they take your friends away, its THE EXPERIMENT.

A few of my loyal readers who prefer to TALK about the blog rather than to leave comments (leave comments! leave comments!) told me it is high time I stop alluding to THE EXPERIMENT and damn well explain it. These people are actually IN the experiment, and I still have to explain it to them when they complain about the dining room mixing lettuce leaves and baby leaves. Baby leaves are a disgusting bunch of stalks with a limited amount of leafery that are placed into a salad to "jazz it up". Well, people, I say no! And, Yeuch!. No. More. Jazzing. The person who invented the trend of mixing baby leaves in with salad should be taken out and shot right now. But they let me smile wistfully at my work buddies and say "All part of THE EXPERIMENT".

Anyone working in a huge corporation will know THE EXPERIMENT. Most people ignore it because the corporation pays them and gives them nice benefits such as bringing in a cake sale every Thursday afternoon. And the people, they need job security. And cakes. Its just easier to ignore what's going on behind the scenes. In return for your blood and sweat, the corporation purports to run as a huge multi-national business. But it's all fake I tell you! The bosses are actors. Their bosses are men with white coats. And they play out THE EXPERIMENT on the people they employ. People like you. And me of course. It's very The Matrix.

And that is why anything that happens to you in there, anything straight out of Dilbert, anything Kafkaesque, anything that will challenge your comfort zone...that's the men in the white coats testing you. They're looking for how you react. They're looking for who can take it, and who can't.

You work in a cube. THE EXPERIMENT.
You share that cube. THE EXPERIMENT.
Camera pans out...you're working in a huge cube farm. THE EXPERIMENT.
Floor upon floor of cube farms. THE EXPERIMENT.
Baby leaves in your salad. THE EXPERIMENT.
Boss calls you in for spending 4 times the average of your peers on the phone, average being 5 shekels. THE EXPERIMENT.
You can't use your employee card to get food out of the vending machines today? THE EXPERIMENT.
Word wrecks your DTP? THE EXPERIMENT.
Cilantro in an innocent-looking salad? THE EXPERIMENT AGAIN.
Boss tells you to work through the weekend? IT'S ALL PART OF THE EXPERIMENT!

Me, I am one of the masses of employees who needs the job security to look after my family. And I have to admit, the cakes are nice. But every day, every day without fail, I find little facets of the experiment. Things that I cannot ignore. Things that tell me its all a big sham. Things like if you press the button of the 'smart' lift 17 times, you can get it to change which lift it'll send you. Why 17 times? THE EXPERIMENT.

Today THE EXPERIMENT took one of the main things that kept me going: the cute guy on the fourth floor.

Damn, I'm going to miss him. But I won't let the experiment get the better of me.

I'm not sure what the prize is, but it probably involves ice cream and a gold watch.