I was talking with a friend of mine a few months ago, and we were talking about her expenses. She mentioned how much she doles out for the ride and the roof alone, and how that's one check already spent every month. The utilities, the threads, the grub and maybe a night out on the town handles the other check. And somehow she has to afford petro to make the wheels spin.

When I asked about her j-o-b, she didn't seem too excited about it. Just another day in the system. You may be familiar with this formula: overworked and underpayed. All that and you have some cyborg telling you when you can take a vacation, if you can leave work early and whether or not you deserve a raise.

Little did she realize that I am not the ideal sympathetic one to discuss the system. I have escaped and have become an advocate for everyone to take control of their lives and their careers. My reply goes something like, "Well, unless you start making decisions for yourself, you will be doing that for the next 40 years. Then you die."

Sounds grim? Tell me it's a lie.

Of course some people love their j-o-b. Not everyone has to put in 40 hours a week, or off-peak cell phone hours (nights & weekends?), or are limited to five days out of 365 for vacation. "There's nothing wrong with working in the system," they tell me, "when the alternative is not working at all." I agree, with the second part of that statement.

But I'm not going to hate on those who have been injected with a high dosage of denial and inflicted with a backbone disease. Apparently they've been Abu Ghraibed by their job and believe that without it, they won't be able to survive. I understand that a goal of every employer is to find good employees and give them just enough to feel appreciated, maybe give them a fancy title (did you know that Ford Motor Company has 53 vice presidents?), a raise every six months (if that many), a business card and of course, the personal cubicle. Then there is the high-tech strategy of 401k matching if you stay just long enough to get attached to the job and too lazy to find another job. There's also the two weeks vacation if you stay just so long. Two weeks? That's 2.7% of the year, meaning you're available for work 97% of the year. Don't forget the Christmas party where everyone gets a company t-shirt.

The reason many people love their j-o-b is because they fear the alternative. Not the being without a j-o-b part. We've all been there, and it's not that bad. Challenging, but not impossible. People fear being responsible for themselves and their futures.

There is a comfort in knowing you'll make $65,000 this year as long as you do what you're told to do. And if you make a mistake, you have an army of people to help you get through it, support you, show you how to fall back in line and be the best robot you can be. And when things really get crazy, there's always someone making $1.2 million at the top of the ladder who can scare you into understanding the propellorhead manual.

In case you're reading too fast, let me reiterate: People are afraid, scared out their wit and absolutely intimidate with having to make decisions for themselves that can have an impact on the rest of their lives. People are petrified of taking responsibility for their own futures.

Who knows, maybe I'll post again about how this huge hypnotism came about, how people became victims of accepting being have nots to the haves, the thinking process of the human robots, why it's important to have these robots, why you don't want to be one of those robots, why the system is an illusion and your dreams will always be just dreams, how to escape the system, why anyone can escape the system with or without technical skills, the one characteristic you need to survive outside th system and most importantly, how remaining in the system has already stole the most precious thing from you that you can ever have: your own life.