#315
You rise before dawn to make it on time to your government-mandated job. Despite having a medical condition that means you need significantly more sleep than average, compulsory work starts early and it’s still dark out when you catch the commuter bus.
In the hallway to your office, you see that a subordinate has displeased his boss; something about his uniform not being to spec. He’s violently shoved through the wall of a cubicle with a laugh while others hurry past, hoping to escape notice. The victim dusts himself off and scurries away, for that exchange counted as getting off relatively easy. Once, after transferring departments, you’d gotten beaten up by nearly the entire C-suite.
Your day consists of boredom punctuated by intense dread, the only real relief being lunch. On the way there you remember to take the long way around to avoid the accounting department, which is always a likely place to get jumped.
After lunch, as you sit browsing excel sheets, a passing colleague stops by to call you a sand n**. You briefly remember HR’s suggested reply of “I know you are, but what am I?”, but alas, this colleague is not in fact a sand n**, so you sit silent, defeated.
It will be several more years before you’re allowed to resign.
That’s not a dystopian future, it’s just an office-worker version of what many kids go through daily. Adults take for granted how much being a kid can suck, so let’s count the ways:
On the Beating of Children and Other Apparently Fine Things
Via an ad in Recomendo July 17 · Issue #315
