Corporate Life is My Personal Hell

October 25, 2005 by David Blackman

This summer I worked for IBM, a.k.a. Big Blue. They're proud that their nickname reflects the things the company stands for -- Stodginess! The 1950s! Corporatism! It was awful.

My welcome packet from IBM said, "It's a lighter shade of blue." Which was true, provided the original blue was so dark as to be black. IBM boasted that they no longer have a dress code. Which is also true. The most restrictive part of the dress code was "No ripped jeans." But you got the sense that everyone would really appreciate it if you at least wore a collared shirt.

I compared my working environment to being trapped on an airplane for nine hours every day. My boss corrected me -- "Airplanes have windows." There was never enough air circulating in the office, and come 2 p.m., I would become completely delirious -- my depth perception would start to go and I'd lose any ability to focus for more than five minutes.

We worked in four-person full-height cubes. So that we didn't feel like we were trapped in small boxes, the ceilings in the room were incredibly high. This led to the interesting effect wherein sound from other cubes would bounce off the ceilings and then settle in our cube for a while in an effort to slowly drive us insane.

If you are ever presented with the choice, pick half-height cubes over full-height cubes. Half-height cubes guarantee you will never ever be able to concentrate because you can see and hear every bit of activity on the entire floor. However, in all likelihood, you will have view of a window. It won't be your window, but that doesn't matter. Not seeing the outside world is a shockingly dehumanizing experience.

I watched "Office Space" with a friend this summer and for the first time understood why it was funny. I also finally understood why my mother can't read Dilbert -- it hits too close to home.

My days were taken up by meetings, which are amazing things if you don't want to get any work done. It's well understood that any time you have fewer than 30 minutes between meetings, or between a meeting and a meal, no work will get done. Bosses respect this fact. You can't bill for your lunch hour, but you can bill for the 20 minutes you spend debating where to go.

During these meetings, corporate drones would show up to tell us about "core values." The core values of every company are the same: Turn a profit and don't get sued. I never understood why they felt it was so important to tell us this on a daily basis.

Of course these meetings involved copious amounts of PowerPoint slides (called a deck in corporatespeak). Because PowerPoint is so important in corporateland, we interns had to spend our entire summer iterating a four-minute PowerPoint pitch of our project.

I discovered there are only two ways to use PowerPoint, both of which are completely ineffective. The first approach is to have your slides spell out all your talking points, which means that your audience reads the points before you can explain them and then stops listening until the next slide transition. Presenters don't know their own talking points, so they need to stop for each slide transition and read the slide along with the audience, guaranteeing that they will never speak engagingly for more than 60 seconds at a stretch. Trying to fix this results in the second method, in which the slides have absolutely nothing to do with what's being said. The words give way to animations and pictures that make perfect sense to the presenter but do nothing but confuse the audience, which consequently ignores the presenter entirely.

I couldn't imagine doing this for the rest of my life -- trapped in a windowless cube, working for a company with more self-loathing than a Jewish Nazi and more makeovers than J-Lo. I wanted to do work that other people would think was cool, and working deep within the bowels of IBM Research was not going to make me happy.

Every time the internship coordinator asked me what I wanted to do after college, I told him, "Move to Spain and sell coffee." By the end of the summer I couldn't tell if I was joking or not.This led to my resolution not to take a corporate job right out of school. It clearly won't make me happy and I know that if I take a near-six-figure job next year, I'll never want to take a 50 percent pay cut. I'll start acquiring things, Grown-up Things -- couches and cutlery and books that will make it very hard to up and quit. It's hard to see myself moving to Kansas just to see what its like when I've got an apartment of stuff I like very much in Mountain View. These are the years when it's OK to be irresponsible in the ways I never was as an Ivy-bound youth. I grew up too fast anyway -- my parents used to describe me as "13 going on 30." I'm trying my hardest to regress. Either I screw up now or never again.

Then what the hell was I doing in a polo shirt and slacks at the career fair two weeks ago? And why was I inexplicably drawn to giving my resume to companies I knew I didn't want to work for -- Microsoft, Google, Nvidia? Search me. I think it has to do with leftover neuroses from the college application process. All my friends are taking (or at least pursuing) these early-decision job offers -- and if I was accepted early to Stanford, I ought to be able to get in early at Google. They'll hire anyone!

Since I was early decision here, I never got the satisfaction of getting a Harvard acceptance letter and turning it down. I'm trying to make up for lost time.

So what am I going to do instead? Stay tuned for next week, when I review in great detail my possible plans for the future and let my readers vote on it.

David Blackman hopes that the Commencement ticket debacle will lead to many situations as endearing as the last episode of "The Cosby Show," in which Theo is only allocated two tickets but needs to find 10 for the extended Cosby clan. He can be reached at blackmad@stanford.edu.

David Blackman hopes that the Commencement ticket debacle will lead to many situations as endearing as the last episode of "The Cosby Show," in which Theo is only allocated two tickets but needs to find 10 for the extended Cosby clan. He can be reached at blackmad@stanford.edu.