QWERTY?!

How well will Personal Days date?

I spent a large part of today in front of a microfilm reader in the New York County Clerk office on Chambers Street, looking at immigration records from the turn of the century. How many people today ever use microfilm? Most technologies pass into obsolescence, but others are completely forgotten. After people stop using email, it may not take many more decades before people forget what email was - before they forget that it was ever an innovation in the real world. That is my secret hope for Personal Days - that someday in the future one of its readers will come across a passage about a QWERTY keyboard or cd drives and see it not as a laughably retro reference, but as the techno-babble of some forgotten era. On that day the novel will pass from very good period fiction to very good science fiction.

—Some Reservations

Not for us

We might think of Kafka’s response to his friend Max Brod’s question about hope and whether there was any outside the world as we know it. ‘Plenty of hope,’ Kafka said. ‘But not for us.’

Where did Kafka learn to think like this? A case could be made that he found his training not in his intricate psyche or in his horrified commitment to writing – ‘the service of the Devil’, he called it – but in his day job at the Prague Institute for Workmen’s Accident Insurance.

—Michael Wood on Kafka's office writings, London Review of Books

(From Jenny)

Words of the year—office edition

The New Oxford American Dictionary's "Word of the Year" finalists include moofer (for "mobile out of office worker") and topless meeting (not what you think).

Time for a staycation!

The chills

Portico on Personal Days:

[I]ntensely plotted, [with] a very satisfying surprise ending...a finely-modulated progression of narrative voices...It's as though working at this unnamed company, engaged in its unspecified business, they are living through a slow-motion disaster, an earthquake in freeze-frame, that will not end until they walk out of the funky lower-Manhattan office building for the last time — assuming that blasting in the neighborhood doesn't cause it to topple. The unaffectionate intimacy with which these young people cohabit adjacent cubicles gives the book a snarkily cheerful surface beneath which flow unpredictably chilly currents.

The answer is always yes

Do you want to maximize your productivity, push your career to the next level, and maintain a positive outlook at work? Artist and office worker Michael Lewy has a series of helpful charts for you. Lewy, who has an administrative job at MIT, spent the past year engaged in a surreal act of worldbuilding that resulted in City of Work, a collection of slide presentations, ad campaigns, and educational films that reveal the dark side of "getting things done." —i09

"Gigantic Turkey Sub?"

Mouth almighty

Ten years later my hair began to turn black and my teeth gradually returned to my mouth. I was deprived of my pension and had to sit at the office doing my work from the end right to the beginning. My employers were very kind to me, but after twenty-five years they ceased to know me and engaged me on trial at fifteen pounds a month. So there I stood, back to front of course, without money and without a job, but with a wife who grew prettier and loved me more every day.

—From Frigyes Karinthy's "The Moral," in Soliloquies in the Bath (read all of it at A Journey Round My Skull)