The Gospel of Anarchy

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I worked at the survey center in the Seagle Building, which stands eleven full stories on the north side of University Avenue, halfway between the eastern edge of campus and downtown. Excepting the Beaty Towers, a pair of Soviet bloc — style dorms built in the late ’60s, it was — and still is — the tallest building in all of Gainesville. Our offices were on the ground floor. We contracted with government programs and private insurers. We wore headsets, hooked into desktop computers; we felt the heat of the machines through our pant legs, even as their cooling fans keened louder, quickening their endless spin. We stared into boxy monitors with dull green screens, sat tucked behind half-height cubicle walls of coarse gray fabric flecked with colored bits like tiny festive mistakes.

The machines autodialed while we thumbed magazines. Junk stuff, mostly—Vogue, Spin, Esquire, maybe a Newsweek now and then, or Time. The magazines, page-worn and out of date, were supplied by the office, piled on a counter in the break room. Management didn’t want us reading books, or anything assigned. So no Norton Anthology, no sheaf of double-sided runoffs held together with a worry-bent staple. If you had a highlighter out, you were busted. (A dropout, none of this was a problem for me.) We had to be alert, poised, ready to get on the line and start talking to whoever answered the phone we’d dialed, or else cut the call off if a machine clicked on. We could not, therefore, afford the distraction of anything with depth.

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