Alienating my own labour

[robinturner]

Having taught Marx on alienation, it's occurred to me that I've just managed to alienate my own labour.

First I rewrote my shell script for whipping student essays off a floppy disk, converting them to plain text and writing them to the appropriate corpus file. That's pretty much what Marx might have called "creative labour"; I'm using my abilities partly to produce something I want and will use, and partly just because I like doing that kind of thing ("species-being" and all that).

Now, however, I'm dogin the following:

Insert floppy disk.
Hit the up arrow key.
Hit Enter.
Remove floppy disk.
Insert floppy disk.
Hit the up arrow key.
Hit Enter.
Remove floppy disk.
Insert floppy disk.
Hit the up arrow key.
Hit Enter.
Remove floppy disk.......

Alienated labour or what?