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: : : 001: MY NAME IS JANINE TELLIER, and I work as a studio manager for the Big Shoulders Media Group.
002: Mainly that entails glorified secretarial duties. Maintaining the schedule, sending out reminders about upcoming deadlines, fielding calls from clients, that sort of stuff.
003: Uh, I don't know. Every once in a while there's a meeting, I guess . . . ? I surf the Net a lot . . . Is that the kind of thing you want to hear about?
004: I read, uh, Salon . . . there's a site called The Morning News that I look at, it's really good . . . at sodaplay.com you can make these little, I don't know, creatures, that's a good site. Oh, yeah, e-mail, don't forget that, I e-mail people all the time.
005: Oh, sure, it's a blast. It's exactly how I thought I'd spend my thirties. Spending all day making little computer things walk around. It's a laugh a minute.
006: Well, sure, I mean I could be working in a diamond mine. And I'm not, and I'm glad. But anything you do like this, day in and day out, it's going to take a toll on you. I mean, this place has never even heard of ergonomics. And all this computer use, eight hours a day of it, it fucks you up.
007: Well, mentally, yeah, but I meant physically . . . I mean, my wrist . . . well, let me see, here, bring that mic closer. Let me see if I can get it to do it . . . [cracking sound]
008: [laughter] I don't know if that picked up or not. But, I mean, you can see, that's not right. A healthy wrist doesn't sound like that. My wrist didn't sound like that before I started working jobs where I used computers all day. And now it sounds like that all the time.
009: If I was still in grad school I'd say something like this is evidence of how the corporation inscribes itself on the bodies of its workers . . . but let me ask you a question. What are you doing this for?
010: Yeah, yeah, you already said that. But what are you doing that for? I mean, what do you hope the end result will be?
011: So, OK, you go around, you interview all these people about their jobs. And I imagine they all say the same thing, or some version of the same thing, which is that they hate their jobs, their jobs suck, whatever.
012: I mean— I'm not trying to be harsh here, I'm just trying to think it through —it just seems like your project, ultimately, is going to tell us something that we already know. That most jobs are shitty and that most people feel powerless within them. And it seems like hearing the finished project isn't going to help people, it seems like what it will do is just confirm these feelings of powerlessness.
013: How I would do it? Oh, I don't know, I'm probably the wrong person to ask.
014: Because I wouldn't do a project about work at all. I'd do a project about play. I wouldn't focus on the ways that people feel unhappy and powerless: I'd focus on how people bring joy back into their lives.
015: Because that's news you can use! We all know that the modern world sucks, right? OK, yes, it's very sad, boo-fucking-hoo, right? Hearing about that in greater detail doesn't help us. What might help us is hearing how people escape it. How do you avoid becoming an automaton? What gets you out of depression? What are your strategies for survival? I think the answers can be found in how we play.
016: Who, me? [laughs]
017: Uh, for me play has a lot to do with sex. But that's a whole other interview. [laughs]
: : :
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Further Reading:
Recent input in the Narrative Technologies weblog:
:: 34 North, 118 West : a Global Positioning System-controlled interactive narrative
[fresh as of 11/19/02]
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