Are you feeling today like Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston) in this clip from Office Space?
Twenty years ago, on Friday, February 19, 1999, Office Space came out in theaters. I can’t recall if I saw it in a theater, or later on VHS. Eventually I watched it on DVD a couple of times.
A lot of things have changed in the past twenty years, some for the better, some for the worse.
On the plus side, the Affordable Care Act seems to have some positive lingering effects. On the minus side, we’re much closer now to a civilization-ending climate change catastrophe.
But a lot of things have stayed almost exactly the same. Then and now, many people are stuck in soul-crushing, mind-numbing jobs, while a very small group of people hoard most of the money.
Then as now, there are lots of people like Peter in Office Space. They might not necessarily be office workers, but they have to deal with their share of slow traffic, annoying coworkers, petty bosses, rude customers and malfunctioning equipment.
After twenty years, one would think everyone who wants to see this movie has seen it already. However, I will try not to give spoilers. I will give a summary of the first reel, as I would with a recently released movie.
There is one aspect about the ending that I will reference here. So if you're a complete spoiler-phobe who worries that knowing one tiny detail about a movie you haven’t seen yet will thoroughly spoil your enjoyment, regardless of how multi-faceted that movie might be, well, maybe you should stop reading now.
So Peter is a computer programmer at Initech. Every little workplace foible irritates him to an extreme. A doorknob that always zaps him with static electricity. A receptionist who puts everyone on hold. A printer that never works as it should.
However, Peter does have some legitimate gripes about his managers, especially Initech VP Bill Lumbergh (Gary Cole, without a beard). Peter makes a little mistake on a TPS report, and then has to endure multiple managers counseling him about it, with Lumbergh being the worst of them.
According to writer-director Mike Judge, TPS stands for “Test Program Set.” Judge might have been thinking about the Test Program Specification of IEEE 829-1998, which has now been superseded by IEEE 829-2008, which in turn was superseded by an ISO standard in 2013.
From the movie, though, you might get the impression that TPS reports are totally pointless stuff, that TPS reports don’t translate to any actual value for the customer.
Peter goes to an occupational hypnotherapist, who puts Peter into a trance… but dies before snapping him out of it. The next day at work, Peter has a completely different attitude. He won’t let anything bother him. Not the doorknob, not the receptionist, and certainly not Lumbergh.
And Peter now also has the courage to ask Joanna (Jennifer Aniston) out on a date. Joanna is a waitress dealing with her own workplace annoyances, like a dweeb boss who seems to think the rule about the fifteen pieces of “flair” actually promotes employee self-expression.
Peter and Joanna gradually fall in love. Things are going well for Peter, but then Initech brings in efficiency consultants, and Peter becomes aware of something so unfair that will put all the other workspace annoyances in their proper context.
Peter is now considered “a straight-shooter with upper management written all over him.” But his closest coworkers and friends, Michael Bolton (David Herman) and Samir (Ajay Naidu), are going to be let go for no good reason.
Peter hatches a scheme to get back at Initech. I’m not going to tell you what the scheme is, nor what the outcome of it is. But I will tell you that at the end, Peter becomes a construction worker.
I find it plausible that Peter would want to be a construction worker. I find it less plausible that he could get a construction job and that it pays enough for his apartment.
Apparently it does, since his neighbor Lawrence (Diedrich Bader) is a construction worker, not a foreman as far as I can tell, and helps Peter get a job at the construction company that will eventually rebuild the… no, sorry, that might be too much of a spoiler.
Even in the optimistic future shown on Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, there would be people who don’t know what their ideal jobs are.
There would be construction workers who don’t know they should be poets, and poets writing bad poetry who don’t know they should be construction workers (a thousand Internet points for the first commenter who names the Next Generation episode I’m paraphrasing).
The problem with our society today is that working is incorrectly coupled with the basic necessities of living. You might be a brilliant poet, but if you want food, clothing and housing, you better get to work filling potholes.
Meanwhile, what are the richest of the rich doing on a Monday like today? Maybe they spent a few minutes in the morning looking at their stock portfolios online. Maybe they even made a few transactions. And then maybe they’re off to the country club, to goof off the rest of the day.
Speaking only for myself, I wouldn’t mind a few people being unproductive all day long if those weren’t people with the power to make things miserable for the rest of us.
Here’s the official trailer for Office Space:
For some reason I thought Clockwatchers came out the same year as Office Space. It actually came out the year before, on May 15, 1998, in limited release, and it also starred a Friends star, Lisa Kudrow.