Some educated Americans develop a real estate portfolio by their early 40s. I developed a sneer.

My recent day-job adventures with Zoom have shown me my face in workplace mode. I now realize the drawbacks of not being a selfie kind of guy: I had no idea that my face frequently slides into a sneer when I am “resting” my workplace face and when I am talking to co-workers. I have easily spent over a decade mistakenly thinking that I was inscrutable. These expressions on my face are horrible and they should not be imposed on other people under any circumstances.

There is a certain feeling that comes over me when I need to explain myself in a workplace situation. And, like my father, I tend to lecture at length. Because I am quite confident in my memory of personal feelings, I assert that this sneering shit must have started around 2011. Two trains were running around this time:

I was suffering from family-law attacks on my character from the mother of youngest son in the form of a mercenary, black-lady child psychologist.
I was working at 20^th Century Fox Filmed Entertainment, attempting to negotiate work-from-home days.

This was a typical peak moment in the typical Black man’s life. You see, kids, the Black man must learn to live with false accusations—and we are often murdered by them. I am not going to bother with the family-law false accusations as these are classic. My attempt to turn remote work from a “privilege” to the obvious is more interesting.

In 2011, I was left with the impression that my coworkers—most of whom are not software developers—mistake working from home with being hostile with them (which, by the way, actually makes me hostile toward them). The environments of my workplaces have all been unsuitable for me. I hate commuting to get to them and I hate trying to find food around them. Too many of my co-workers mistake my suffering with immaturity (and/or pretension) and imply that I should just get along with them—with a smile on my face. And, yes, the racist subconscious is very much at work here, starting with the suggestion that I should be grateful to work in your workplace—and any suggestion that what the workplace has to offer is always inferior to my needs implies that I am “crazy.”

I am extremely confident that a survey of the offices listed on my resume will be found extremely unsuitable for almost everyone but the most desperate visa holder, faking it to make it as a software developer. The architecture of the “open office” alone is a dead giveaway. As a mental health exercise, here are some sneer-inducing designs:

being seated in a conference room with CRT monitors crowding on the table, bumping the elbows of the guy sitting next to me, trying to type on our clacking keyboards
being seated in a cubicle next to people who talk loudly for a living
being seated in a cubicle in the center of large floor, surrounded by window-seat offices, reserved for “management”
being seated in a basement, freezing in a room that is so quiet I can hear the guy breathing next me for hours because he is sitting too damn close to me
being seated on a broken chair in an overcrowded room with high carbon-monoxide levels and pet dogs parading through my legs
being seated in a room right next to outdoor workers operating a jackhammer for hours
being seated in a room (in a brand new building with state-of-the-art ergonomic furniture) with a racist talking loudly about what came on Fox News last night
being seated anywhere with months of sleep deprivation because commute times are totally insane

In 2020, it has taken several hundred thousand pandemic deaths for the “thought leaders” of my co-workers to finally recognize that remote work is actually productively possible and it should be at least normalized as optional. And I am left with a debilitating sneer.

I can continue to trick myself into thinking that this sneer is my only physical manifestation of corporate damage. I can easily assume that my physical injuries have all been internal:

the grinding of my molars in my sleep led to dental work
the stress-related flexing of eye muscles led to worsening eyesight
stuff related to the intestines and kidneys that I don’t need to go into here

The most obvious external damage (along with the sneer) is my speech. You will not be able to find anyone in the world who has heard me recite poetry or sing and heard the sound of my voice in the workplace. (This, by the way, betrays how much society is segregated and stratified.) My speech impediment predates my appearance in the American workplace but it was made much worse.

Sure, I can pay bills. But I cannot talk (most of the time), I cannot see and I have lost control of my face. Fuck you corporate America. I played the young man’s game of thinking he can get away with playing around with a toxic thing to escape as pure as when contamination started. I have lost this game. I never wanted to play in this league. I never wanted to be near the Roman stadia.

rasx()