Very little is expected of you. Motivation comes from speakers. Help comes from books. Management comes from training programs and thinking is done by hats. You just need to punch in and out. You are paid enough to keep up with inflation but not enough to retire.

It is not a bad deal. And it’s not like you have seen better ones. But it leaves you strangely dissatisfied, like primates bred in captivity.

Between performance ratings and working on weekends, you realize the only one who can help you is yourself and off course, some friends. Breaking the perimeter of captivity will require some elaborate scheme, like Prison Break.

As in scripts, you need some lucky breaks, like jet packs in Super Mario. You need to swim against the tide of non-believers and nay-sayers into the pristine waters of realization.

And nothing works like Vindication:

 

Management would call it positive re-enforcement, we call it community. It is the reason why worker unions, fan clubs and tribute bands exist and thrive.

You don’t have to be Neo from The Matrix, just Peter Gibbons from Office Space will do. You don’t have to be weirdly unique either. Most of what we call unique is like a differently colored stick figure in a stock photo. You just have to be crazy enough to look beyond the cubicle and sane enough not to send out a farewell note laced with expletives.

__________________________________________________________

SlavesInc was launched in January of this year with a gusto I don’t remember having for anything else. Before Freshly Pressed or even my friends and acquaintances started reading the blog, Lorna was a regular visitor. Though there was no bogging down SlavesInc, Lorna’s comments greatly re-enforced my belief in the content of this site. It makes me think of all the blogs I have enjoyed reading but left without commenting. The writer would never know someone read the whole deal and appreciated it (I am talking pre Like-button era)

Now, Lorna has done me one better by nominating SlavesInc for ‘The Versatile Blogger Award’.  This award follows a pass the baton routine. Besides being a major motivator and smile-inducer, The Versatile Blogger Award also makes you realize what was missing in school, college and now, at work.

Apart from the merriment, VBA comes with a set of customs:

• Copy and paste the Award Image to your “Acceptance Post” .
• Acknowledge the blogger who nominated you.
• Disclose 7 random facts about yourself.
• Notify the bloggers I nominate for this award

So here goes…7 random Slave’s facts:

1. SlavesInc was originally intended to be a comic strip. (Watch this space)
2. The sign-off ‘- J’ was meant to be a central character in a comic strip theme. Over 34 posts so far, it has come to become more of a pen name and it suits the look and tone of the blog
3. The very first post, Morning High, was meant to be a one-off post on my older blog. But so enthralling were the results that I spun it off into a blog by itself
4. Offline/in real life, I am a slave whose existence resembles though does not mirror the logs of SlavesInc
5. Many of the posts are suggested by fellow slaves who see kinship in this account of their not-so unique multitude routine
6. I am not a harrowed, stressed, diabetic desk monkey (yet). I work out and I carry 7-10 small but frequent meal containers to office
7. But I am not the sporty-type either. I only learnt to ride a bi-cycle after I was 21 years old. Learnt it without falling down even once, long legs you see.

Nominations: I am guilty of not reading many blogs. Recently, I realized that I have not even subscribed to Lorna’s wonderful blog. So I am aiming for 10 but I may fall short:

Lafemroar

Being single, being crazy and a lot of things in between

From The Fluffy Cloud

A beautiful collection of skillfully penned short short stories

Vici Mia Vita d’oliva

A blog about Olive Oil! Delightfully celebrative and well written

Mostly Bright Ideas

Humble and humorous churnings from a veteran writer

Oodles of doodles

A canoodling of smile-inducing doodles

High on Coffee

A book in the making

Boring, Banal and not at all Bodacious

Aptly titled and ably worded, it is described as ‘pursuing a career in professional unemployment’ by the author himself.

IMONTHEBANDWAGON

A colorful log of a band on the road

TEStazyk

A published author writes about living on different continents and reforestation

THE WARPED PRISM

A photography blog that is a treat for the eyes and fodder for the mind

Deep as a Birdbath

Earthy and likable accounts of an affable life

My Pencilart

Reclusive but pleasing, rendered by the humble lead pencil

Okay, we actually have more than 10 so far and it has taken some doing. I will stop here since I would only want to mention blogs I can vouch for. Also, I am sticking to WordPress blogs.

Thank you fellow slaves and kind readers for your interest and thank you Lorna for supporting SlavesInc.

– J.