What the fuck is "workflow"???

The fact that I was born missing the soft chunk of gray matter essential for allowing me even the most rudimentary understanding of corporate politics is something that I've always been proud of. Even after jumping ON the corporate bandwagon, which I was too mired in the muddle and existential panic of the mid-20s to properly think through, I always approached meetings and seminars and those infernal obligatory-by-implication, let's-everybody-get-wasted-and-sexually-harrass-each-other office social outings with a dismissive wrist-flick and the conviction that my ignorance simply illustrated the purity of my soul or some such dude-man bullshit.

Now thoroughly ensconced in the early-thirties rite de passage of receiving a daily skull-thwack from the crowbar of reality, however, I am growing ever more alarmed at my overwhelming ineptitude. My plaintive battle cry of "I will never understand you people!" has gotten less haughty and more panicked with each passing year, and I've come to realize that I most likely will never understand it, and not because I can't be bothered with spiritual mundanity of it all. I will never understand it in the same way that I will never understand nuclear physics or organic chemistry, and that might even be all right because lots of people don't understand those things, but that's why said people leave the nuclear physicsing and organic chemistrying to those with the capacity to deal with it. Right? One doesn't flunk basic chemistry in high school and then think, "Hey! This could be a career path!" Right? Of course not! Usually.

It's not that I simply disagree with corporate philosophy but, like so many of my colleagues, recognize that 99% of people in this world do what they gotta do and that's life, baby. My lack of understanding goes so, so far beyond that. I mean, that is what I aspire to. That's the physics. I can't even clearly define what it is about the corporate environment that I so strenuously disagree with, apart from the fact that it sucks the soul right out of my body and vomits it 40 hours per week closer to death. But doesn't it do that to everybody?

It's all very well and good to heroically suffer the indignities like a line-toeing martyr until you realize that you've been doing the same job for five years and people far stupider than you are making a lot more money and hey! Let me try that! and you come out of a meeting with Production Department upper management feeling like you've been listening to Ronnie Wood recite Japanese poetry though a voice modulator and all you can wonder is who, in fact, is the real member of the idiot masses.