{"id":1833,"date":"2012-01-10T23:46:21","date_gmt":"2012-01-11T05:46:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/murileemartin.com\/wordpress\/?p=1833"},"modified":"2012-01-10T23:46:21","modified_gmt":"2012-01-11T05:46:21","slug":"tech-industry-workplace-murilee-martin-style","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/murileemartin.com\/wordpress\/?p=1833","title":{"rendered":"Tech-Industry Workplace, Murilee Martin Style"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"tormentinccover\"
\nI’ve been going through my novel<\/a> to make a “de-pornified,” semi-safe-for-work version for use in the long-postponed Part 20 of the Impala Hell Project series<\/a> (yes, there’s a connection between the Impala Hell Project and Torment, Incorporated<\/em>), and I ran across this paragraph that sums up the way I feel about the American office-cubicle workplace. 
 
\nI was getting into it as well; designing the most unpleasant, soul-crushing work environment would require the hand of a master. I told Charlene to give me a week and I\u2019d have her team slaving in the ideal setting. First order of business was the Annex. I sketched out some plans and rang up some contractors, paying triple-time for fast building. We set the place up in the basement, for that gloomy, oppressive ambience. Since the existing basement was a bit too cheery for our needs, some major remodeling was in order; I obtained several boilers from a shuttered Detroit asbestos factory and had them rigged up to leak steam and heat the place to a miserable, humid 100 degrees. The fluorescent lighting was ripped out and replaced with several 500-watt mercury-vapor floodlights, chosen for their unearthly pinkish-orange light and dismal hum. We rigged up a couple of telephones in a locked office next to the work area and had them set up to ring for hours on end. Scratchy Chinese pop music played on lo-fi PA speakers, punctuated by blaring commands in incomprehensible tongues like Urdu, Basque, and Miwok. The \u201cwork stations\u201d really gave me the satisfied feeling of a job well done: I modeled them on the primate-behavior-testing cubicles used by the army to train chimpanzees to find land mines, down to the banana-pellet dispensers and shock-electrode ankle clamps. Each cubicle had a Soviet-era terminal, complete with 9\u201d monochrome monitor and Cyrillic keyboard; the whole mess served by an ENIAC 500 mechanical-relay computer of late-50s vintage. Each programmer would be hooked up to a catheter for urination; each 18-hour shift would have one \u201cdefecation minute,\u201d during which the employee would be permitted to shit into a hole in the concrete floor, finishing up with a traditional corncob wipe. They\u2019d sleep in tattered Cub Scout folding bunks and awaken to a bugle call for morning calisthenics, as the rats scurried around their feet, snouting hungrily for banana-pellet crumbs.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been going through my novel to make a “de-pornified,” semi-safe-for-work version for use in the long-postponed Part 20 of the Impala Hell Project series (yes, there’s a connection between the Impala Hell Project and Torment, Incorporated), and I ran across this paragraph that sums up the way I feel about the American office-cubicle workplace.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[383],"tags":[417,481,384],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/murileemartin.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1833"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/murileemartin.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/murileemartin.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murileemartin.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murileemartin.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1833"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/murileemartin.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1833\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1839,"href":"https:\/\/murileemartin.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1833\/revisions\/1839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/murileemartin.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murileemartin.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murileemartin.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}