Dig or Die

Work wasn’t life; it was the slow, methodical process of dying in fluorescent light. Every day, I, William Harding, chief data analyst for a mid-tier software developer, would encase myself in the concrete tomb of our office building and offer up eight, ten, twelve hours of my soul to the voracious, humming god of the spreadsheet. My job was to translate the vibrant, chaotic mess of human interaction into sterile data points, which would then be used to increase profits by a decimal percentage I would never see. The walls were a shade of yellow that promised cheerfulness but delivered only a low-grade, persistent nausea. The air tasted of stale coffee, recycled oxygen, and quiet desperation.

I was a good employee. A company man. I translated apathy into diligence. My boss, Jim, a man whose body seemed to be in a constant, losing battle with his own belt, saw this diligence not as a symptom of encroaching oblivion, but as a commendable work ethic.

The breaking point wasn't a grand explosion. It was the last, insignificant straw on a camel already crushed by a mountain of them. It was a Tuesday. A meeting about synergy. The word was used seventeen times in the first ten minutes. It ceased to have meaning. It was just a sound, a corporate mantra hummed to ward off the terrifying silence of pointlessness.

Someone was droning on about optimizing workflow. My gaze drifted to the conference room window, to the slice of indifferent blue sky visible between two other concrete tombs. A bird flew past. It was free. It didn’t have to sit here and listen to a man in a sweat-stained shirt talk about leveraging proactive paradigms.

Something in my mind, a rusted, ancient gear, gave a final, agonized groan and then snapped.

I stood up. The PowerPoint slide froze mid-transition. Jim’s drone cut out. A dozen pairs of eyes, all varying shades of tired, fixed on me.

I didn’t have the grand, eloquent speech I’d rehearsed a million times in my head during my commute. There were no pronouncements on the vacuity of modern corporate life. There was only a raw, primal scream clawing its way up from the hollowed-out pit of my stomach.

Without a word, I lifted my company-issued laptop over my head and slammed it down on the polished mahogany of the conference table. The screen spiderwebbed. The sound was a beautiful, satisfying crack. Then I walked out.

I moved through the sea of cubicles, a ghost suddenly made solid. The people I’d shared stale air with for seven years stared, their faces a mixture of shock and, I thought, a flicker of envy. The walk culminated in my own cubicle. My computer monitor, the glowing cyclops that had devoured a third of my life, was next. I lifted it, the muscles in my back screaming in protest from years of atrophy. The slam against the cubicle wall was a thunderclap of liberation.

Then, Jim’s office. I kicked the door open. He was there, a tuna sandwich pinched between his fat fingers, its mayonnaise-laced innards spilling onto his tie in his bewilderment.

“What the hell are you doing, Will?” he sputtered.

All the clever, incisive words, all the arias of my discontent, they all vaporized. I was left with the pure, uncut rage of a child. I stomped my foot.

“Fuck you, Jim!” I screamed, the sound raw and alien in my own ears. “I fucking hate this! I hate you. I hate these yellow walls! I hate the stale smell. I hate my goddamn job!”

“Get out!”

“Oh, I’ll get out!” I jabbed a finger at him, a trembling lance of pure enmity. “I’ll get out and you’ll never see me again, you dick-headed, shit-hole-faced bastard!”

I slammed the door behind me. The walk to the exit was a blur. The cool air of the parking lot hit my face like a baptism. I leaned against my car, a hand-me-down sedan from my father, and the nausea finally won. I vomited between my feet, the acidic bile a physical manifestation of the poison I had just purged from my soul.

I was free. I was triumphant. And as I looked at the half-digested remnants of my lunch on the asphalt, a new, terrifying feeling began to creep in, cold and sharp as a shard of glass.

I was worthless. Jobless. A nobody. I had no title, no identity.

The exhilaration of the escape was already souring into the abject terror of the wilderness.