One of the problems of there not being many jobs right now is that those who currently have jobs have to do them well. I mean that earnestly. I miss Bad Workers.
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During the fat years in the 90s and early 2000s, I recall one could practically choose any job they wanted off the tree of Economy. Those with law degrees couldn't wait to graduate so they could see what kind of offers they'd get! Those at the lower tier of American life could, if nothing else, abandon their crappy job for another, if for no other purpose then to provide some sense of variety in the mechanistic life of Working Poverty.
Loyalty to a company was anachronistic, and we the Committed, felt free in our disloyalty to any one job. We--our spirits, our goals, our psyches--felt more important than employment.
This mentality, the innocent dew that insulated and nurtured us for years has evaporated. Now we "make due." We "take what we can get." We wait to make our next correction "when--if--the economy gets better."
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Looking back at my own life/work history, the early phase of it seems so easy, so liberal, so spontaneous. I bounced around like a pixie. I had the liberty to quit Starbucks again and again and return to it again and again. They never even got angry with me, or even remembered! With my charm and hard work and skills, I easily got that clerical job at the law firm and the bagel-slicing job at the bagel shop and the teaching job in the Chilean Navy. I quit all these jobs at will, confident something new and ascending was out there waiting just for me. More than the job choices, it was the lifestyle itself that was spectacular. I never had to stay anywhere long enough to begin looking at myself and asking, "Is this me?" I was a Migrant Worker. In fact, true agricultural migrant workers were, in this era, likely more permanent than me, than so many of us. And more useful. We were the modern day Huck Finns, constantly constantly looking for new Territory we could wear out quickly, unhesitatingly, before moving on again to the next territorial search for Happiness, before it, too, proved to be vapid, or before we burned it up of all its caloric joy.
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Now in 2010, law students get no exciting offers. They apply for jobs, anywhere, hoping to land a spot in the economic beehive that is America. The poor can't quit their jobs at Maids Emporium or Subway and hope to easily find another. They slog on. Those with jobs won't quit them because they're health is still good and they need to save as much as they possibly can before... well, before the mysterious, anonymous events of the Future come, which is likely a very expensive, hospital-ridden passage to the next world.
There are too many of us and not enough tasks. (If only there were more tasks!) We have a pile-up of college degrees and flesh. We don't admire our wealth of human power; we hate that each soul represents a hairball in the economic pipe that we must burst through to get the other side. What's there on that other side? Tasks! Work! From my fellow employed creatures I hear again and again and again what would make Marx chuckle: "We should consider ourselves lucky: at least we have jobs."
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I really miss the time when there were Bad Workers, a time when people could at least embody the idea that "this job sucks, so screw it. I don't give a damn." I miss the time when people work passionately at what they love. I like Bad Workers because they represent something I see less and less: Beatnicky, Romantic, Pretentious, Frustrated, Artistic, Contrarian, Pulled-into-this-crap-with-nails-clawing-the-ground Indifference. With said indifference, they are grumpy, inefficient, conversational, funny, combative, ineffective. They are human. (What feeling is more human than not giving a damn!)
Recently--refreshingly--two employees at local businesses took me back in time to an era when employees were not efficient.
1) At QFC on Capitol Hill, there was a female checker with very short hair and very oily skin who was trying to help a crazy man purchase his things. On a scale of 1-10, he was probably a 5 on Craziness. He seemed mildly aware of how to use his EBT card in combination with his debit card, but he did mess up the order of using them and he was extremely picky about how the teen bagger bagged his three items and he did second-guess the checker and it got to the point where the checker, after gruffly waiting for him to figure all this out, hastily and huffily turned the card-slider around and with his cards in her hands did it all herself. And while waiting for all the information to go through, she looked at the crazy man and the teenage bagger to her left and shook her head and swore that if another damn person talked back to her today or wasted her time...
God, it was lovely. First, it was entertaining. The grocery lines in Seattle and across the country are now so boring that I will take anger any day over efficiency. Second, Good for you, Lady! I don't need you to love your job. I don't want you to have to fake it. I know that etiquette goes along away, but so does sincerity. She sincerely was frust with this crazy man and she wasn't afraid to admit it. (It seemed like he had been her bane many-a time because he did say at the beginning of the now Epic transaction, "Let's do this like we did it yesterday".) I commend her. I hereby pledge: Anyone working for a corportation at under $10 an hour, I don't care if you're polite or not. I would prefer you not be so I know you haven't been so worn down as to have lost entertainment value.
2) Today at a coffeeshop a very tatted man with earrings that pulled his ears down low and elephant-like admitted to me he had just started his 4-hour part-time shift and he was just kinda getting going so give him so time. Which I did. So, instead of making my coffee, he upped the volume on his acid jazz that filled the cafe loudly and then he talked to me about how they had moved around the furniture in the cafe and regulars were bumping into them, and then there was a lot of clattering of dishes, followed by silence, and then eventually he got to my drink. The coffee was not memorable; it was fine. I drank it looking out to rainy, dark Greenwood Ave. thinking about what I'm writing now. He was human and humane, strengths and flaws as apparent as his tatted forearms. He was what I think all of us want to be, what we want much more than being known as a Good Worker: he was memorable.
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I realize a theme throughout many of my posts is this: that what we are told is bad is in fact not bad. Inefficiency, dislike of work, frustration, slowness: these things are in a very real sense, not bad. These things break monotony, robotics, and inspire. Inversely, much of what we've been told is good--efficiency, work, happiness, speed, missions--are often not good for us. They lead to automation, soullessness, delusion, and the plague of us, the Committed, what'snext?ness, that burning perennial internal hum that never, ever, ever lets us just Rest and Be.
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Bad Workers blessedly require each of us to hold onto our Self-Reliance. Bad Teachers, Bad Bankers, Bad Sandwich-makers, Bad Waiters, Bad Architects, Bad Presidents, Bad Checkers, Bad Anything healthily remind us that 1) as all Christians in theory know, humans are deeply, tragically, and gorgeously flawed and that's why we're all in this together and 2) no one system or one person can be fully relied on. Therefore, do not get so compliant, You, so lazy, so robotic as to forget the Power of Your Own Damn Self.
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As a teacher, I have written bad lessons. I have seen halfway through that I'm not getting through to the kids. They're not learning anything. I've been, at moments, a bad teacher. I stop silent at these points and the quiet almost shocks them. I've abandoned the plan and I'm not going to be the person who continues to go through the motions of something that clearly isn't working. I'm done with that shit. I sit down. I look around at them and it seems for the first time in hours, days, maybe weeks, I'm really seeing them again. They're coming into focus. They are not HSPE scores or learning outcomes or grades or behaviors. They're the continent of Man, the lineage of Humankind, end-knotted here in this room. Perhaps I'm becoming clearer, too, though they won't remember it. The present rarely lasts to become memory with teenagers. I will remember this moment; they'll remember its essence, which is purer anyway.
Something happens in the abandonment of a plan. For one, we stop acting. Plans make us feel like someone else is in control and when someone else is control, well, who cares? But it's clear now: there's no longer a plan and it's just us and in a not-a-bad sense, no one is in control. It's absolutely just us. We start to talk. We wonder, hypothesize, amaze, parody, crack wit. We talk about Whatever, which is to say, we talk as humans, and all human talk rotates around the central Shakespearean themes of the human condition: Love, Fear, Identity, Justice, Society, and so on.
For the next 20-minutes, without objectives, rudderless, inefficiently, we talk, and in our talk we create Experience.
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