When you are an orange circle
My sister is
a consultant for a large insurance company. I went to her office
one day to pick her up for lunch. She forgot something at her
desk and gestured for me to follow her. We entered this stadium
of a room with fluorescent lights across the ceiling and
cubicles across the floor connected to each other like squares
on graph paper. We marched down the center aisle, banged a
left, turned to the right, left again, moved five spaces down
and we landed at her cubicle.
It felt like
I had just entered a video game. If I were to push the “B”
button I could eject myself out of the building. I kept turning
in every direction and staring at the maze of cubicles all
around me. I was an orange circle in a sea of green squares.
Like most creative types, I just can’t face a wall; I need
windows, movement, air.
As though
panicked to discover I was in a maximum security prison, my eyes
darted to the tops of the cubicles. “Keryn,” I gasped, “it would
kill me dead to work in a cubicle.” She knows. Curious, I
pointed to the top of the partition and said, “Have you ever
thought of getting a marshmallow rifle or launching Koosh balls
into neighboring cubicles?” She looked at me and said, “No.”
There were
employees by the hundreds — all of them steadfastly working in
cubicles. It was as though I was observing a different species.
Nobody was complaining about being closed off or trying to climb
out. No bouncing elastic balls or watching YouTube. They weren’t
creating paper clip necklaces or making their office chairs
spin. They were working. Diligently. I was the only one feeling
like an inmate in search of a letter opener.
I get this
same feeling when I visit a classroom. Looking at the desks
lined in a neat row, I wonder how I ever sat like that for so
many years. I didn’t. And this would be one of the reasons why
the nuns liked my sister so much more. I used to wonder if the
windows were nailed shut and that’s why they were never opened.
I could never understand why, on a beautiful spring day, we
couldn’t go outside and learn? And what was up with the “no
talking” rule during lunch? Geez.
Now, here I
am, wayyy grown up and still have the same response to
things regimented or confining. It becomes all the more glaring
to me that we are all wired differently. I am not the
only one in this world who can’t work in a cubicle. There are
plenty of us orange circles.
And yet I
feel that life would be simpler for me if I could just conform.
If only I could wake up, go to work, shut up, get in the
cubicle, work, eat my lunch, finish, punch out, go home. I
admire people who can do this. I really do. But I am an orange
circle who will never be a green square.
Maybe there
is a business for those of us who cannot work in cubicles. We
could demonstrate to large corporations how to shake things up
every so often (they love this sort of disruption). And I might
add that we will not be starting things off at my sister’s
office because she would promptly kill me and I choose life,
thank you. No, I am thinking that we start small, like say, the
Internal Revenue Service. We position ourselves fortress style
and synchronize our watches. When we hear the signal, there are
two critical steps to this mission, should you accept it: 1) We
launch water balloons into the Auditing Department then 2) We
jet out the door.
I guess that
meant water balloons were out of the question.
***
Sometimes we
tread out into the ocean water, safe in knowing that we can dig
our feet into the sand and it will anchor us. Other times, we
move forward and feel the floor disappearing into the sea. We
are way, way in over our heads.
That is how
I felt during my first conversation about filmmaking. The desire
to make a documentary started way, way back in my head I’d say
about ten years ago. I am not a “techie” or a “techno-phobe.”
I’ll plunge in, try things. It’s just those warning flashes,
beeping sounds and foreboding terms like “abort code” that give
me the sensation I have just connected a lit match to a stick of
dynamite and in that moment, I am capable of knocking the entire
planet off its pins.
Given such
angst, why on earth would someone like me ever want to make a
documentary? I have pondered this question, fully analyzed my
reasons and the conclusion is this: I don’t know. I just do.
I listen to
the techno wizards around me and feel like I am trying to swim
with robots. “Let’s catalogue the combined equipment we have,”
Ryan says to the crew one day at lunch. They nod in agreement. “Uh-oh”,
I say to myself, “What equipment? I have no equipment. Was I
supposed to have equipment?” I wear the look of someone who
has just gulped down a cup of fire.
“I have a
Sony High Def 1080i HDR-FX1,” one robot announces. The curious
one beside him asks, “How is the low light on that?” I am
sooooo busted. Round and round the table it goes until the
spinner lands on me. “Well!” I begin, then reach for a drink of
water, clear my throat, take yet another sip, “I have a camera
phone if any one would like to see it.”
Nobody wanted
to see it.
June 5, 2008
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