this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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There are a lot of people dissatisfied with the quality of the type of work they do. Most people talk openly about how they do just enough work to meet whatever productivity goal they have and avoid doing anything else, and it isn’t because they don’t want to be useful to society, it’s because if they do, they will have even more useless busy work to be responsible for until they can’t keep up at which point they are replaced by the next try hard hopeful.
It’s one of the few things I enjoyed about kitchen work, you are making a tangible good that is useful inherently and can create a positive impact on people both physically and emotionally.
Compare that to the call center work I used to do. I waited for a computer to beep me at which point I improvised as close to a script as possible to sell people Bank of America Privacy Assist Premier. Do a quick search about the lawsuit they underwent, we were encouraged to take anything vaguely affirmative and sign them up for a service that provided no benefit. You know what I got when I beat quota? A higher quota average for everyone. You know what I got when I couldn’t because obvious scam was obvious? Let go for the day.
It was incentivized to sell just enough for your quota, then waste as much time on a single call as possible to avoid having to con more elderly people and raise the quota for every worker.
The interview sections of the movie office space highlights and satirizes this feeling. Everyone desperate trying to inflate their importance or stroke the right ego to keep their inherently useless job to ensure systemic violence wasn’t perpetrated against them in the form of homelessness.
The crux of the conflict in the movie hinged on that absurdity when the protagonist and his friends try to create a virus to siphon money from the company since they were getting shit canned for superfluous reasons anyway.
Their jobs werent useless. Literally no one in office space has a useless job - that's also part of the joke with the Bobs.
Maybe I’m misremembering the context of it, Milton literally had a job so useless they didn’t realize they had fired him and forgot to take him off the payroll. There was also that “what would you say you do here?” Interaction, the best he could come up with was he deals with the customers so the engineers don’t have to, when questioned about how he takes info from the costumer, he insists the Secretary does that, at which point they ask him what he actually does then. He ends up so frustrated at the questioning and not having a good answer that he emphatically decries himself a people person in a very unpersonable manner.
The "what would ya say you do here" bit is a play on the real-life situation of defending a job to people that sounds stupid on the surface but has value. In reality, that person works in customer relationships.
Milton isn't unimportant, they just treat him like shit. I've been a Milton, and am willing to bet most people have felt that way.
Bob Slydell : What you do at Initech is you take the specifications from the customer and bring them down to the software engineers? Tom Smykowski : Yes, yes that's right. Bob Porter : Well then I just have to ask why can't the customers take them directly to the software people? Tom Smykowski : Well, I'll tell you why, because, engineers are not good at dealing with customers. Bob Slydell : So you physically take the specs from the customer? Tom Smykowski : Well... No. My secretary does that, or they're faxed. Bob Porter : So then you must physically bring them to the software people? Tom Smykowski : Well... No…. Ah sometimes. Bob Slydell : What would you say you do here?
Seems like he never even talks to the customers let alone handles customer relations. Best case scenario he translates customer specs that someone else takes down for him into the format the software engineers will prefer to read, but if that was the case why not say that instead of making yourself appear to be a useless middleman?
Don't quote the old magic at me, witch, I was there when it was written.
I have Office Space memorized. You not understanding that this dude imploded when asked about his job, while the actual waste in the company is the amount of leadership overhead that exists off-screen ("I have 8 different bosses, Bob") is leading to your confusion about the intent of this scene.