Dante was only partly right when he spoke of hell being frozen over. It was not frozen because of the perpetual flapping wings of the horned beast. Instead, the flames stand frozen in place because Janet from accounting keeps turning down the thermostat too low. You see, hell, far from being bloodied and gruesome is more like a quite mid-level open floor office setting. In Dante’s nine hells, the torments become increasingly more horrendous. In my vision of the nine hells, each torment becomes increasingly bureaucratic, mundane, and regulated. You enter through the sliding glass doors, check-in with the receptionist, Beelzebub, and never leave unless it’s your day to get the coffee.
In the first layer of torment, you may only find yourself in line at a place much like the DMV of your hometown, which doesn’t cause too much discomfort. The worst that you may endure is the screeches of an undisciplined and bored child, but you come to tune them out with time. However, by the final layer, you’ll find yourself working as a manager in the open office space of an average survey collection agency. Where your daily tasks include requesting permission from your local government municipality to mail a survey that asks people from your community about the frequency of their McDonald’s sweet tea consumption and filing a never-ending torrent of HR complaints about Janet’s constant habit of turning down the thermostat, something she does despite being repeatedly told by Jeffery that “he needs the office at a ripe Seventy-two degrees or his sciatica will flare up.”
Each complaint filed to HR requires that you sign in triplicate and hold a reconciliation meeting where the offender and offended must meet in your presence with two or more of their randomly chosen peers. With each descent, the paperwork becomes more tedious, and the office slights become ever more obscure and insidious until you’re left quivering in the accessible stall of the bathroom, wondering to yourself, “How long until my boss notices I am gone. If I can stay in here for fifteen more minutes, I will only have seven and half hours of work left to go.”
I can’t speak for you, but I know that I would prefer to be stuck enduring the visceral torments of Dante’s damnation than having to attend an endless string of meetings about various minutia around the office. At least in Dante’s hell, the pain is immediate, external, and obvious. The damage inflicted by the never-ending chain of bureaucratic tasks doesn’t erode you physically, other than the carpal tunnel, but it wears down your will. Physical pain may inevitably drive you insane, but the pain caused to the soul of an individual by the meaningless mundane knows no bounds.
Many people kill themselves as a result of constant pain, but even more people kill themselves due to living meaningless lives. That is the ultimate danger threatened by the drudgery of a mid-level office job at a useless company. That is the insidious nature of my vision of hell. It does not inflict pain to kill but only maims the psyche in perpetuity. No outward signs of torture, only scars left on the soul. The worst form of abuse. Physical pain may be forgotten with time, but the damage inflicted on the soul lasts forever. It is as eternal as the soul.
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Been there, done that! Redeemed from prairie-dogging hell of cubicle life! Fortunately, did not demonstrate enough evil intentions to graduate to “lower” levels of management. 😄