A guest post by Dante Alighieri
Imagine everything you hate about your current commute… and be thankful for it.
In the Second Circle of Job Hell, your actual job is irrelevant. Most of your time will be spent languishing in the most heinous daily commute imaginable.
Employees of the Second Circle discover emotions below misery and beyond rage. Words fail to describe the traffic adversary against which you will be pitted. This cartoonish map, however, should convey the idea quite well:
Botticelli’s Map of the Second Circle of Job Hell
As you can tell, your path to the office could not be any worse. How will you pass the hours?
Your only entertainment will be AM radio. This isn’t so bad, really, and should help keep you amused. Unfortunately, listening means you’ll hear traffic updates every 6 minutes, the content of which is merely a refrain as to how hopeless the traffic situation is at the intersection of the perimeter and I-666.
Since your air conditioning doesn’t work, you will have to get used to a perpetually sunburned left forearm, and yet even with the windows down, you will still show up to work drenched with sweat thanks to the lack of airflow during the intervals of gridlock.
To top it all off, your co-workers don’t understand why you are always late. They all live just around the corner and roll their eyes when you blame the traffic for being late. Worse still, your boss has a loft right above the corporate offices.
In a valiant attempt to be on time, you leave progressively earlier and earlier each day. It makes no difference, of course–this is Job Hell. Occasionally and without explanation, you will arrive to work insanely early as a result of trying to adjust for traffic.
It’s at that moment that you remember that your employer took away your key card some time ago (habitual tardiness is a sign of an unstable employee, after all). As a result, you will have to sit in your car until the earliest of your co-workers arrives to swipe his card in the front door–a mere 5 minutes before work starts and only ten minutes earlier than you’d normally get there anyway.
The Third Circle to come next week!
-Dante
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17 responses so far ↓
1 Melissa // Aug 3, 2007 at 3:32 pm
This is hilarious!!! Where do you come up with this stuff. I haven’t laughed this hard in a long time.
2 Maureen Rogers // Aug 3, 2007 at 9:25 pm
Chuck - This is just too, too funny. I had that commute from hell in an un-AC’d car with an AM radio. I had to get a mouth guard because I was grinding my teeth all the way to work. And, naturally, that “work” was the worst job of my professional career.
3 Mark M // Aug 4, 2007 at 1:51 am
I commute using public transport. 50 km per day, usually taking around 2.5 hours, means I have an average commuting speed of 20 kph (12.4 miles per hour).
4 Chuck Westbrook // Aug 4, 2007 at 9:30 am
@Melissa– All the credit goes to Dante, friend.
5 Chuck Westbrook // Aug 4, 2007 at 9:31 am
@Maureen– A mouth guard… yikes. Did you ever find yourself clenching your fists from tension?
6 Chuck Westbrook // Aug 4, 2007 at 9:35 am
@Mark M– Yuck, sorry to hear that. This post probably hit pretty close to home for you, then.
At the same time, I live in Atlanta, and there have been days when I was driving and wound up going about that same speed (12 mph) thanks to traffic.
You at least able to get stuff done on the train/bus?
7 Mackenzie // Aug 4, 2007 at 12:49 pm
Ha! Love the map, Dante.
8 Bush Mackel // Aug 5, 2007 at 6:34 am
Hilarious. (#):)
9 Peggy // Aug 5, 2007 at 9:54 am
“Botticelli’s Map of the Second Circle of Job Hell” is hysterical!!!
I could not handle the commute of most Americans. I slowly go insane during any traffic jam of any length….
I begin a job tomorrow that will take me 5 minutes to drive to. If I encounter any traffic nightmares in this 5 minute drive…I will pull off, put my car in park, lock it and then walk the rest of the way to work..
10 Roderick Chambers // Aug 5, 2007 at 9:49 pm
Excellent representation, living in the second worse city for commute times, I feel your pain.
11 Chuck Westbrook // Aug 7, 2007 at 12:29 pm
@Mackenzie– Thanks!
12 Chuck Westbrook // Aug 7, 2007 at 12:30 pm
@Bush– Hope things are going better for you these days…
13 Chuck Westbrook // Aug 7, 2007 at 12:30 pm
@Peggy– I love the idea of abandoning your vehicle in the face of traffic problems.
14 Chuck Westbrook // Aug 7, 2007 at 12:32 pm
@Roderick– The upside is that the bad traffic areas usually at least have the best/most radio station options… not much of an upside, though.
15 Roderick // Aug 11, 2007 at 8:12 am
Chuck, while this is true some people around here could HOST a radio show with the commute time they have!
16 onlineanjali // Aug 24, 2007 at 1:42 am
Hey chuck this is a very well said post…. amusing!!! I never thought of it before… but your perception makes me smile over it
17 Eric S. Mueller // Aug 31, 2007 at 1:40 pm
What’s even worse is when you live in an area that functions as a suburb for a metropolis across a state line. I live in south New Jersey, and most of our news and traffic reports come from stations in Philadelphia. I can’t tell you how many times I have been parked on I-295 admiring the pavement and just for the heck of it tuned into a traffic report to hear about the jam ups in Philly with the catch “traffic over in New Jersey is moving along just fine”.
I don’t even bother anymore. I download podcasts onto my iPod to listen to in the car. I don’t even listen to the radio anymore.
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