Co-op Insanity
Written July 3, 2004

I am insane. This is probably a result of sitting in a largely abandoned office on the morning after Canada Day, watching the phones that never ring and waiting for company visitors that never come. Nobody wants to split a long weekend by working on the Friday, but here I am, the co-op student, holding down the fort in solitude. I am damn good at Solitaire: black ten goes on the red jack, jigga.

In spurts of motivation I design marketing materials: pens, brochures, logos. I write technical documentation, which is as boring as it sounds. I make a sign for the refrigerator stating that employees who bring their own drinks to work rather than purchasing from the company pool are aiding and abetting in the slaughter of innocent kittens. I interview myself.

Normal Chris: Well, well. Look who’s become an industrious member of society. Now what the hell is with that stupid blue collared shirt?

Proletariat Working Chris: It’s –

NC: It’s stupid, you bastard! Remember that I’m asking the questions around here. Now what motivated you to take a tech job? Didn’t you watch Office Space?

PWC: Well, yeah. I liked the part where they stomped on the printer and there was badass rap music. But that’s not what office jobs are really like – not really.

NC: Whatever. If you can’t destroy computers then I don’t even see the point. Did the school make you do this? That evil bureaucracy…I knew we should’ve gone to McMaster!

PWC: Actually we should’ve gone to Sheridan . Then I might have actually gained some useful job skills instead of constantly hearing about hegemony. It’s a good thing that we were a big nerd and self-learned all this technical stuff back in the day, huh?

NC: Speak for yourself buddy, I got laid like a champ. So what you’re basically saying is that a Communications and English degree at Wilfrid Laurier is effectively useless in the job market?

PWC: Pretty much. But does that really surprise you? Everyone jokes about Arts degrees getting you a sweet job at McDonalds after you graduate, but it’s pretty much true. If you don’t back that BA up with some kind of actual skill, you’re basically just a freakishly intelligent source of menial labour. You can tell your migrant co-workers about Sartre while you stack boxes in a warehouse.

NC: Okay, okay. That office job is starting to look a little better I guess. It still doesn’t seem very punk rock of us to be sitting in front of a monitor all day, though.

PWC: Fuck punk rock.

I stop interviewing myself because having multiple personalities is starting to scare me, especially when one of them sounds like a Conservative. They’re right though – if I hadn’t spent my younger years experimenting with web design and my filthy pirated version of Photoshop , I wouldn’t be here among the ranks of Canadian intelligensia. While Wilfrid Laurier has provided me with co-op, which in turn landed me the job, the school has provided me with zero tangible skills.

I love my education (for the most part), but I love it with the understanding that the only visible reward at the end of the journey will be a piece of paper. This piece of paper will put me at eye-level with thousands of other university graduates, an elite group which chatters and complains quite eloquently as college grads sail on by to take all the jobs. Hey, it’s only fair – they know how to do stuff that we can only discuss in abstract terms.

But maybe we don’t really want their jobs. Maybe we’ve been inundated with enough disillusionment in culture and society that nothing seems satisfactory anymore. Maybe we’re stuck, empowered with knowledge but crippled by a lack of experience. It would certainly explain the mass exodus of graduating Arts students to faraway lands to teach English. I will one day join them, but for right now I’m sitting in an office, pretending to be a Business student. I am insane.

I didn't really have this conversation vs. myself. Well maybe I did, while I was doing the actual writing. It's all very metaphysical. And I got to say FUCK PUNK ROCK. Isn't that badass?