At the end of every month, as any frustrated bookseller will attest, a small pile of pristinely perforated and printed envelopes materialises on the staff-room table, before being silently (and often sullenly) acquired by their intended recipients. As you'll have guessed, these three-sided, sterile and impenetrable slips (utilising a patented "no peeking" anti-transparency grade of computer paper)are pay-cheques, and their functional, automated and perfunctory form are a poetic reminder that with every day we, the non-salaried paperback conduits, move closer and closer towards becoming the automaton dream so embraced by middle-management.
But what do we really know about the pay-cheque? Well, on the 28th of every month it allows me to buy a quart of whiskey, usually rye, or a coarse rum with which to make imperfect Hemingway's. On the 14th of every month, it likewise enables me to make the exact same purchase, thereby reifying my pavlovian association of two parts wild turkey to one part ginger ale - one part pineapple juice with a non-sobrietal yet salumbrious satisfaction of a "job well-endured". But what else of these folded fancies, these enumerating epistles, thess gilded giros? where, for example, do they come from? And, what is more, by whom are they sent?
The answer, unlike "AMAZING SIGHTS LEAPING AT YOU IN 3-DIMENSIONS" is that They Came From Human Resources, and not, as that tagline would have suggested, Outer Space. Not, of course, that "Human Resources" is any less frightening or technologically primitive than that particular Hollywood B-movie from the early fifties. -it is- and what is more, at least in "Sand Rock, Arizona" you could see those extra-terrestrial faces or marvel at that meteor-come-spaceship; all I see are these envelopes, impersonal pre-dated envelopes.I'm not even sure if "human resources" refers to who they are (or might be) or the manner in which they operate; are they resourceful humans, or pre-fossilised fuel to run the levianthanic bookselling agenda? Maybe they came up with three-for-two's -no, they can't be that intuitive, can they?
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Who knows, maybe next time, it won't be about work.
next: "The Whosis Blog"
