Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to John Armstrong,
The idea that taking pride in shitty work is imposed on us in order to keep us in line is utter tosh. Doing a job properly, even a shitty one, is about basic self-respect.
I'm not so sure. I think the two points of view are not asking the same question, that both you and Gio are right, but there is a disconnect about the purpose.
I have certainly experienced many a time being told to take more pride in fucking dull work, usually by the boss who essentially wants me to work harder. Also by teachers who gave out tedious assignments, and would load me up with extra ones because I'd managed to do the other ones quickly. I have, since a young age, seen this as an attempt to build up false consciousness in me.
However, there is, of course, truth in what they say, that you can find satisfaction in dull work if you have to, and you really try. I have to do the dishes, so I've learned to enjoy doing the dishes, to do it properly (hey Gio, I even dry some of the dishes in the rack, however much I thought you might be attempting to develop false consciousness in me). It's a valuable skill to learn, to be able to force yourself through dull things.
The solution to the conundrum is that one is a personal ethic for your own benefit, the other is someone trying to impose this personal ethic for their benefit. If you fail, it's not because you're a failure. Some tasks actually just are boring/demeaning/unpleasant for some people. Most people would blanch at learning to program a computer, for instance. Some ways that you change people's work do rob them of their dignity - that's been one of the least pleasant things I've found from years of computer programming, just how often this is exactly what the product is meant to do, to take skilled work, and impose some horrible simplification on it, just to get rid of some staff. Then the job is done in a half arsed way, but cheaper (although usually the development time and the extraordinarily high cost of people to fix the system are conveniently swept under the carpet).
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Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Oh, then fine. I took "should work" to mean, you know, "should work".
I actually read Che as I think he intended (and let's once again NOT have this argument). IOW, when he said "should work" I think he meant "should be allowed to work". It seemed clear from the context.
ETA: Which is why I didn't disagree with him. I'm not yet at the point of advocating enforced retirement nor enforced reduction in working week. Not that I think these ideas are in themselves wrong or evil, but I think there are other changes that have to come first, or they would hurt a lot of people really badly.
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Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to Rich Lock,
I spent six months picking capsicums in Queensland, and I can think of absolutely nothing about it that wasn't mindless. It didn't even have the bonus of learning how to manage short-tempered underpaid staff armed with sharp instruments.
Oh, yes, I forgot to mention my two season stints at thinning pears. When I brought a friend along for the second season, the owner decided to pay me 50c per hour more. The friend was righteously outraged whenever he came across a tree that I'd done in a half-arsed way. It was pretty silly - the skill took about 10 minutes to learn, but the owner was a Nat and believed in rewarding the laborer who had done their time.
It could probably be argued that you learnt something or brought something to all of those jobs you listed.
Of course. I brought an intimate knowledge of the works of Bertrand Russell to every customer buying gas. So far as I could tell, if that was ever noticed at all, it was a source of either anti intellectual anger, or pro intellectual lamentation, but it certainly made no difference to the petrol sales.
Plus, that works only for the people who are lucky enough to have a character arc.
I was hoping to convey that my character arc had absolutely nothing to do with my gainful employment until that last job. Until then, it was only a source of misery, and in one case, redundancy.
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I will agree with John Armstrong (are you the one from the Herald?) that there is no such thing as objectively mindless and boring work. One guy I worked with in the gas station absolutely loved it. He was a nice enough guy, but really, really thick. If I considered it boring, it might have been a function of the kind of things my mind likes to do, which is not, on the whole, spending a lot of time on the details of stock placement in a shop, or the tricks of efficient vacuuming. He would come in on his days off to do it just for fun. Perhaps the old people in Subway are like that. But why weren't they doing it in the 80s, if there was always a portion of society so inclined?
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Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to Steve Barnes,
So, not a great success then?.
Depends on your perspective. Rental car customers are seldom repeats, they're holiday makers, probably never going to come back. I made sure the people buying petrol got priority (which was only fair really, you don't expect to have to wait 20 minutes to pay for your petrol). So him being able to save $40 on staff costs might have been compelling. I think it was more that he thought there was some moral lesson in it for me - he was a pure capitalist, and also a friend of my parents, who he thought were hopeless idealist socialists, educated urban liberal twits. The guy had massive anger in him, it seethed from every pore. He died suddenly from a heart attack a few years later, well before his time. I felt terribly sad about it. Seriously. Despite being a slave-driver, he did love to have a good old argument about abstract things, and found it especially fun to pick on a philosophy student, because I'd fight back. So he got a free education to boot, but I welcomed the distraction - talking about ethics made vacuuming out a car a much less unpleasant chore.
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Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to John Armstrong,
There is no such thing as mindless work, and to claim otherwise in an insult to the people who do it.
That's totally untrue. There is endless mindless work. I brought nothing to my childhood paper run other than an ability to ride a pushbike, and that was not essential, it just made my job easier. I did actually enjoy some aspects of the job - quite a lot of old people are up at that time, and relish the human contact of the paper boy. There was some pride in doing the work well, which pretty much involved working out how not to destroy the outer page on the fuxored letterboxes many people have, and making accurate estimations of how many papers I could carry, and what the optimal paths for delivery were (although it never once occurred to me at that age to take steps to make my job easier, like moving the pile of papers to the center of the delivery area, something one of my old morning "friends" would probably have been happy to accommodate, for the price of a few more minutes of my attention every morning).
But none of that mattered squat to the boss, whose only concern was that he got no complaints, and he could pay me the absolute pittance that you can get away with giving to a child. I could tell he liked me, every other delivery boy hated the job and slacked off a lot, which is probably why papers aren't delivered by children any more.
And mostly the job was dull as ditchwater, and the most enjoyable part about it was the ride home afterward, and obviously the bit where I got payed my $20 for 7 hours work (including 2 hours on the weekend - how I loathed those enormous fat papers). It was almost always freezing cold, and I couldn't wear gloves because it's too difficult to manage paper. It began at 6am, which meant I was perpetually exhausted throughout my early teens, doing school and a lot of sport at the same time. My school work improved enormously when I quit.
The main thing I learned from it was the appreciation of the fact that a lot of the time, if you want money, you have to do dull things.
It was, however, a nicer job than working at McDonalds, the only part of which I enjoyed was operating the garbage compactor. I lasted 6 months.
For my next fucking boring mindless job, I tended a petrol station on weekends as a student, because I was too rich to get a benefit like my friends. Being a person of reasonable intelligence, the boss worked out that he could get me to run the rental car company at the same time. I soon developed skills in dealing with angry and dissatisfied customers whilst simultaneously handling a steady stream of sales through a cash register, and huge wads of cash for the cars. I got minimum wage for this. It was interesting in so far as being massively overworked doing something really dull can be. The challenge was to flit around doing the most urgent tasks. The boss would leave a long list of things to do if I ever got a moment's rest, and would be quite angry if he found me sitting down reading some university notes during one of the intermittent breaks, when I could, for instance, have been vacuuming and washing one of the cars, or cleaning the forecourt, or cleaning the windows, or dusting the shelves, or rearranging them. It makes me laugh how little petrol stations attendants do these days. The only thing that made it better than McDonalds was that the boss was absent most of the time, so I was able to prioritize my way through the list of chores, get the fuckers done, and then sit down and do what weekends for students were supposed to be about, studying for their courses.
My first "real" job was at Unilever, entering data from stupid printouts they had, for which they had advertised seeking people who had programming skills. I wrote them a spreadsheet which extracted the data from the database source, in the precious minutes that I could get at the end of a 7 hour shift of looking for number groups and entering them into the spreadsheets. They were very grateful, and laid me off because I was no longer needed. During this year I passed 9 university papers, having found a sneaky loophole by which I could beat the 8 paper enrollment limit.
The next job involved initially entering a massive map database for a software house. It was almost interesting, measuring all the roads with a chartometer, and plugging them into a database, because the engineer who wrote the system using the data couldn't be arsed to do it. For this, I got paid nothing at all. I did it to get an in at the company, which was doing things that were interesting. I then wrote a bunch of software that used this data to provide useful information for the product, whose future was in doubt. Pretty soon, I rewrote the entire thing, and the company got rid of the other engineer, and I got to finally do interesting work, installing the system all over Victoria. By the end, they were paying me slightly above average wage.
So, I think there is boring mindless work because I have done plenty of it.
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Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to Sacha,
We undervalue wisdom.
I often think we actually despise it.
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Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to Sacha,
and men too
No doubts at all there. Being well-groomed is a bare minimum. Being attractive is the icing on the cake. I'd say it's been that way since the dawn of time. The more hierarchical the organization, the more that seems to be the case. Senior management are often little more than courtiers.
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Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to Che Tibby,
but more older people working means less welfare dependency among that demographic.
The fact that old people are dependent on welfare, and that it's not enough, is the bad sign. I don't begrudge any individual person who wants to work in Subway because they can't pay their bills otherwise, but the fact that the people seem to be in their 60s tells me a lot about the extraordinarily mismanaged economic situation this country has found itself in.
I don't deny they are good workers. For starters, they don't have any other options - no parents to fall back on, no expectations of long life ahead, good looks leading to advantageous marriage or senior work placement, no time to learn valuable skills. Also, a lifetime of knowing when to shut up and put their heads down. It's just great for employers and customers, as I said.
For the workers, it's most likely a tedious drudgery that most people would hope to avoid in the final years of their lives, although there is no doubt that a lifetime of work can be so habit forming that you can't really feel happy unless you're doing it, however much it undervalues your real worth to society.
I don't object to old people working, at all. In fact, I think they're very often the most valuable workers. What disturbs me is seeing them working at the very bottom of the job heap. The old guy working in the hardware store is not in this position. He's a highly skilled employee, quite probably draws a lot of customers with his knowledge and attitude alone. He should be, in a fair society, paid well for that. If the store has become a simple warehouse, as so many hardware stores have, then he has reason to fear for his job, of course, and will work for the same as kids, if put against the wall of destitution. I just don't think noticing a lot more people in NZ in that position fills me with happiness.
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Hard News: The new riot reporter, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
It's the only way I'd do it. Being able to choose a good pseudonym is like the first basic qualification for being able to bluff your way through that genre. Don't call yourself Busty Harlotte.
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