Desk work in an office was the most performative, exhausting thing I’d ever done. I remember starting factory work and having it fucking reshape my body worse than the start of any workout I’d ever tried. Like the physical demand of it was brutal. But there were no weird stigmas about talking to people or not talking to people. I didn’t feel like I had to pretend to work when we weren’t busy. My boss didn’t feel the need to constantly imply that I might lose my job. I never questioned whether what I was doing was useful.
And with factory work, my body eventually caught up. I got in shape and even though I was physically tired at the end of the day, my brain was alright and I could myself to do a load of dishes or spend some time with my kids. Even when I was exhausted, I knew I had a good reason to be. For some reason, sitting in an office chair doing nothing for 8 hours is incredibly taxing. I’ve corroborated that with so many people. It’s bizarre. Office work turned me into a shell of a person. I was in a brain fog for months at a time with only a few hours of reprieve, just enough to remind me what being normal felt like and that I was depressed.
Edit: may be relevant that I’m autistic. Office culture does seem to be designed for someone, just certainly not for me. And honestly whoever it’s designed for can fuck off out of principle
My last job was like this weird combination of both. We were in a food packaging plant with heavy machinery active all the time and no air conditioning (so like 100+ degrees at all times) doing hard manual labor for a total of like 2.5h each 8h shift. My direct supervisors didn’t really give a shit if we were doing anything for the rest of the time, but we still had to either hide or pretend to work for the rest of the time, and we absolutely could not make any mistakes about it whatsoever. like you might literally be sitting around with nothing to do from 10 to 2, but if 2:02 comes around and you’re still not doing anything but across the entire facility some work finally opened up at 1:59 well you’re gonna have a fuckin meeting where they shout and threaten to fire you and accuse you of being lazy and shit
have they considered actually doing their jobs as supervisors and letting us know when work opens up? no. of course not. we’ve just gotta know.
absolutely fucked
edit: just to spell it out as well (because its so ridiculous) they literally just expected us to be walking circles around the facility with a broom in hand for hours on end. that way we’d know when finally there was something to do. :agony-shivering:
