Minion

No disrespect to the slaves of the world but your jobs suck! Being a minion is working for the master—your overseer. Anytime your job involves booking, calling, scheduling, coordinating, organizing, reminding and purchasing…that is minion’s work. A call to arms you Slavic fools and cubicle drools! All minions cast off your modern chains of cell phones, SMS FaceBook and Twitter updates, your Myspace accounts and free yourselves.

I am a realist; almost all jobs require minion work. Most lower and some higher. It’s the lower minion class that irks me. We can be a minion to our kids or parents or loved ones—that’s fine. It’s healthy to help them. But a minion to your job is not. I would say being a minion is now a disease, like that of alcoholism. Minions are growing because the service sector (the key housing statistic of minions like me) keeps expanding, and we’ll still be in demand ten years from now when our parents are too weak to wipe their asses!

You know that movie scene in V for Vendetta when actress Natalie Portman is imprisoned and tortured by her mentor, V? She thinks the bad guys have her but the ensuing days of interrogation break her down mentally and physically until her capturer, V, thinks she has had an epiphany and suddenly releases her. She discovers, to her disgust and dismay, as well as the audience, that she’s been held in V’s cramped New York apartment all the time! What a mind fuck! Of course, at the end of the film he dies (oh! the sympathy of tears) and she cries (“I really do love him!”) and has more respect for him despite her beat down. Here’s the small analogy: being that we’re her (Portman) and our employer is him (The Vster), and at the end of the film or our day at work, we are still indoctrinated and fight and defend the status quo. Minions reject this!

V wanted her to understand the feeling of being a minion and well, she did, perhaps but we who also may gripe and grumble about the injustice of it all, are still seduced by the big, fat pay check: the rewards of servitude to the master. My paycheck is about 41,000 a year. That’s barely enough to live without a car, in a shared 3-bedroom apartment on the Westside of L.A. V wanted to start a revolution whereas your humbled and chained writer, dear reader, doesn’t. He wants to be a minion. I can’t follow or be a follower and besides the economy is expanding!

If I was a caring, Che Guevara type of revolutionary (I like him better than Mao because facial hair looks cooler than a clean shaven revolutionary face), I would gather the forces and fight. But for this minion it’s particularly discouraging and evident to me that when I do organize something revolutionary, like a simple breakfast run to the cafeteria at work; my three coworkers respectfully decline and politely say no. So, ha! to the revolution! And, if you’re not hungry for it because you’re still full from yesterday’s leftovers from the “big meeting” in which we quietly pecked at the leftovers like vultures, then you won’t go. I still picking my teeth.