you think 'Oh, that's a good restaurant.', but it might not be, right? You don't know if the food's good or if the service is nice, you're only going because other people are there. People like conforming. So I'm thinking, what's the biggest window in the world?" she asks me. I think for a minute then say there's probably one in a cathedral somewhere. She shakes her head.
"No. Windows. Y'know, Bill Gates? Those are the biggest windows! And sitting at all those windows are people just like you and me, talking to each other on social media. So what we're offering to users is an interactive advertising opportunity. We pay people to say things for us." she says, leaning back and stretching her arms far apart. I nod in understandment.
"Why spend fifteen million on an advert with Clooney when I can pay one of your friends a dollar to say 'Oh I like this thingy-majig' or 'Hey I just saw the big summer blockbuster it was awesome!'." What she's saying is grounded in hard scientific fact. It has been proven that the number of tweets regarding a film before release is in exact correlation to it's box office success. I ask her if she thinks people would be willing to sell their personalities for such a small price. She laughs loudly.
"You remember that guy in America who had the casino brand tattooed onto his forehead? We organised that. We offered Felix Baumgartner the opportunity to fulfil his lifelong dream of breaking the world sky diving record as long as he would say 'Mmmm, red bull gives me wings.' just before jumping. We brought together Adidas and the United States Army so that every soldier is now required to wear Adidas footwear. Everything is advertising. People are going to be saying it anyway, why shouldn't they get paid for it? And chances are they're going to spend that payment on whatever we're advertising anyway. It's a win-win." she says. I look through the window, then another window and another window, at the London skyline. The sun is setting. I think it a worthy metaphor for something, though I'm not sure for what. I try to speak but for some reason my tongue feels bulbous and disproportioned suddenly. I merely make a sound. She continues anyway.
"We're working on text messaging in the next quarter. After that, who knows, maybe use alternative reality or something. Pay people to say things in real life. Current technology opens up new avenues for potential advertising opportunities as well as new challenges. You speaking my lingo?" I walk over to the window and open it, letting the stale London air enter the room.
"What are you doing?" she remarks incredulously. The wind blows through my hair and at my cheap suit. I turn to her and try to talk again, though all I seem to manage is a strange sort of groaning noise. I run over to her desk and throw her laptop out of the window before running out of the room, clutching at my mouth. I continue groaning as I stand in the lift and walk out through the reception. After walking just a few feet on the pavement I throw back my head and begin to shout.
"I just want to watch a funny advert with a catchphrase that everybody repeats like the one from the compare the market advert or perhaps even the go compare advert. But even those are changing and becoming more ironic, more self aware. Advertising companies know they are just making shit but they think that if they make fun of it it makes it okay! But it is not okay! It is all fucking bullshit and I am sick of it!" I say. By the time I have finished my voice has been reduced to a whisper. I continue walking, thinking about where film posters fit into the advertising landscape. Is a film an advertisement for itself? Are clothes real? Can I rest between the shelves of a supermarket, dreaming of my softs, fearing nothing?

The Insect Eaters

A chart showing rising food prices. Statistics on global warming. Words such as 'overpopulation', 'taste risk' and 'megavalue' flashed by on the powerpoint presentation. Somebody was talking in the background, though I couldn't quite hear him due to the incessant buzzing coming from a hollow glass cube containing wasps. The presentation finishes.

"Any questions?" says Michael Smith, founder of Snacksects. I put up my hand slowly. I am the only person in the audience besides an apiculturist and his daughter, though both have fallen asleep.

"So, what was that presentation about again?" I say, finally taking out my dictaphone.
"Essentially we believe that due to the current food predictions, done by scientists, we will inevitably have to eat insects in order to feed the world. Well, they already eat them around the world anyway. We at Snacksects wish to bring insect eating to the West through a mixture of marketing strategies, rebranding insects as a potential food item and presenting these food items in an aesthetically pleasing way." he said.
"Okay. But if that's the case, why don't people just keep insects at home? It must be easier than gardening." I said, with no real idea how difficult either gardening or insect farming actually is. Michael Smith laughs a hearty laugh, shakes his head then leans against the podium.
"Anybody can farm insects, true. But then they can grow their own vegetables, keep cattle and so on. Why don't they? Because it takes up too much time essentially. Why go to the trouble of buying a greenhouse, maintaining it, buying soil, seeds and so on when you can go to the shop and buy whatever you want? Not only that, we have identified the best way to make consumers desire to eat insects."
"By making them into burgers?" I said, remembering a few pictures from earlier.
"That is one revenue stream, correct. We also have a range of oven chips made from maggots, dry-roasted beetles, chocolate coated ants and so on. Some people don't like to eat cuts of meat as it reminds them too much that it came from an animal. So we have decided that by processing the base product to such an extent that it is unrecognisable, people will eat it." he says. I nod and begin to wonder about the possibility that insects would be widely consumed in the west. Perhaps the horse meat scandal was part of a media conspiracy in order for people to be unsure about beef. It would only take a few youtube videos in order to change public opinion entirely. They had their work cut out after the many reality shows having contestants eating live insects as part of a task, though this is as ridiculous as trying to eat a live pig or a live lamb.

Into the presentation room a plate of highly processed ant cubes are brought out, each covered in a layer of salt and vinegar flavourings, preservatives, wheat extract and sugar. I accept one and put it in my pocket for later, I wondered what would happen if it was dropped off a motorway bridge onto a car windscreen below.