Friday, January 20, 2006

"I Wanna be a Boss"

So another working week comes to an end and we drag our tired asses back home to start the process of intensive recovery. I've been very lucky in that the jobs I've had have all been really enjoyable, challenging and almost well-paid. Yet that in itself doesn't always take care of the nagging feeling that someone, somewhere is having an even better time than I am. And more often than not, it's the boss who's in clover: "Well, I've been doodling on this notepad/And I've been taking telephone calls/I can tell that this job's at the end of line/And I'm ready for the fall/But I've been watching the boss carefully/And he always seems to be having a ball/Then I scratch my head and wonder why I'm down here and he's up the hall."
And so we all develop the focus of our discontent (real or perceived) on the poor sap who happened to float to the top. We can construct lazy daydreams about being a world dominating uber-boss, a magnate, a Master of the Universe, where we can live out the dream of perfection and power.
Thank you to Stan Ridgway for crystallizing the whole thing in one neat song... this is a fairly straightforward bit of wish-fulfilment, but it covers EVERYTHING, dammit. From riding in a limo with tinted windows, to handing out thousand-dollar bills, to building executive amusement parks, to watching "Ice Station Zebra" in the nude (a big shout-out to Howard Hughes there), to buying the planet Mars...it's all here. Thanks, Stan: I don't think you missed anything off MY list, anyway.
Happily though, he remembers the little folks too, and urges us to follow our own ambitions: "I want to take a two-week vacation/26 times a year."

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