Charity Week, or- I'm Watching You Asshole!

This week is charity week at work! Whoa- hang on- don’t get too excited that the corporate masses have given up their hierarchical ladder-climbing ways in exchange for selfless; charity week basically consists of a decoupaged box sitting in the lobby wherein people can drop their loose change for a good cause and feel like they have contributed to the world. Besides the obvious issue of confining charity to one week a year and feeling self-satisfied, there are other ways that this drive brings out the best of the worst in so-called charity.

First, this is no random throw it all in the pot kind of change drive, this is specifically a PENNY drive, to which the office denizens say: 'hey, here's a way to get rid of those things I didn't want anyway and feel good about it. Double score for me!” As if the charity = money equation isn't problematic enough, charity = useless money takes passive activism to another level.

I know, I know- the additive power of all our pennies can make a difference. But can you imagine what the 150 people in this office could do if they came together to clean up a park, tutor kids or support grassroots organizations with much smaller budgets than the current beneficiary of our drive- UNICEF. Yes UNICEF the United Nations Children’s Fund, whose operating budget for 2006 was $2.8bil. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against UNICEF- they do good work supporting maternal and child health all over the world and have managed to piss off anti-choice Catholics with their support of contraceptives (hey- the enemy of my enemy is my friend, right?). But I digress.

The real revelation about the true meaning of charity came after just the first day of do-gooding. As the receptionist- the lobby is my domain (believe me in a corporate office full of tiny identical cubicles and elementary school-grade carpeting everyone stakes out their domain) and therefore I am responsible for putting away the penny-filled box every evening. Which, of course, I forgot to do. Maybe it was that charity is so far outside the realm of what I am typically assigned (read: things I don’t remotely care about) that it didn’t occur to me, maybe I was on overdrive to get the fuck out of this office at the end of the day (most likely), or maybe it’s because the neurotic person in charge of charity week moved the box about 50 times trying to find its precise feng shui location.

How does one person have so much time to attend to one single box? Probably because it is half of her job description. This particular overpaid corporate head honcho is in charge of ‘Special Projects’- for which no one seems to have an actual definition. As far as I can tell she organizes the charity week and complains about people using too much paper (otherwise known as jumping on the “going green” bandwagon- more on that in a later post). Basically she gets paid 150K a year to act morally superior and shame other people in the company into doing the right thing- shit…I could do that!

So after the box has finally found a home, I forget to move it to a super secret hiding spot for the night (re: under a desk) and the next morning there Ms. Special Projects is waiting to berate me the second I arrive (I guess shaming was early on her very busy schedule that day). She want to make sure I know that someone could have stolen the hard-earned pennies. Yeah, “someone,” by whom she means the housekeeping staff that work overnight. Oh right, I forgot, because poor people steal. Glad I had her there to help me sort that one out. Does she really think that someone working nights making minimum wage is in the position to risk their job for a handful of pennies. Not to mention the ridiculous elitism of collecting money for impoverished people all over the world (who you don't ever have to see), while judging the low-income people right in your own office based the classist stereotype that poor people are liars and theives. Can't you just feel the charitable spirit?