October 22, 2004
your formula is frightening
Download: predictable?
This song has been a long time in the making. I have been traveling a lot lately and the company I work for was recently acquired, increasing my work load significantly. This has all led to dramatically reduced time for me to spend in the studio which has been quite frustrating. It is difficult to work on a song in little spurts now and again when I get the time. I work much more effectively when I have time every day to actually be writing and recording. That way, it's always in my head. I am lucky to ever have this time, I suppose, but I do make it about as high a priority as you can get (often to the detriment of other activities like, say, a social life). Ahh, the price of creativity. Enough of that.
As I mentioned before, this song is about me in the corporate world. This is not a 'me' that I carry around out of the office so much, not that I try to hide it, but I get enough of it when I am there. There are uses for having a corporate job for sure (you get paid, for one), but I have to admit that much of what happens in this world is very funny when viewed with a certain perspective.
Who are all those people speaking?
Every last one of them is someone I work with currently and have worked with for at least three years.
Where do you work?
It used to be @stake, but now it's Symantec.
Where did those words come from?
Way back in the first weeks of my employment at @stake, I was required by the 'People Team' to take a personality test to see how I could be most effective at work. You can imagine how useful the results were. They are more useful now, four and a half years later, in this song then they ever were before.
Do you hate working for a corporation?
Are you trying to get me fired or something?!?!?!
Will this song be funny or at all interesting to people who don't know you personally?
I have no idea, but I'm hoping that the resistance to corporate classifications and foolish consistencies is fairly wide-spread.
Do you believe in personality tests?
Oh yes, absolutely!! Any way the intricacies of the human emotional existence can be reduced to an algorithm and computed at will is something I have a HUGE amount of faith in!!
Are you a sarcastic lying bastard?
yes
Wow. I can't imagine where some of that feedback came from. The corporate personality prognosticator somehow thinks you're friendly, casual, unselfish and unassuming? Where did all THAT come from?? The algorithms *must* be flawed!
Of course, I'm sure they got some stuff right. What I've learned from this new song is that (1) you don't adapt well to changing circumstances, (2) you can't handle work that requires a high level of precision or attention to detail, and (3) you are, basically, a human lap dog. Perhaps you should be working at Starbucks??
...Or maybe the message is that your strength resides where you are outside the structured workforce entirely and can devote yourself to independent creative endeavors (ones that don't require any crazy formulaic personality tests)?
