"I'm disturbed, I'm depressed, I'm inadequate, I've got it all!"

Working at a meaningless job is a like having motor neurons disease.


When you arrive, you are a normal, functioning human being, dressed immaculately and carrying a packed lunch. You greet everyone in the office (as best you can through the language barrier) with a beaming smile and hand out small treats to your co-workers. You make daily plans for what you aim to accomplish and include highlighted windows to learn the language so as to better find out the office gossip.


As the days press on, you begin to realize that all those lesson planning seminars you sat through were a waste of hours. Your schedule is to help teach two classes a week, and this involves standing behind the teacher and reading a list of selected verbs out of a textbook. On a good day, you will be able to engage in impromptu conversation with your students; on a bad day, you will sit quietly at your desk for eight hours. Bliss, you say. Try it for a year.


And so, things start to shut down. That immaculate suit which you made sure you had dry cleaned once a week is left crumpled on your bedroom floor. You think about hanging up your jacket and decided it against it. On a good morning, you will wipe off the chalky patches with a damp cloth. Usually, you just shrug. The shirts, which you used to iron with a Bree Van de Kamp-efficiency, are now stuffed into a draw and pulled out one crumpled mess at a time. One day, you forget to wear a tie. As with the shirt and the chalk patches, no one says anything. From then on, you go open collar.


Your shaving ritual collapses. You drag a razor across your chin once a week and spend the next five days letting the stubble grow longer and uglier. Instead of getting up an hour before school to shine yourself up in front on the mirror, you roll out of bed with twenty minutes to spare and arrive at school late, your hair hanging limp and sodden from the shower you just jumped in and out of. Some days, you wake up even later and don’t even bother with the shower. You flick the sleep out of your eye and attempt to subtlety pat down your cowlicks with a salivated hand, Bristol Palin style.


Your appearance is not the only thing that disintegrates. After weeks of having your chipper ‘is there anything for me to do today’ plea responded to with the solemn shake of the head, your work ethic finally dies on the respirator. You give up studying Japanese, and suddenly find you can’t concentrate on anything. You spend hours staring at the computer screen, clicking on links on Wikipedia and pouncing on anyone fool enough to sign into Gmail chat. Soon, even this doesn’t satisfy. You find your attention span has completely disappeared. Replying to emails is too much hard work. So is reading books. Sometimes you make yourself a cup of coffee just to see how many sips it takes to drink it.


Your morale destroyed, you also give up caring what anyone thinks of you. You give up the fake polite smiles when you realize no one has talked to you in days. You start turning up late, leaving early, taking naps on your desk. You play your ipod too loud and silently bop along to ‘Raspberry Beret.’


Throughout all this, no one says anything. And you realize, if your existence is a joke to them, then you might as well treat it like one. And now that your spirit is broken, the delightfully awful question arises: just how far can you push these people?


You begin watching TV shows on your laptop, starting with a half hour during lunch and eventually you are having Weeds marathons twice a week. You laugh at the jokes; even the ones that you don’t think are funny. You SLURP your coffee. You yawn loudly. On the morning they have an important meeting about swine flu, you cough and blow your nose loudly and specifically buy pork for lunch. It’s almost fun.


Ten months on, the fresh faced idealist has been replaced with a lazy, sloppy, bitter, nervous wreck of a person, who doesn’t even have enough discipline to wash out his coffee mug before using it to make tea. His functions have all shut down. He traipses the two minute walk from his house to his school at 7.59am and returns the opposite way at 4.01pm. He realizes that everyone in the office despises him but he no longer cares. He no longer cares about making a difference because no one allows him to do any real teaching. This is what happens when you are given a job that could be done by a nine year old. You start acting like one.


In an ironic, blog-themed twist, I have turned into George Constanza. God help us all.