Is all you care about chasing the Yankee dollar?
S2E4: ‘Motivation’ to remember The Office is a business
This piece is part of a series on The Office (UK), running up to the 20th anniversary of its finale this Christmas. Don’t miss out by following me on Medium.
Work is what we do to maintain ourselves indirectly, trading our time and labour for money, itself a means to harness the time and labour of others to maintain ourselves. Yet in this web of deferrals there are people for whom money is primarily the imagination of money.
One such is Simon, “your favourite computer geek” as Dawn says to Tim. He’s a fan fave too, thanks to writer/actor Matthew Holness, who plays him as the sort of haughty vampiric geek he perfected for his own show with horror loudmouth Garth Marenghi.
Tim has to deal with Simon most, first as worker drone to his hieratic expert. Simon doesn’t greet him back, tells him what he does and doesn’t need to know about firewalls, and ends by giving orders to browbeaten Tim.¹
The last time Tim deals with him he has double cause to return the aggression: Rachel is present, whom he wants to…
