I found the following passage in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit interesting:

"In this strange, polite world high in the sky above Rockefeller Center, maybe nobody ever really got fired. Maybe all Hopkins did was to give a man nothing to do, absolutely nothing to do, until he started to go out of his mind sitting uselessly in his office all day, and resigned. Maybe that was the polite, smooth way to get rid of a man nobody wanted" (138).

In the passage we get a conflation of the heaven/hell dichotomy. What is usually thought of as the ideal place, where one gets paid to sit and do nothing, turns out to be a peculiar kind of torture to Tom, his own private hell. Perhaps this is a further sign of Tom's cynicism, but I think there's something else working in this passage beyond just characterizing his temperament. Wilson provides us in this passage with an empty space situated within the rat-race usually associated with the corporate world. There's a sort of fear inherent in this space that the moment there's no work then there's no worker. Tom might as well have disappeared in this scene, at least in his own thinking, since he momentarily serves no purpose in the community of which he has become a part. This line of thinking is interesting especially since it is usually seen to come from the top: managers worried that workers are not utilizing every moment of their time to perform pertinent work. It is also an inversion of the Marxist concept of surplus-labor in which workers labor beyond the hours they are actually paid for. I'm not quite sure what to make of the implications of the passage yet but I think it would make a good topic for classroom discussion.