Just caught up with the latest season of The Office; as a 23-year veteran of the envelope business, I've been enjoying this show on a somewhat rarified level. As you might guess, the paper, envelope, and printing industries are closely linked, and it's been a delight to see how accurately the writers on The Office portray the paper-biz dynamics. Of course, most of the jokes translate to nearly any business office, but there are some funny dynamics to the paper business that outsiders probably don't get, and yet the writers seem to capture them very insightfully.
I was a bit disappointed when I first started watching The Office, as I have about 120 pages of a novel set in an envelope factory and office (write what you know!) and my story was a very absurdist treatment, a lot of buffoonish characterizations and ridiculous situations, and the same sample chapters which recieved so much dismissal by the agencies I sent them to read now like Office episodes. The most consistent observation I got in my rejection letters was "we doubt the reading public will be interested in the minutae of your setting."
Guess I should've been writing spec scripts.
Particularly telling is the story arc of "The Michael Scott Paper Co."-the companies selling paper, by and large, are not subsidiaries of the companies making paper-they are merely distributors. I've always felt funny about that, that a company could be founded on the principle of merely distributing the products of actual producers. When my envelope career was brought to an end, I had offers from paper distributors but I could not bring myself to move into distribution-I enjoyed being involved in manufacturing, but I had no interest in a career wherein I was purely a middle-man. I've wondered if Ricky Gervais picked paper-distribution for his setting partly because it is such a "non-industry".
I could go on and on about the minutae of paper and printing; the decades I spent with it have front-loaded me with information that's a bit alarming when I really start revisiting it. I sort-of wish I could reclaim all that brain-space, but, oh well. I have to say, I'm pretty glad to be done with it all.
By the way, look for the brass eagles in the background of The Office-those were give-aways from National Envelope, my old company. First time I saw one I about bust a gut!
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I've never watched this show and know even less about paper. It seems humor is everywhere if you look. Nice blog post.
ReplyDeleteI watched the first couple episodes and was less-than-whelmed; later, I caught a couple of later episodes and it seemed they'd gotten their feet under them. It's been a little uneven but overall I like the show a lot. As noted, I think some of the characters and some of the situations speak to almost any office. There's basically no television show that I schedule my week or evening around, but I do like catching up with this one.
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