Writing for a hour on - work

Writing for an hour about any subject – work.

The reason that I ask other people to suggest subjects for me is that otherwise I would go with the things that are uppermost in my mind. And what I want to do by writing something like this is “stir the pot” a bit. But work's such a big subject, I get the feeling that writing about it will result in a substantial amount of stirring.

Philip Larkin famously (or famously if you did my exam board at A-level English) asked “Why should I let the Toad work squat on my life?” But of course, this isn't exactly a rhetorical question, rather it's a fucking obvious one. Because you need the money Phil, that's the answer. Of course, by the time Larkin was writing that, he was probably at the stage where he could have given up a proper job and replaced it with an “Poet in Residence” at some prestigious American university. If you know anything about Larkin, you realise that he'd probably much rather have stayed on as a librarian in Hull, which of course is exactly what he did. But enough of Larkin. What about ME. Why do I work – well, mostly for the same reason that Phil does – I need the money. It was only after I'd spent getting on for two and half years not having a proper job that I realised that there were any other benefits of work. During that period when I was “Self-unemployed” I did find myself either alone – for a lot of the time, or when I was in the company of real human beings, I tended to find myself talking about what had been happening on twitter. Not a good sign. But then when I got a proper job, in a proper office after a long break I was amazed at how much banal chat there was. Most of my colleagues seemed to do nothing but talk about cars and football and babies. I was also amazed at how lazy some people were. I distinctly remember being in a meeting very early on which was easily the most pointless meeting that I'd ever been in my life. Of course to get the job, there'd been some, not exactly lying exactly, but lets just say, some extremely robust statements of the facts. And so when I'd started, I'd been very worried that I might be found out. That my skills weren't exactly shit hot, more piss warm. But then I was in this meeting, which was the most pointless, aimless, non-sensical meeting that I've ever been in and I cheered up.

I distinctly remember thinking to myself “This meeting is really shit! Great! There's pretty much no way I could do worse than this!”

One of the things that fascinates me, at the same time as it depresses me and infuriates me, is the way that everybody knows how to behave in a work environment. Everybody knows how to kowtow to the boss and the boss knows instinctively how to be a witless dick. This must have been something that was going on when we were roaming the savannahs. In the absence of powerpoint he would have a stack yeah-high (I'm holding my hand about shoulder height) of either interestingly painted flat stones, or pieces of tree bark. In fact, wouldn't it be great if all these cave paintings that everybody gets so excited about weren't actually “religious paintings” at all but presentation slides for a sales meeting “Uggg has been doing a marvellous job over in Waterbuffalo, so good in fact that he'll be moving, as you can see from this mysterious dot-pattern org-chart which future generations will confuse with evidence of invasions by extraterrestrials”

“And in this painting you can see that we predict mammoth slayings will double in number over the next quarter, for no reason at all other than our bonus is tied to it.”

I think this makes a lot of sense. One of the most important things to consider when you're talking about work, is cognitive dissonance. Logically, you need a job, otherwise your wife will leave you, your landlord will evict you, your cat will fuck off, and, most heart-breaking of all, your dog will stay with you and just give you this look that says “What happened? Why aren't we going back to the house? I used to really like it when I got to lie on the rug. And why are we sharing food now? So it's logical that you need a job. And for a fraction of a second, you're happy that you've got a job. And then in the following millisecond, you realise that you have a boss. OK, it was logical for you to get a job, but what happens now, the things you're asked to do, the way you feel about those things, the things that you find yourself doing all by yourself, without any prompting at all, that, really isn't logical, far from it. The most logical thing to do at work would be to slack off as much as humanly possibly, check updates on facebook more than 60 times an hour and arrange your chair so you can fantasize about doing animalistic and degrading things to the new girl in accounts. Or, actually, something I know at least one person did at one of the places I worked, spend all your time running another business from work.

Now that is logical. But what I tend to find myself doing when I'm at work. And I don't really like to admit this too loudly, is that I tend to try to please my boss. I also try to do a good job. In his fantastic blog post about “The Office” and what we can learn from it, Venkatesh Rao says that there are three kinds of people in a work environment the losers, the clueless and the sociopaths. As far as I can tell, the only difference between the losers and the clueless is that the Clueless don't know that they're doomed. It doesn't take much time after reading that article, if you're at work. And then you find yourself desperately wishing you could be a sociopath and grudingly admitting to yourself that you're probably a loser. The courage and steely determination to genuinely do fuck all only really comes easily to the kind of guy who killed cats for fun during his school holidays. You can try not doing what your boss tells you, and, especially in IT, where nobody can see anything. But the real problem with this, if you aren't a sociopath is that you let the other people that you wok with down as well. To let your own team down, that really takes a lack of regard for humanity.

Posted via email from The Ginger Mumbly