Office Space
Ask ten geeks their favourite top ten movies, and you’ll probably hear this one a few times. It’s definitely one of mine! To be honest, I had never heard of it until it appeared in an article on Digg. It’s one of those movies that never became a box office success, but got a cult-like following later. This review will contain a few spoilers, so consider yourself warned. Let’s start with the story.
Peter, the main protagonist, is a programmer who’s working on banking software. He hates his job and, most of all, his boss. His friend Michael hates the fact that his last name is Bolton and everybody asks him if he’s related to the singer Michael Bolton (who he describes as a “no talent ass clown”), while his other friend Samir gets angry when people can’t pronounce his last name (it’s Nagheenanajar). Instead of working, Peter spends most of his time just staring at his computer, pretending to work and hoping his boss won’t ask him to work on saturday.
One day, Peter’s life changes dramatically. When his therapist hypnotises him, tells him to forget all of his worries and then dies of a heart attack, he stops caring about his job and feels happier than ever. He ignores his boss and bossy girlfriend (who dumps him for doing so) and even stops going to work, only showing up every once in a while. At the same time, his company hire consultants to find out who they can fire. Instead of firing Peter, he gets promoted, because the consultants think his current job doesn’t motivate him enough. His pals Michael and Samir aren’t so lucky, though, and that’s when Peter gets an idea.
Michael once told him he could rip off the company for millions if he wanted to. The only thing that stopped him was the fact that he had a good job and didn’t want to risk it. Now that he’s fired, Peter convinces him to go through with it. The idea is to write a computer virus that takes tiny amount off every bank transaction and tranfer it to their bank account. Michael writes the virus, Samir uploads it, and then they wait for the cash to flow in. And flowing in it does, but a little bit too fast…
It turns out Michael misplaced a decimal point and instead of tiny amounts that nobody notices, several hundreds of thousands of dollars disappear in a matter of days! There’s no way they can keep this a secret and after a lot of panic, Peter decides to confess and take the blame. At night, he writes a confession note and drops it off at his boss’ office, together with the money they stole. The next day he goes to work, expecting to get arrested. Things turn out a bit different, though…
Milton, a quiet guy who gets pushed around a lot, breaks into the boss’ office to get his favorite stapler back. He finds the enveloppe with the money and then does what he mumbled about to himself several times before: set the building on fire! When Peter arrives, everything is ablaze and all the evidence is destroyed.
Ok, spoiler alert is over here. About the cast. Not too many famous people. Probably the most well-known cast member is Jennifer Aniston, who plays a waitress that Peter has a crush on. Stephen Root and Richard Riehle, who played two of Peter’s coworkers, also appeared together in the sitcom Grounded for life.
Like I said before, the movie wasn’t really a box office hit but got a cult following later. One scene in particular is very famous: the “going away present”. Apart from Bill Lumbergh, their boss, there’s one more thing Peter, Michael and Samir hate more than anything else: the printer! It jams all the time and displays cryptic error messages that don’t make any sense (such as “PC load letter”, wich apparently stands for “paper cassette load letter format”). When they are fired, Peter steals the printer and they all beat the crap out of it. A parody of it was even made on Family Guy. Another memorable thing from the movie is the term “TPS report”, wich is a popular term for any sort of pointless paperwork. It stands for “Totally Pointless Shit”. It was even featured in the first season of Lost.
If you haven’t seen this movie, do so now. Buy it, rent it, download it, whatever, just watch it. It’s full of the workplace-related agony we face on a daily basis (annoying bosses and coworkers, paper jams, slow computers) but turns it into something funny. And it shows things we all dreamed about but never had the guts to actually do.
