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While some may have been able to get by in post-college life with relative ease, I’ve found my recent foray into the corporate world both difficult and punchy. Having myself gone through life without owning any suits or in fact, anything worth more than six dollars, I was faced with a dilemma: where am I going to find a reversible suit? 

To those who have never bought a suit, your first plan should always involve research. Walking into Holt Renfrew, for example, and admitting that you have never bought a suit, but need 5, is a bad start. Luckily, I only ended up with 2, each costing me more than a plane ticket to Italy. I could’ve fed a small village for months with the amount of money I spent. That’s what I should’ve done. Flown to Sicily, given the entire village what I spent at HR and lived in a villa for a month while they sewed a dozen reversible suits for me.

The irony of my million dollar purchases was that I would not last that long in corporate Canadia and I still have a wonderful, unused, grey, pin-striped, D&G suit sitting my closet (tags still attached) where my friend so helpfully pointed out that it was getting wrinkled because of the humidity in my condo. I never realized suits were as high-maintenance as cigars.

I had always heard that incorporating yourself is the best way to stick it to the man. Capitalism was this rumoured Eden of tax shelters and there were words like “bonuses”, “dividends” and “hookers” thrown around.

Though my ambition has no bounds, my energy and youth nearly always drag their feet. I am not that doe-eyed, 21 y.o. tramp I once was anymore. I have expenses now and I need to put away for my retirement when I’m 65 and need an emergency colonoscopy.

With my thirtieth birthday looming ahead like the center of Ike, I knew I needed to take a shot at this self-employment game before rolling over to the less glamourous side of middle-age and calling it a night. Get married, get a mortgage, get TiVo, get a dog, get fat. I want to go into that inevitable death march with arms wide open and welcome it, like I would welcome a warm vasectomy.

Once upon a time, I thought this world was mine for the taking. I was bright, energetic, young and fearless. I once looked derisively at my elders as obstacles and frustrating barriers to me and my riches. I sneered, I glared, I disdainfully dismissed their warnings and apathy. I told these thirty year olds, their time was over and I was going to bring about change. It was going to be me and Obama. We were going to make things happen.

These days, as I frequent the local bars, I notice a new crowd in town. The younger, more energetic, and if possible, even less fearless crowd of 20-somethings doing things I wish I thought of first. They storm out of the gates of college and stake their claim. Marking their territory like dogs. Nearly always missing the mark, but peeing all over everything else. Its their world now, and my generation is what people refer to as ‘retro’. 

When you watch television, and you see your favorite music videos being played on MuchMoreMusic, then you know you’ve lost your youth. Seeing this, your only solace is a half-eaten bucket of fudge brownie Häagen Dazs®. The contestants on Don’t Forget the Lyrics know exactly as many songs as their iPod can hold. Their only defense is that they were born in 1987. 

It probably didn’t dawn on me that I was old until I overheard someone referring to retro style as the 90’s look. I nearly wanted to yell out, Retro?! Those were my teenage years, Junior! but then quickly realizing that admitting that, would probably have had various undesirable generalizations about me. Notably, ones of cowering in shadows and murmuring to oneself about the difficulty of opening child-proof vitamin bottles. 

If this whole new venture into capitalism doesn’t work out for me, I’ll need to work out my next plan. What is the next plan? Whatever it is, it’ll probably involve living in the Upper East Side of New York City, and working at Butter. Maybe I’ll run into some of NYC’s high-society socialites like Tinsley Mortimer. Even better, maybe I can become one!

For the last four months, I’ve been stationed at an insurance company deep in the heart of Scarborough or “ScarTown”, as it is fondly dubbed by the local gangs. Along with a SWAT team of consultants, I have been here for months. We are a special forces unit closely modeled after the US Army’s Delta Force with no exit plan and no hope of liberation or self-governance in the form of democracy. So in fact, exactly like the US Army.

Sadly, we are without snipers and rifles so killing yourself is limited to slitting your wrists with nicked off razor blades found lying in the alley behind the plaza. There’s a Mandarin restaurant in the same building that we share with the office.

Everyday at around 9:13 AM, I park my car at the back lot and enter the loading dock entrance behind the Mandarin restaurant. I walk through probably the most disgusting smell that has ever faced mankind and won. I tend to hold my breath when I walk by, but sometimes a gust of wind knocks me back by surprise. Generally, it gets worst as the day goes on.

As I pass by the gutted chickens, hanging pigs, and buckets of murky water, I acknowledge the peripheral stares from my Asian brethren. Squatting over chopping blocks in befouled aprons and smeared smocks, they glance up at me briefly and I return the looks: Yes, you too could wear a suit one day, I think quietly to them. Free yourselves from this mini-market of rotting flesh! Join the ranks of Deloitte consultants!

Through the sterile corridors, there are beams of white fluorescent lights fixed on the ceilings that lead the way to our windowless room. Here, we sit side-by-side in filings of cubicles. Rows of grey, fuzzy-walled cubicles; enough to seat 50 medium to large sized adults.

I sit at the end of the row of cubicles in the hallway near the entrance. My desk juts out at the end of the row of all cubicles, asymmetrical with no match or twin. A small laser printer sits atop a table beside my desk and two milk crates lay on the floor carrying packs of white paper (presumably for the printer).

I spliced the network cable, attached a switch and pulled another network cable to my laptop to give myself Internet. I have no phone, nor even dignity as it remains outside in the summer sun, smiling and laughing at me while I squeeze into my desk. There is no wall surrounding the desk, so it doesn’t really count as a cubicle — its more just a desk in the middle of the room loosely attached to a cubicle row.

I greet people as they walk through the door. I also take messages for my manager who sits next to me. Sometimes I leave notes on his Post-It™ Notes sticky pad. On Mondays and Wednesdays, he hangs his gym towel to dry on a hanger next to my desk drawer. It’s usually damp.

I have learned to frown when I sit there in my hallway desk scowling as dark as a thunder cloud. I’ve learned this well as I’ve tired of the smiles, waves and taps on the shoulders from passers-by. Most people are able to deftly avoid my desk by a sidestep to the left as they come through the door and proceed to their own desk.

I’ve tallied up the total hours that I’ve spent in small talk and chit-chat with people wandering or waiting or needing information and it amounted to approximately 5 years of my life.

Often people ask me for directions to the washroom as though there were a giant sign above my desk that read, “Information”. I look up above my desk to check everyday, just to make sure.

There have been times that I’ve given serious thought to bringing in a monkey and an organ. Perhaps more to amuse myself than anything else.

One day, a Dell computer workstation appeared on my desk. My desk! A desk no one else wanted and yet there it was, a computer waiting to be turned on had found its way to my desk.

I hid behind the file cabinet for a week, waiting to see who it would be that would appear at my desk. How dare they take the one thing I had? Violating my home, as easily as one would move their shit into another man’s space. Was I to move to the furnace room next and have my stapler confiscated?

No one appeared.

I waited, situating myself in concealment, and still no one appeared. Its entirely possible that I may have blacked out for brief intervals.

I went back to my desk and moved the workstation to the floor, piled the milk crates on top of each other, fashioned a bridge, and moved the 17″ monitor over slightly to be my second monitor. I felt like a hobo collecting unwanted goods and turning them into my own treasure.

This carried on for another few weeks until today.

Today, a giant Xerox printer appeared. I left for two hours to a meeting and returned to find a 4′x5′x2′ all-purpose scanner/copier/printer/coffee maker directly in front of my desk. As people began using the printer, I breathed in the fresh, warm toner only to see my dead grandma dancing in front of me. Cheap highs and condensed quarters were not included in the job description.

I am hoping tomorrow, they bring in the large “Kinko’s” sign and when I show up, there will be a freshly pressed Kinko’s uniform waiting for me. At least, I won’t have to spend $1500 on another suit.

“Never hold discussions with the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room” – Winston Churchill