The Cubicle Sarcophagus

Visions of the Office in Dissident Horror

This is a Carousel guest piece by an anon

Work has many synonyms: drudgery, toil, the grind, the great, big suck. All these words signal the same thing—work is hell. This has been true since getting kicked out of Eden. Work breaks your back and your spirit. It makes you humble. It makes you value little things like your daily bread and the prospect of eight hours of peace in a warm bed. In our contemporary epoch, office work, which was once lauded as the preferable alternative to manual labor, is especially hellish.

The office worker is subjected to daily humiliation rituals of Kafka-esque complexity like attending “optional” birthday parties for Susan in Accounting’s dog or sitting through the same DEI training seminars again and again. The HR harridans who rule over this dystopia, never completely log off and are always ready to file a complaint about the mildest touch of spice. Fifty thousand a year is nice, after all, and it would be sad to part with it. The office worker repeats th…