Fit, right?

There's this woman at the office where I once worked. She's called Ebony and she's from Newcastle, well, Hebburn. Close enough. Ebony is a pick-me girl, even though she's in her 30s and old enough to know better. What this means is that every interaction of hers I observe sets my face in a grimace I have to work hard to conceal. I don't think I'm any better at this sort of work than I am at my actual job. 

Ebony is the sort of woman who says things to the ignorant but well-intentioned misogynistic boss like, "No more comments about my outfit from you if you're sitting in this meeting, you hear?" in response to his bad appropriation of her (strong) Geordie accent as he greets her with "Whey aye". Or else she makes jokes about him using disparaging comments to conceal the fact that really, he must just find her "fit. Right?"

I'm not sure this is true. Although she definitely seems to think so. Ebony with the dyed ginger hair who's hairdresser told her, "there just doesn't seem to be a colour you don't suit!" Or so she said when I paid her the compliment to see if it would make her stop scowling every time she looked in my direction. If the non-existence of any further interaction between us is anything to go by, I think she saw right through my tactic.

The boss is also from Newcastle. But the other one, near Liverpool. It's even lower down than you think. I know, because I had to look it up to double-check before writing this. And I've gleaned that he's a misogynist through empirical evidence as well. I know this because of the allusions he makes to the sex lives of various female employees, me included. Never those of the men though, I’ve noticed. Himself included. 

For instance, according to him, my "body count" must be high because I'm a communist. It doesn't matter that - if we're being pedantic about it - neither of these things are a) true, or b) any of his business, because he brings them up anyway. Sometimes he even pulls up a chair to sit down and tell me how "billionaires don't care about who's using which bathroom," or how "exploited children in China" made my mobile phone, or, my personal favourite, how "capitalism is natural".

I do have to give credit where credit's due: he is nothing if not consistent. Even today, for example, he made a joke about making a whore moan by slapping her in the face, which really sounds even cruder when you write it down rather than just saying it aloud for laughs in a professional environment. Doesn't it. 

Ebony is also the sort of person who I think thinks everyone wants to "do her," as she puts it, as if sex is something to be done to a person, rather than a mutual activity to enjoy alone, or in company, or however you want as long as it's consensual. This is the office of a digital marketing company I suppose, so it makes sense that it would be seen as a task to undertake, but I didn't think the repressive desublimation would be quite so obvious. It's reassuring to know that my infatuation with Marcuse isn't wasted, and that he is still as relevant, if not more so, to capitalist society today as he was 60 odd years ago. But it's disheartening all the same. Oh look, there I go again, commodifying my interests in terms of their teleological value. Sorry, I hadn't released my one-dimensionality was showing.

I do, however, feel fairly confident about my perception of Ebony's self-perception in terms of her sexual value, though. Even if she doesn't realise it herself, and even if really, we should be lamenting that women (including me) are often still able to both recognise and leverage their sexual value in response to benevolent sexism. This confidence comes mostly because today Ebony announced that Tim, who seems to do almost as little work as me from what I've seen, was showing a photo of a girl he thought she looked like, because, "he wants to do me and just doesn't know how to say it". Which seems a bold statement to make, and an even bolder one to announce to an office of around 50 people. Either way, Tim didn't refute Ebony's comment, so maybe she's on to something. Still, it's a shame that people still find themselves working in sexist offices as if the gender pay gap wasn't enough to worry about.

It is a weird experience, to be so immersed in the mundanity of an office job again, 6 years on from the last one I had and vowed never to go back to, and to be more aware now than I was then of everything that feels so wrong about it. If only because I have more of a vocabulary to explain it now, almost 2 degrees and a lot of debt later, which is the reason why I'm here by the way. Just in case anyone was wondering. 

From the misogyny myself and other women are victim to, to the insensitive jokes about the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and even to people's genuine belief that the the homeless people who line the street outside of our city centre office have had the same opportunities they've had. They've really got all the bases of the isms covered. 

Here, in the corporate world, they use euphemisms for everything. From "deck" for "powerpoint" to "over capacity" for "total burnout", and even "your news" to refer to my recent notice of resignation.  On the desks around me, people engage each other in conversations that have contextual premise, but which all invariably make some use of phrases like "client churn" and "organic traffic generation", as if no one else minds the fact that none of this is real as long as they continue to make money that is valuable only in terms of it's ability to be exchanged.

The other day I was witness to a tense conversation between two employees about the style of font used on a particular deck. I had to stop myself from making a joke that they should just humour themselves with some comic sans and call it a day. Except I've just immortalised the joke here instead, so I guess I didn't try too hard to stop myself after all.

Every weekday, between the hours of 9 and 5, I find myself repeatedly baffled by the things like fonts that anyone who isn't a calligrapher or a typographer seem to cherish. As if making profits out of profits was as important as the equal distribution of food for a population facing drastically disproportionate wealth, or even acknowledging the people who sleep on the street just outside the doors of this building. 

Still, they are the same people on the street who I walk past when I skip out of the doors at 5pm. Rarely having change to offer them, or the time or inclination to stop and buy them something to eat, even when it’s just been pay day, and for once I do probably have the money to spare. So I guess that makes me no better than anyone else who works here, and perhaps, since I seem to be the only one who's noticed it, maybe it makes me even worse.

What's even more unsettling is that the people who run the company really are quite generous, if you ignore their disproportionate harbouring of wealth in terms of their eye-boggling salaries. They do do things like buy us the occasional iced latte on the company card so that we can stop our eyes drooping before 5pm, or bring in ice lollies to cool us down when we're trapped in a hot office away from the sunshine outside. There's also a perks app our jobs give us access to, which means that we can spend our "points" on plots where trees can be grown, sort of like a digital serfdom to the feudalism of corporations incidentally greenwashing themselves in an attempt to make more money from the online awareness of their environmental consciousness.

"It's a weird balance between realism and idealism, isn't it?" the boss asks me on my last day, after he's pulled me aside to ask me my opinion on a recent company decision to let someone go, and to tell me again in the same conversation how he was apparently "raised as a socialist." My authority to make any sort of judgement on this topic having arisen from nothing more than my failure to shake my head in the negative when he had asked me for the first time, about three months ago, "you're not one of them communists, are you?" despite my having actually been raised a socialist.

"It certainly is," I agree, although I'm quite sure it's not in the same way I think he means.

I do know one thing we can agree on though: On my last day, when I answer his question honestly (minus a few details) about why I'm leaving my role and he laughs good naturedly, telling me, "This isn't the place for you, mate," for the first time since I started here, he's absolutely bang on the money.