Office Space Bobs and Oval Office Obama-- by Nate Winter

Remember the movie Office Space from 1999? I watched it on cable last week and was reminded not just how funny it is, but how on point it was in 1999 and how relevant it still is today. Rather poignant in the foremath of the Y2K scare and its comical depiction of corporate excess in a tech company, a poignant yet unintentional foreshadowing of the .com and tech bubble burst of the early aughts, and The Recession of today. We're all seeing the light after realizing how cushy things used to be at our corporate jobs.

The outward premise of the film is that our protagonist Peter Gibbons (played by Ron Livingston) hates his job as a software developer and contributes nothing to his employer, Initech. His work environment clearly sucks, but he’s not exactly trying to make the best of it. So we have a “chicken or the egg” scenario where it's difficult to determine if Peter’s uninspiring workplace caused his lackadaisical work ethic, or if his inherent laziness contributed to an intolerable office. Ultimately we side with Peter because we bear witness to the agonizing ennui of his day-to-day corporate drone existence.

A major turning point in the film is in Peter's first meeting with consultants Bob Slydell and Bob Porter, known collectively as "the Bobs," who have been hired to help Initech identify its dead-weight employees and lay them off. This meeting takes place shortly after Peter's hypnosis-induced enlightenment sets in. In the meeting, Peter is painfully candid with the Bobs about his distaste for Initech and work in general. Much to our comedic delight, the Bobs are sympathetic toward Peter's lack of motivation at work and they support his requests to change the way Initech runs. So not only do the Bobs not fire Peter on the spot, but they kiss his ass and promote him. And it’s hilarious.

After seeing Office Space again, and after receiving a handful of emails from the Obama For America during the holidays, I noticed an interesting parallel between the two.

The American people were a bunch of Peter Gibbonses in a political system that resembled Initech. We were alienated by the steep learning curve of political awareness, and intimidated by the difficulty in getting an unbiased synthesis of the issues. The Bill Lumberghs of the political system insisted that it was the public's responsibility to keep up with the issues, telling us to "Get with the program!" The rationale was that it's easier to ask the people to work harder than to change a giant political system for easier comprehension.

As Peter Gibbonses, we were slogging through our political lives, doing the bare minimum we could get away with as citizens-- voting in occasional elections and watching the nightly news, but not really understanding the details of what was going on. We understood and did just enough to not embarrass ourselves at the office water cooler. And in the face of our underachievement, Obama took our side instead of telling us to shape up and get with the program.

Obama treated us in his campaign like the Bobs treated Peter in Office Space. Obama's overarching message was that it wasn't our fault we didn’t understand or care about our own political system. But if we wanted to make things better, he'd walk us through it every step of the way. And when he finally got what he’d been leading us toward like sheep the whole time (his election), we got all the credit. No wonder people loved Obama.

-- Nate Winter