9-5 – Anton Martin Smith Writer

by Martin Anton Smith

Once In a Corporate Office Job,

I once got a printed letter memo from HR,

Telling me of my “2% pay rise”,

& also, what the ‘new’ amount was.

I remember looking at the new amount.

Immediately something about the number didn’t quite feel right.

Then realised that it was actually a “pay cut”.

They had diddled me out of 1 Grand.

That letter summed up the workings of the madhouse I was in perfectly.

I didn’t even bother to follow it up.

I didn’t even feel annoyed angry or enraged.

I took the pay-cut-in-disguise-as-a-rise with depressed aplomb.

There was nothing else to do.

I told my next cubicle colleague about it –

They said the exact same thing happened to them.

They also didn’t do anything about it either.

Then I asked another – same story.

I guess deep down we all knew this brute fact:

There’s no profit in arguing with a madman.