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The Bliss of Spam

  • Fiction
  • Nov 25 2019
  • Dalia Maini
    is a writer, editor and urban mermaid.

Melting in tears at work

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It’s Monday dudes and the bathroom of our working place is always occupied.

I hope my colleagues are still flushing out the toxins of some crazy weekend chemic party, but knowing them they are crying.

So Monday is the out-of-order-day for the bathroom which turns in the Chapel of Tears.

 

I can understand the reasons why someone would cry on Monday, there are many, and few of them are much related to the punishment of going to work. 

And even worse is when:

the cause of your tears is your job;

nobody wants to see you cry;

nobody gives you a chance to explain your inner pains;

there is no more toilet paper.

 

Well it’s Monday for everybody, it’s a shit commonly shared.

 

But the real problem subsists when they cry every day, and the stream of their tears overflows under the bathroom door.  

It’s very difficult to work at that point, so sometimes we make paper boats with love messages, hoping they anonymously reach them through the teary river. 

We would love to tell them they can cry in front of us. We would love to tell them that, since we spend three quarters of our life in this white cube, would be lovely to tighten the strings of solidarity and support each other’s feeling. 

Also we would love to tell them we would never judge them weak or unprofessional, because to work should be the joy of engaging with a passion not a smashing soul industry of survival. 

As long as nobody cries inside the fucking office, the discomfort of our living condition will never see the light, will stay as latent symptom, will never become an explicit problem to address and resolve. 

We want to make visible the problem. 

Because when on Friday evening at 7pm, an investor burst in the studio, bombing us with questions, we think it’s pretty natural the arise in our throat of a big fat: Can you please shut the fuck up and let me go to live my life?

It happens, and we see the cry in the eyes of our heartfelt, professional and broken colleagues ready to flow. 

What if they would start to cry in front of the latecomer talkative investor?

I guess him/her would be very scared from this spontaneous eruption of discontent. Maybe he/her would run away terrified. 

 

So problem SOLVED.

 

Tears can be the weapon against what an investor symbolically means, the overcome of humanity, toward the frontier of productivity. Tears can be our transgressive way to organize, open a space of conflict into the pressure cooker that is our working life.

 

Melting in tears at the office:

acknowledgment of a systemic disease;

as coalition;

as moment of shared background;

negotiation of a new system inside the cube; 

democracy in process of re-humanization of time.

 

The exercise for this week is: 

cry in front of a colleague and see her/his reaction.

open the door of the bathroom, when you think they are crying. 

 

Luckily in the spam we have a toilet just for us, we don’t need to line much to deliver our poop. And we can start the space for suffering and joyful changing in the open space of life.

 

If you want join us, and bring your tissues, 

we always need them in the spam. 

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