Monday, November 20, 2006

Tell Me Why I Don't Like Mondays

For a little over a third of my life, I've been working for this...ahem, oh so joyous company. No pitchforks, no brimstone and it gets hot on occasion. Yet, if I wasn't allowed to go home at the end of the day, I would think that I had been banished to that place wayyy below.

A few years ago, we had an accident-related fatality in another department, as well as a few employees that everyone knew, pass on. Of one of those that had passed on (as the story goes), he unintenionally did himself in, living his life a little too much to the fullest. If you knew him, that's how he always dealt with his work situation. To quote an old metal song, "for every minute of work, I need an hour of play."


Another who used to let the job and stress get to him, died a year after retiring from a heart attack, and it was no coincidence. He couldn't seperate the job from his life and the company took advantage of that. It was manslaughter, but no court would convict, ya know?

Those events had inspired me to write an outline for a screenplay short, in which a man gets a job that seems too good on the surface. The job has the top salary in that related field, an unparalleled retirement package and all the Kona coffee that he can drink. The protagonist finds that this is no Eden. The job is overwhelming in terms of work load and expected production of the employees by management.

He delves a little further, lo and behold, the company is actually run by aliens who feed on the stress of the employees. Plus, the people who were "transferred and promoted," were actually sucked dry by the aliens until they became empty husks.

This idea never went any further than a few paragraphs and a couple of lines of dialogue. I didn't want to pursue it any further because I wasn't sure it hadn't been done before, nor could I figure out a unique way for the aliens to be destroyed.


At any rate, my computer has a DVD player and before the Torzig of Preavemt Major can mainline the stress cluttering my third eye, I'm cooling down with the following this week...

The Sopranos Season Six has been good so far and I have two episodes to go. Still, it gets a bit much when you want to decompress from work and you see almost the exact same situations that you are going through. So tonight I'm going to lighten things up with Robot Chicken, a show that is as funny to me as "The Simpsons" once was, before the show went into the enivitable rut that comes with such a long run. I'm not criticizing "The Simpsons," name me any show that is still as funny on the fifth year, as it was during the second.

If I manage to finish both of those before the end of the week, I have Greg The Bunny-Best of Film Parodies. I was a huge fan of the Fox sitcom and this marks Greg's return to the IFC channel. His return almost got me to shell out extra and upgrade to digital cable, but why should I bother now that I have it on DVD? Hah! Hey cable company, I've got your Comcastic, right here!

2 Comments:

Blogger Katie Schwartz said...

sadly, I can completely relate. I like the short idea. is it a dark comedy?

Mon Nov 20, 07:23:00 AM PST  
Blogger Writeprocrastinator said...

It's "dry" as you say.

Mon Nov 20, 09:47:00 AM PST  

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