Work makes me feel like a machine. I shuffle through a set of pre-determined reactions, in no way different from the patterns of qualities and phenomena which constitute an animatronic, an algorithm or a clock. Everyday I go through the same motions, on the same floor, with the same noises.
It's incredible.
A storm took out the lights in the other room. I felt absence chill the whole store. My mind racked for precedent and only one came to mind: I was in Hell. Dante's inferno sprung up before me and the spirit of my discontent wove its way into the knives and slicers. Machines then whirred back to life. All was fine.
Tomorrow, me and my fellow wage slaves will manufacture the Store #344 spectacle replete with smiles, thrills and spills.
I apologized to the tare paper and heard a sigh of approval from the oven while it cooled. A certain madness is produced by turning someone into a machine. Both in the party responsible and in the person who becomes a profit producer. I hate it. I really do. We have a dollared caste system here, it is remarkable what one can call normal and very telling what is called natural. All of your bosses will look you in the eye and tell you that you will be paid less than you are worth, this is called "The Way Things Have Always Been".
Everyone connected to this process should be compensated in accordance with their need. Everyday on the factory floor, I am exposed to a microdose of the ills of contemporary society. I ask myself: what is the purpose of a grocery store? My musings are answered by boxes stacked to the ceiling of food people won't eat, thousands wasted on meat that will be thrown away and an air of immiseration so thick it chokes me with tears. Release me from your demons, cruel world. This will be a slow death. I'll rage.
I flit between days now. I am always headed back to that deli. My footsteps trudge towards that kitchen. All those sensations flooding me once more. I am not good at that job. I should be better. I got written up today. 4 or so strikes and you're out. How bizarre. The three tiered wage system structures pay based on seniority and hours. It is arbitrary on the basis that what is good for one, logically, should be standard for all of us. The sum total of all of our work makes the store's daily function possible. Nobody who works for a living here should be worried about the cost of life. Though they stoke ire in me sometimes, it shouldn't be that people starve on account of the fiction known as price! At the store, some benefits are given to a small strata of workers while the rest deal with uncertainty gnawing away at the corner of our eye. I say this not to continue this division but to highlight a line, not by our own design, that workers are forced to toe. We all want each other to have the good life therefore we should be afforded very concrete benefits as a result of our labor. Those gains are achieved only by consciously choosing to shake the monotony off together. To recognize the individual's part as one involved with the whole. It is in that fight with one another against our shared bondage that our chains begins to loosen.
