idiot at work — i looked into it

idiot at work is a category of person, and also, on tuesdays, a documentary about my afternoon, which the plants on the windowsill have been filming without releasing the tape.

the printer two cubicles over is making the noise it makes before it asks for paper. carla stepped out at 4:47, came back at 10:14, left again at 10:19, and i have, by the sun on the philodendron, maybe forty minutes before anyone notices i am writing this and not the deck.

so. there is the idiot at work in the small sense — a man with a spreadsheet on monitor one and this draft on monitor two — and there is the idiot at work in the larger sense, which is what i want to discuss while my employer pays for the chair. the plants on the sill above the radiator are watching. sixteen months and the pothos has not blinked. i’ll get to the pothos.

idiot at work: a person performing labor while simultaneously performing the smaller, quieter, ongoing labor of being themselves — usually badly, usually publicly, usually before a jury of houseplants. the plants don’t say anything. the plants don’t have to. that is the entire problem.

PLANTS. ARE. SILENT. LANDLORDS.

what an idiot at work actually does, since you asked, and you did

the idiot at work, in my specific case, sits next to a window with three plants i did not buy. they were here when i arrived. they will be here when i am not. somebody waters them. it is not me. i am, at minimum, the fourth idiot to sit in this chair, and there is a coffee ring on the wood that predates my employment by an entire decade.

i am, in technical terms, supposed to be reviewing a deck for the renewal push. eighteen slides. i have, so far, opened it. opening a file, i would argue, IS reviewing it — the way picking up a book at a bookstore counts, ethically, as reading. an argument i borrowed from a man at the bar who works in insurance, and it holds up at 10:23am on a monday.

meanwhile the pothos on the sill has produced one new leaf since friday. that is more measurable output than i have generated all morning. the pothos is winning. and the pothos is, crucially, not paying rent. not a cent. it photosynthesizes on company time, and we, the humans with direct deposit, bring it water and apologize when it droops.

the take i will defend until somebody waters me

the windowsill, the office, and the small daily eviction

so the idiot at work, on any given monday, is being silently audited by three to seven plants, depending on how nice the office is. the nicer the office, the more plants. the more plants, the more landlords. you walk past a fiddle leaf fig on your way to the bathroom and you can feel the rent notice. it remembers monday.

i had, once, in a kitchen i no longer live near, a peace lily named brenda. brenda demanded one cup of water on tuesdays. i missed three tuesdays in a row in the spring of 2022, and brenda staged a slow leafy resignation across two weeks. i found her, at the end, crisp. the pot is still in a closet because throwing it out felt like losing a small claims case.

so when i tell you the pothos is my landlord, i’m speaking from experience. ask me again why i’m so attentive to the soil moisture of a plant that doesn’t know my name. ask the kitchen i can no longer enter without flinching at the empty hook above the sink.

the pop-culture defense, with witnesses

i am not, for the record, the first man to identify this. there is a long tradition in cinema of plants being the most intimidating roommates available. the plant in jurassic park (1993) — the one in the visitor center, before everything goes wrong — is, when you watch it back, the calmest character in the room. it knows. it has been there. plants do not panic. plants do not file expense reports. plants occupy the high ground by simply not getting involved.

the only character at this company with better posture than the pothos is carla, and carla is in a meeting about whether the renewal push should be pushed, which is the kind of meeting that breaks posture eventually. by the time she returns, the pothos and i will both have outlasted her. me, by hiding. it, by being a plant.

objections, considered, mostly dismissed

i have heard the objections. mostly from a dream-version of mike at the bar who pushes back on hot takes. dream-mike says: “plants are not landlords. plants are dependents.” dream-mike is wrong. let’s take it seriously anyway, in the spirit of being an idiot at work who occasionally pretends to do thinking.

objection one: a landlord receives rent; a plant only receives water. counter: a landlord, in many cases, receives rent and contributes very little — the door has been broken since february, the radiator clangs at 3am, the man does not return calls. the contract is “occupy space, extract maintenance”. the plant occupies. the plant extracts. the difference is the plant has the decency not to lie about why.

objection two: plants don’t choose to be there; you bought them. counter: i did not buy the pothos. it came with the desk. it was a clause in a lease i did not read. i inherited a landlord and i’ve been paying upkeep ever since. the plant is in charge. i am the idiot at work, and the plant is the work.

findings, filed under the small dry leaf on my keyboard

so. we end where we began. windowsill. chair that has held at least four idiots before me. the deck is still at slide one. the philodendron has produced one and a half leaves since this draft began. carla is, by the sound of the elevator, returning. i will minimize this.

but for the record — for the small dry leaf next to my keyboard, fallen from a plant whose name i do not know — let me say it one more time, because that’s what an idiot at work does, he repeats himself to the chlorophyll:

plants are silent landlords. minor hill. i’ll die on it. my body will fertilize the basil.

if you want the broader argument about being an idiot, properly defined and credentialed, i wrote that one from this same desk in slightly better light. for an afternoon that feels like a small crime, read about the elif batuman novel called the idiot, which i have not read, but which sits on a shelf in this very building judging me like a plant with pages. distantly related: the idiot box and one yellow sponge covers what a tv-shaped landlord wants from us, also attention, also paid in glances. if you’re new, here is what the word idiot actually means. cross-cluster, for the brave: confirmation bias, by someone who is always right, applies to my plant theory in ways i refuse to examine.

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