Imagine that you have the worst job in the world.

You work in a middle to high-level management position in an office building.

Your company is a strange one.  There are no policies to protect your civil rights.  You can be hired or fired for any reason your bosses choose.  Race.  Color.  Gender.  Religion.  Sexual preference.  Financial status.  Marital status.  Family life.  Or simply because they decided on a whim that they either like or dislike you.  Almost everyone hired by the company is an upper-class married, straight, white Christian.  Of course, if you yourself say anything even remotely racist, you'll almost certainly never work for this company again.

When you were first hired, you went through a year-long interviewing process.  You wore an uncomfortable suit every day, while your closest friends coached you on what to say and how to act and how to respond to trick questions.  You spent the whole year trying to be as inoffensive as possible, nervous to a point of near panic over how much is the proper eye contact, what to do with your hands, how to pronounce every single word, how to sit, how to stand, when and how to smile and even how to breathe.

In the end, the hiring committee made its decision.  Half the members never showed up that day, and of those that did, most of them based their choice solely on which fraternity you belonged to.

After you were hired, several of the members of your old fraternity who were responsible for getting you the job have come to claim favors, such as helping them embezzle funds or just giving them first dibs on some office supplies.  You don't remember having ever actually ASKED for their help, but they insist that you owe them.  You know it's dishonest, but if you don't give them what they want, they'll kill you.  That's not a metaphor.  They've murdered people in the past and gotten away with it, and you know they can do it again.

There are office snitches where you work who delight in getting you into trouble.  They take every word you say and twist it into something else.  Your bosses never ever give you the benefit of the doubt.  If your actions are in question, they always assume the worst about you.  But you just grin and bear it.

In this company you work for, you have many bosses.  There are so many, you couldn't even count them, and you are subject to listen to all of them.  Anything you say or do that they don't like, and you'll never hear the end of it from any one of them.  They will openly despise you if they disagree with you about something, whether it has anything to do with your job or not.  And they never forget nor forgive.  Ever!

One of your bosses tells you to do one thing, and another tells you to do the opposite.  They can never seem to agree on anything, but you'll be called insubordinate if you disobey either side.  You try to make compromises, but it just never seems to work.  Both sides just look at you like you're not even trying.  This happens at least a hundred times a day.  You grin and bear it.

Your bosses tell you right to your face that they hate you.  Not "dislike."  "HATE."  And you know that they mean it in the most literal sense of the word.  They make fun of you every chance they get, putting degrading cartoon drawings of you in their newsletters, telling all the secrets of your personal life over the loudspeaker, and having open serious discussions about whether or not you should have ever been born.  You can't go five minutes without being called stupid or evil or criminal or dishonest or psychotic.  But you grin and bear it.  These are the people who can fire you or hire you.  These are the people who pay your salary.  These are the people who will determine your status for the rest of your life.  So you pretend to laugh with them at yourself.  You'll do anything to make them like you, or at least, not hate you.  But it seems like nothing is ever good enough.

You and all your co-workers know that your bosses are morons, but you know better than to say so, even when you think that you're alone.  Not one of your bosses has read the company handbook.  Not one of them even knows for certain what your company's business is.  Worst of all, not one of them is really sure what your job description even is.  Some expect you to do all the accounting.  Some think you're in charge of security.  Still others think your job is fixing morale.  You were hired to be an administrator.  But no one ever asks you to coordinate the company's logistics.  They just dump all their petty problems on you and walk way.  They expect you to handle it all, while they do nothing.  But you smile and keep reassuring them how hard you're trying.  And you really do try.  They just shake their heads and say that you're hopeless, and the company is going to be ruined all because of you.  Again, you grin and bear it.

At least half of your bosses don't bother coming to work.  You wish they would, so they can tell you what it is that they want.  You really want to do a good job.  You got into this line of work because you care about the company.  It means a lot to you.  But all day long, you have to put up with the complexities of office politics, backstabbing, criticism, arguments, distractions and levels of pure ignorance so extreme, that the word "stupid" doesn't even come close to doing it justice.  You can barely get your real work done, but somehow, you manage.  Nevertheless, unless you make a mistake, no one pays attention to your work.

Many of your bosses only come to work one day a year for maybe five minutes.  They make a few snap decisions about hiring and then leave, actually feeling proud of themselves for a job so well done.  The more involved ones might skim over some information on company policy without really reading it, and then waste their time discussing the matter with people who do nothing but agree with them.

There are a few bosses who love your work, but you know they don't understand it.  A few of them actually act like they're working for you, and you are the boss.  They yell at the other bosses who won't let you do your job.  You appreciate the gesture, but deep down you'd much rather have a boss who will lead you, than one who will just get out of the way.  You sometimes feel like you're the only one who cares what happens to the company, but then you remind yourself that your bosses probably would care if they understood it, which they don't.  So you just grin and bear that too.

You also remind yourself that there are a few good benefits to your job.  Company car.  Company housing.  A really good pension plan.  But in the back of your mind, you never forget that the house and car belong to your bosses.  And as for the pension, by the time you're old enough to appreciate it, you're afraid you will have lost your mind.

You are paid adequately, but you can never repay the money you borrowed just to pay the travel expenses of getting to your first job interview.  You do a few jobs on the side for your creditors, making your full work day almost twenty-four hours.  You barely sleep.  You don't stop thinking about your job for an instant.  You have never had a coffee break that was actually a break from anything.  Your bosses don't have to work weekends or holidays, but you do.  And yet, they're the ones who do all the whining about having to work so hard.  You can only take working vacations, and each time, you still have your bosses calling you up and asking why you're wasting time.  They accuse you of not caring about them or the company.  Regardless, they make no secret of the fact that they don't care about the company themselves.  Or about you.

You live in constant fear of being fired, not just because you're afraid of losing your job, but because you're even more afraid of what someone else might do in your place.  You might be replaced with someone who really will destroy the company.  You know that you can't trust your bosses to make a decent hiring choice.  And you doubt that there is anyone as dedicated as you.  Also, you know that your bosses are just the kind of people who after firing you, would still call you up every day to remind you of all the things they don't like about you.

You deal with nothing but negativity from the time you put in your application to the day you die, and the next kind word that anyone will ever say about you will be during your eulogy.  You try not to take any of this to heart, because you know that the people around you don't understand.  But it still hurts.

You find that you have almost none of your original personality left.  You've become as much of a "company man" as is humanly possible.  It's still not good enough.  You make occasional inoffensive "office" jokes, but that's as far as you go.  Even then, you take harsh criticism.  You spend every day feeling like you want to scream, but you know that someone is always watching.  And the office snitch would LOVE to tell everyone that you're having a nervous breakdown.  You feel like you want to quit, but you can't bear the thought of it, because you love the company you work for.  You know it will never stand without hard-working people like you.  So you take your pain and use it.  You let it drive you, inspire you.  You interpret the stress as life challenging you to surrender, which only drives you to work harder.  And all the while, you must remain composed.

So you continue to play the inter-office game, and you continue to do those favors you hate for your old fraternity brothers, and you continue to make your reassurances to the deaf ears of your superiors, and you continue to perform those stupid little pet projects that your bosses keep dropping in your lap, and you avoid giving the office snitch anything he can use, and you let all the abuse from your bosses be deflected away from you by your invincible fake smile.  And somehow, in the middle of it all, you manage to get some real work done.  So what if you're told it's not enough or it was done wrong.  You know the truth.

You love your company.  You believe in the product it puts out.  You love it more than your own life or your own sanity.  Why else would you put up with all this bullshit if you didn't believe in your job?  If you didn't love the company.  The name of your company is the United States Government.  Your title is that of an elected official.  Your bosses are the ones who have the power to hire you or fire you come every election day.  They are the ones who pay your salary every time they pay their taxes.  They are the ones who give you orders with every petition and berate you with every protest.  Your sinister fraternity brothers are the corporate conglomerate lobbyists and also the national political parties.  The office snitch is the media.  The product your company manufactures is freedom.  That is the product so precious that you're willing to put up with the Worst Job in the World.