My sophomore year roommate and I were never huge fans of big business. He's a computer geek with an anarchic streak and I'm a newspaper geek who's spent the last four years working for free for a non-profit company.
We're aligned in our distaste for the world of briefcases and cufflinks and the vast globalized corporate environment that constricts the automatons who toil within it. Neither of us ever aspired to be a consultant or an investment banker. He just wants to program. I just want to write.
But as we move out of the Duke bubble, Rob and I have found ourselves trapped in the money-obsessed universe outside the University. Although we've both taken relatively fun jobs, within months we'll both become tiny cogs in giant, faceless bureaucracies, complete with proactivity, planning documents and Powerpoint presentations.
Worst of all, we're pitted against each other in one of the heated wars in that terrible territory of tremendous transactions: Giant Corporate Mega-Merger Land. You see, Rob is going to work for America Online, which now owns Time Warner and is thus affiliated with anything Time, Warner or Turner. And I've taken an internship at Newsweek, which is owned by the Washington Post Co. and affiliated with MSNBC (itself a conglomerate of NBC and-shudder-Microsoft.)
So now Rob and I will be battling on two levels: the old-media conflict between Time and Newsweek and the 21st century AOL-Microsoft fight for dominance.
At one time, it seemed that our career paths would diverge quite sharply, with Rob going off into the world of technobabble and me heading into the fast-paced newsroom environment. But all of a sudden, with companies combining and aligning in new ways seemingly every day, the media and computer industries have become one, creating new rivalries along the way. Rob and I have been unwittingly pulled into this rapidly changing world, forced to compete with each other.
Admittedly, we won't be anywhere near the boardrooms where the competition is the most heated, but it might even be worse this way. We'll be pawns in the war, churning out work daily for our companies' broader goals.
Now I don't quite know how to behave. Although I'm sure the Newsweek newsroom is just as friendly-if not as messy-as The Chronicle's, I've still never been in such a professional/corporate environment before, and I don't know how far the mega-merger rivalry should extend into my personal psychology and actions.
Am I supposed to implicitly dislike Rob now? Am I supposed to determine my personal allegiances based on my corporate ties? How should us Newsweek-Washington Post-MSNBC people treat AOL-Time-Warner-Turner people, let alone CBS-Viacom people or ABC-Disney-ESPN people?
If had to venture a guess, it would be that all these acronymic hyphenated entities just want us to shut up and do our work.
Richard Rubin is a Trinity senior and managing editor of The Chronicle.
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