Notices by john paul grips (grips@cawfee.club), page 3

there’s a blogpost I keep thinking about on a regular basis and in my opinion, everybody near a corporation absolutely needs to read it

http://www.zivotvkorporaci.com/index.php?id=2013-04-14-korporizace

it’s in Czech, so here’s a machine translation which I didn’t read (sorry for any mistakes)

I’m hungover as a pig today, so don’t expect any big jokes.

When you’re done with the big day and you get hired by the corporation, you and your friends go out drinking. Try to make the party worth it, it’s the last time you’ll be hanging out with old friends like this and nothing will come between you.

While you’re hanging around like dirt in a bucket, trying to prove you’re worthy of the corporation, you’re gonna lose your shit. One day you cut friends off for a meeting, the next for team building, and the next for a business trip. You stop being counted as a permanent fixture in normal life. The process of adoption into your new family has begun.

Without you noticing it, a high wall begins to grow between you, your family and your friends. You’ll fall out of the daily rhythm, you won’t catch on. Your family will think of you as someone who does something indescribable, and questions like, “How’s work?” …because they don’t understand it anyway, but that’s all they can talk to you about. You’ll start to feel uncomfortable and you’ll deliberately start skipping out.

When you see friends or former classmates from time to time, you’re completely out of it. You feel like a complete stranger. Someone broke up, someone had a baby, someone had a housewarming, everyone helped them move, and you? You weren’t there. When you want to engage in conversation, you find you can’t talk about anything but work. Of course, you won’t admit that you’re at fault. How is it possible that you haven’t yet realized how limited your friends are? You start to feel uncomfortable and deliberately start to skip.

You’re becoming more and more connected to the corporation. You only go to the bar with people from the office and talk about work. You don’t even know who’s from where, and nothing connects you except the corporation. Your relationship with your pre-corporate partner has also long since broken down.

When you work your way up through the corporate ranks and start having some of that power, you’ll have a stigma attached to your forehead. Based on this sign, the people around you will either start to hate you because you are a corporatist who destroys the planet, exploits, or torments puppies in the evenings.

Or they start to see you as an investment. You get a protection coffee at the coffee shop because you’re an investment. In the pub, you’ll be the first shot on the house because you’re an investment. And the girl you go to the bar with your mate like old times will choose to bed you because you’re an investment.

Everyone around you will be insincere. The only friends you have left are the ones from corporate. They’ve had similar experiences and will happily blow their sores with you.

During all of this, you somehow blurrily record your own wedding, which you phone in anyway as you do every weekend. You get two kids, you don’t make it to the birth, and you don’t get to raise them and share in their upbringing. When you do decide to get involved, you’re sent up the arse by a teenage brat, only to get into an argument with your wife. I mean, you’re split. You’re the one with the hard part, making money so you can all buy the nice things. So how could she fuck up something as trivial as raising kids without a father?

You’re fifty-five, the kids have a life. They call once every two months, so you taught them. Wife moved out. You have no one to carry on your legacy and nothing to pass on. You have nothing left but whores and corporations.

But you find that you are no longer good enough for your adopted family. You lack drive, you have no drive, and on top of that, a moron like you joined the corporation ten years ago. He’s after your job, and you can’t resist him anymore. And besides, the recruitment leaflet for the corporation must have the phrase: Work in a young and pleasant team.

Honestly, I know a lot of similarly corporatized guys who’ve given their lives to the corporation. And believe me, it’s not gonna wipe their asses at 80.

If a guy is a workaholic and sacrifices everything else for his company, that’s bad. But if he sacrifices his life for a corporation that he has nothing from except a few memories of company parties, then he’s an arch-asshole.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)