Burns, Goddammit, shoot me in the face!

[Eater of Clowns]

Service economy.  That's what they call our disconnect with real work, our separation from basic needs.  This desk isn't for your hands it's for your fingers and you can use them until the bones rub to dust, poking each key one at a time after the congealed blood in your digits stiffens them in an erection more perverse than the one you can't see on television.  Our back problems aren't from manual labor they're from muscles atrophied after years in that nice comfy chair; one weekend-moving-into-your-nice-new-place away from throwing your spine into a question mark that'll drain your pocket and the health care coffers until you're bent so far forward that keeling over to die is no longer a euphemism.

We're all so arrogant, so sure that we're better off here than with our hands buried in soft, cool soil.  We never thought to test that theory, it having been brain food from that big hand that reaches down to us in simultaneous pity and satisfaction, the one with the muscles that look too much like wires and the blood too dark and too viscous.  Our hands won't be in soil until they're on the underside of it reaching up, even then protected by a smooth, shiny box.  After all, we wouldn't want to get dirt under our fingernails.

We're all in services instead, doing our part to complete one leg of one project to keep one department afloat in one company keeping itself from flatlining in one economy.  It's a diamond scheme with a maniacal codger dancing and laughing at the highest point, unaware of his own mortality and irrelevance only as long as the backs upon which he stands remain unaware of his existence.  They're all looking down to keep their precarious position, the best of them a sudden breeze from plummeting.  Follow their gazes to the end and you'll find a weary and abused body straining against the burden, braced by hands plunged deep into the earth.  All they need to do is look up and see everyone else teetering the same way they are, but it's a glance they can't afford.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

That was good, EOC.

[Eater of Clowns]

That was good, EOC.

[BabylonHoruv]

I can't work up a proper rant on this one as I have not had to suffer it.  I can however point out the horrormirth involved in OSHA requiring an activity that is likely to lead to repetitive stress injuries and the EPA requiring the generation of mountains of paper, thus necessitating the cutting down of even more trees.