Murphy’s Bye-Laws

Recently, I’ve written about the inflexible world of corporate employment.  The confining job descriptions and bureaucracy are prescriptions for career quagmire and a near-certain soul death.  The ridiculous hoops one may jump through to even get into a position in cogdom are just as soul-constricting.  A certain blandness and unwavering nothingness is almost required these days.  Between employers checking credit reports and employers utilizing Google, one has to be as a mole in a dark hole, with opinions, hobbies, aspirations, or a brain for even the shallowest introspection hidden away or non-existent.  What opinions and thoughts are put on the internet can’t be too deep, obscure, or intelligent because whoever is the doing the searching may not have the reading comprehension of a sentient being with capacity for rational thought; it just wasn’t in the job description, I guess. Read the rest of this entry »

There are phrases like “the working poor” floating around. This refers to the people who are actually employed, sometimes in more than one job, who still can’t afford housing, food, and other tenets of the American dream. Perhaps this state of affairs is due to the cost of actually going to work.

In the past I’ve written about the chicken-or-egg nature of earning and spending; the first time I talked about some of the factors affecting the work environment that make us desire escape so frantically; the second time I elaborated on how we spend our treasure in pursuit of an escape from the depressing world of employment, in turn resulting in the need to work in order to pay off the escape. Somewhere else, though I can’t find where, I thought I also mentioned that my spending habits go contrary to reason and become less frugal the more pinched I feel and yet more stingy when I feel like I’m getting ahead. And just this past week I noticed an expansion, or perhaps a corollary, to this phenomenon. The busier and more frantic my employment environment becomes, the more my feeling of pinched finances grows in parallel. This also seems to contradict logic. When working hard for long hours, one is apt to collect overtime, which means actually getting paid more. So why does it seem like I’m with less money when working so much? Is it just an illusion brought about by stress and the apparent contraction of time ([time flies when keeping busy (less time)] x [time = money] = less money)? Read the rest of this entry »

I’m sure regular readers have noticed the absence of any new substance here at the Bye-Laws in recent weeks – or maybe not, since it isn’t all that unusual. This particular absence stemmed from two things: I was busier than a one-armed paper hanger with work and school and then I was decompressing from such busyness by taking a week to do much work around the house. It hardly seems like decompression to go from sitting at a desk (and in my car) for 10-15 hours a day to the back-breaking labor of removing landscaping, but it was surprisingly refreshing. Read the rest of this entry »