Who is the one who works beside me? I am watching you, management trainee. Watching you who work beside me, you for whom I am nothing. But I am barely anything for myself, I can assure you. Soon I will disappear, but you will still be there.
You have entered the Castle, management trainee; you are a functionary. Others want your place, but it is your place. Looking at the new graduate trainees you think to yourself: they have a lot to learn. You’ve already forgotten you were one of them. One of them: how could it be? You fear them, you turn your gaze towards the boardroom. Yes, that is the source of your essence, what you are. You exist insofar as you aspire. Only you will not struggle openly to find a place in the upper echelons. You know a great training is required.
You know that your boss is like Plato’s Sun who radiates through everything in the company. That those close to him glow with a light that burns through him. But you also know that this Sun is your boss’s only because he has passed through a great movement of training. You can learn from him, you say to yourself. He is not a god. He is like me, and one day, I will be like him. Because you know that once upon a time he too was a management trainee like you. And just as you cannot bear to look at the new graduate trainees, because you fear to confront your own dissolution (the fact that you did not always occupy the lofty place that is yours’) he cannot bear to look at you. Only sometimes may he allow himself to think: this management trainee is like the young man I once was. A lion cub, but a lion nonetheless …
Meanwhile, work on yourself. Develop your skills. Develop your portfolio of skills, management trainee. Perhaps you will have to move from this company to another one. Perhaps you will have to insist on a pay rise. Perhaps you will have to move into another team. Work on yourself. Only the work has already begun. Before you knew it. Before you took yourself to the training suite. You are a part of the great machinery, and it works through you. At the level of the habits and rituals of the company life: breakfast (a sausage in a roll) in the canteen, the cigarette break, the trip up to Birmingham, the night out in Reading at Mulligans on whose barfront is written: drinking, dancing, cavorting …
I am watching you, management trainee. I am watching you and wondering what it might be to be a management trainee. I watch and I think to myself: I would like to see him malfunction, this company robot. Would that he drank like Jed the robot on Grandaddy’s The Sophtware Slump. Would that one day he laughed so hard at his own imposture he is that he fell into his laughing mouth and disappeared.
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