Who's got the Mondays?

It's hard to believe that the movie Office Space is almost 20 years old. The office tech in the 1999 film dates it, but it's not as different as a 1979 movie would be to a 1999 movie. Forget the Internet; in 1979 almost no one would have a computer. Michael Bolton would not be destroying a printer because there weren't any. Theme restaurants with unhappy waitstaff were just becoming a thing in 1979. In some ways the 20 years between 1999 and 2019 is not as different as between 1979 and 1999, and way less different than between 1959 and 1979.

The reason that Mike Judge's movie endures, though, is the terrific comedy characters brought to life by a great cast. Two of the greatest character actors of their generation, Gary Cole and Stephen Root, are particularly brilliant as passive-aggressive boss Bill Lumbergh and petulant mumbler Milton Waddams respectively, but everyone's good. Even Jennifer Jane Emerson, playing the thankless role of Female Temp, has one of the great comedy lines in movie history:

One thing that hasn't changed since 1999 or 1959: we still hate Mondays.

Efforts to make offices better since Office Space came out can be summed up in one word: Failure. It's not hard to see why. People are allowed to dress like pigs in many offices now -- in 1999 that was reserved for quirky Internet startups -- and on the whole having everyone look like a stoned undergrad does nothing for team unity or a sense of purpose. If people thought cubicles were dehumanizing prairie-dog holes, the despicable and counterproductive open-concept office has made us long for those halcyon days. More recently we have seen the weaponization of Human Resources, which is not likely to lead to a happy place.

A lot of this comes from company higher-ups acting like a teen's parent, trying to be "down" with the kids, and works about as well.

Bottom line: Whether your boss is a soft-spoken jerk like Bill Lumbergh or a loudmouth jerk like Alan Brady or even someone you like and respect, work is work and has to be done. If you're in a bad place, I hope you can find a way to go work in a better place; it is not always easy to find a good job. I've been laid off three times and chased out of bad workplaces and had to take pay cuts and had to piece together a full-time paycheck out of multiple part-time jobs, and sometimes the options are all crappy. May you find the least-crappy ones.

One thing that doesn't change: Mondays will still suck. Shift work and flexible hours don't help. Mondays suck even if they fall on Tuesdays.

But from great suffering comes great art.