Bricolage writers inspired by corporate job market

Armed with English degrees, a pair of recent UW graduates parodied their experiences in the corporate world of jobs and work in two humorous short stories that bookend this year's Bricolage magazine.

The annual collection of works by UW staff and student artists, poets and short-story writers features 41 original compositions.

"I've been thrown into the cold water of the corporate world," Jeremy Mackie said Wednesday night after he read his story, "Chanteuse," at the Bricolage release party. "I've always wanted to be that perfect writer, with a life of wine and women and to live in Paris."

Since graduating last year, Mackie instead spent much of his time working in a cubicle for a local public-relations firm. The repetition and boredom of office work inspired his tale, subtitled, How I Learned to Survive the Cubicle Crunch.

"I floated my morals down the drain for two bits a year and all the coffee I can drink," laments Mackie's narrator, whose sanity slips away while battling deadlines and office machines.

A story by Mackie's former classmate, Emily Johnson, opens the journal and satirizes the job-hunting process and the stigma of being fired.

In "Work History," Johnson's character struggles to get hired with a job application containing some three dozen former employers. The protagonist worries that her perspective boss won't be impressed with such a diverse record.

"Maybe that's what they didn't like, that all those other people found a reason to fire me, and they thought they would too," Johnson wrote. The character's application turns into an evaluation of her self-worth, depending on the decision of those judging her long work history.

"For me, the story is one long joke," Johnson said. "It's a critique on how we judge success."

Johnson finished work on her creative-writing degree this week and is currently looking for work before applying to graduate from school in 2003. She said her story reflects her own experience, though she admittedly has held fewer jobs.

Senior Cortney Anne Johnson's summer job working the night shift in a pulp mill inspired her poem, "Lower Columbia Nightlife." Her mind would wander during early mornings because the simple, repetitive nature of the job required little concentration, she said.

She described the world of work as a poignant exchange of her time for a list of goods.

"3:30 to 4:30 is $9.35, is six gallons of gas, is 2.5 watts, is one good movie," she wrote.

Most of the works in Bricolage do not deal with job-related themes, though those works may be the most relevant to the approximately 4,000 students who will walk out of Husky Stadium on June 9 and into the real world.