Some thoughts on work

While I talk a big socialist game, I am actually quite lazy and therefore unsuited to socialism, communism or any other sort of communal labor-oriented society. I hate working. Shouldn't we have robots to do this kind of crap, so we can go on thinking marvellous thoughts about whatever we like and so on? While this is clearly childish wishful thinking, I also have a hard time with the idea that there's something inherently ennobling about work. No matter how many times my father told me it was good for me, in some way, to be out working in the garden, I always preferred to be inside reading a book or something. Culture kept telling me it was a free country, that I could grow up to be anything I wanted. Nobody mentioned the eight-hour day, job applications, 'at will' employment, lower back pain or miserly 30-minute lunch breaks, let alone this idealistic crap about operating an engine lathe for the good of the people (or, as Lexy's father is fond of saying, "hoeing beets for the Cultural Revolution"). So I have always felt - wrongly, I realize - that work was an unpleasnt obligation foisted off INCORRECTLY upon me, who, as an artist, clearly had better uses for his time.

Now, after a crapulous series of mostly crapulous jobs, I find myself forced to reevaluate this stance as I mature (a concept I find all too offensively similar to "ferment" or perhaps "brine"). While technically my first job was at the Barter Theater in Abingdon, acting, I was a) a sophomore in high school at the time and b) paid some pitiful token sum like $25 a week. My real first job was at a packing-and-shipping store down the hill from my high school, which I'd inherited when my girlfriend quit. I won't dignify it with details, but it was, as a business, entirely questionable. After that I worked at the Papa John's in Jonesborough, where I had a member of the management team ask me earnestly, "Have you ever had your fingers in a vagina?" when I asked him about anchovies and another one, nicknamed "Dookie," take me out in his car to smoke a bowl during his break. You can see where this list is going. While I have, of course, worked for less dubious persons - Jeff and Charles at Appalachian Sustainable Woods, the earnest public servants at Land-Of-Sky Regional Council - I have yet to find a job that I do not, in some way, doubt. Even if, as was the case at Trader Joe's, I find the pay, benefits and management structure fitting, satisfying, there is still some reason or another I can always find to eventually begin hating it.

TJ's taught me that, no matter how good the job itself, a job in retail is not for me. I hate the tunnel vision, the sense of entitlement, the cell-phone dependancy and the vapid conversation of the buying public. I have sworn to myself that I will never work beind a cash register again and I hope the arrogant avarice of financial speculators and craven obesiance of public officials (you humans may know this as "the economic crisis") won't force me to go back on that vow. Whether or not I have the right to hate retail - to think that I am BETTER than retail - I cannot change my own nature to such an extent as to clock in for some distant corporate distributor of even more distant goods cheerfully. That has, in fact, always been the most galling fact, to me, about the service industry: one is not merely expected to DO a disappointing job for frustratingly low wages while putting up with all manner of guff from manager, customer and co-worker alike - one is expected to LIKE it.

WWOOFing is helping me form a new perspective on all this. It is teaching me that perhaps there ARE other ways of being in the world of economics than resentful office slave, abused retail drone or rapacious entrepreneurial predator. There are solid reasons why, despite debt, the vagaries of the market and the constant struggle to constrain nature's boundless variability, people still choose agriculture. Not that I see myself farming for a living... I wouldn't give my dad the satisfaction (Zing!). But I can see how beneficial it would be if all of us took the time to grow some portion of the food we eat ourselves; to think about the impact our actions have on the health of the land and its creatures (humans included); and if we all took the time to suck it up for a few hours here and there to do something that, while probably not fun, is at least in many ways valuable.

It's also making me dread applying for jobs when I get back home. I was thinking about this process today and saw no reason not to flat-out lie when faced with questions like, "What was a specific instance in which you provided excellent customer service?" The kind of person who closely scrutinizes my answer to such a bald prompt for brown-nosing is not the kind of person I care to spend my days obeying.

Hopefully, I won't have to.