The Lost Freedom to be Grumpy in the post-Fordist economy

I have been struggling with the ever-present “what is he up to and what does he have to say about it?” questions regarding our new friend Virno. I would be interested in hearing how others are answering these twin questions for themselves—I have found the “10 Theses” section at the end of this week’s piece very helpful in my own attempts to come up with some answers to these basic placement questions.
I was formulating a post calling Virno to task for leaving out any discussion of the relationship of worker to work in his characterizations of the post-1977 “post-Fordist environment.” Isn’t one of the problems of capitalism supposed to be the alienating, mind-numbing effects of working in a factory as an unthinking cog in the factory machine? But then I realized that this is a significant part of what he is talking about. For me, Virno’s characterizations of the new requirements of workers in the post-Fordist work world make a lot more sense if I think of the salesperson at a department store rather than someone whose computer usage is being mined by a multi-national for profit (though I think much of what he says applies to this latter category, too.) The salesperson must bring to bear in his or her work behavior very many aspects of his or her socialization. That is, to do the work even passably well (i.e., to at least keep the job), the salesperson must show a high degree of social and communicative skills, not just with customers but especially with co-workers and bosses. Now certainly these skills would have helped the Fordist worker to get along or even, in some cases, to advance and succeed—union organizers, for example, would similarly have to show a high level of social and communicative skills. But what (as I see Virno pointing out) has changed in the current work world is that work has expanded to include these “socialization” skills as a requirement in the production process, i.e., as a requirement of the actual work itself. The alienation of the worker under this scenario is pushed much deeper (repressed more)—the worker loses the “right” or option of coming to work alienated and grumpy but still being able to do the job. Now a cheerful and chipper attitude has become a requirement of the labor process, so the labor process can be seen as having expanded into this once-private realm of thoughts and feelings (at least insofar as these thoughts and feelings play out in terms of one’s behavior at work).
Could a successful college professor be grumpy and uncommunicative—not just on occasion, but as a standard way of being? Probably not, especially if we expand “uncommunicative” here to include not publishing. Would the worker collective in the past have been any more tolerant or protective of a grumpy and uncommunicative worker than a post-Fordist faculty department trying to decide on a vote for tenure?
I would, by the way, put in a vote for the paragraph on “Page 99” that begins with “The masterpiece of Italian capitalism...” as a brief answer to the “What is he up to?” question.