There's a subtle hum of electricity in an empty room with a receptionist. Current empowers fluorescent gases to jump states, emitting the light of excited atoms on to the travertine tiles and dark cherry wood furniture below. The delicate tapping of acrylic fingernails on keys echoes throughout the large space, reverberating against the aluminum logo behind the head of Michelle — Going the Extra Mile captions the silhouette of a simple figure of a man with his arms extended skyward in victory. Michelle answers a soft digital ring from her phone with the touch of a finger, repeating back an affirmation in a quiet voice before hanging up. She let's me know with a warm smile that it will be just 5 more minutes before Sandra in HR will be down to see me. I'm sitting in a modern chair against a large picture window. There are magazines on the coffee table regaling the great outdoors. The foliage spills in from beyond the glass entryway in the form of indoor ferns, blurring the line between what is real and what is artificial. Looking up, I see a mission statement on the wall beside smiling faces — Quality, Respect, and Integrity. I reflect on past work and how it relates to these terms, readying an artillery of anecdotes. I am prepared. I am qualified. I am top-notch, considerate, and honest. Sandra swings open the large lobby door, breaking the seal between the calm of the lobby and the chaos of the office. Looking rather frenetic, she transforms her practiced stoic visage into a smile and says, "Hi there, you must be Sean."
I'm not sure how this became my norm. I find myself dressing as I never dress, thinking as I never think, speaking as I never speak, in foreign rooms with strangers discussing my strong desire to achieve their goals in exchange for large amounts of money that my parents never came close to earning. I put all of who I am and who I want to be aside in order to achieve some separate goal of being able to buy my free time for activities that I actually want to do. By not providing for who I am, do I cease to exist? With all the money in the world, I'd be able to pay someone to meet my every human need — but then by not providing for my own human existence, do I cease to exist?
For me, work is simply exercise in a general direction away from the comfort of where you currently are, the status quo. I view work as something that I'll always need to do even if every material desire in my life has been met. I view work as a tool to keep the mind sharp, a necessary chore to keep the brain and body from atrophying in the absence of use. Work then, is separate from money. Work sometimes pays off and sometimes it does not. Sometimes work pays too well and distorts its owner. As a colleague once said, "It's not what you do, it's what they THINK you do" — this phrase became an obsession and likely forever changed the way I observe the work of others in a corporation, those in the middle class.
To this end, I feel like I have lost touch with the working class. Reading William Deresiewicz's, The Dispossessed, I remind myself that the world that I interact with in a corporate setting is a very different one from that of the majority of the U.S. There is indeed honest work in this country beyond the deceit of cubicle walls. As Deresiewicz discusses his tunnel vision on this topic, he states, "The reason I was so abysmally ignorant about this world that lay all around me — the American working class — was that such knowledge had been withheld from me by my culture" (Deresiewicz 154). He goes on to blame the media for this narrow view, stating that, "Today's army of cultural commentators, who speak so confidently about the way 'we' live now — the crazy hours, the overscheduled kids, the elite colleges and nursery schools — mistake their tiny world of urban and university-town professionals for the whole of society" (Deresiewicz 155). Deresiewicz views the world that is around him and the media he consumes as feeding an inaccurate perception of the way that the world works, thus tainting his ability to come to accurate conclusions about the country as a whole.
I know this lack of insight due to lack of constant exposure to be very real. There is an old proverb that states that, "To a man with a hammer, all the world is a nail." In other words, there is not one tool to make sense of all of the world, and to prescribe a narrow view to a broad subject is a logical fallacy. My work in IT as a Help Desk technician, answering phone calls, to that of an upwardly mobile IT Manager working with a small team, made this point clear to me.
As a Help Desk technician, I took calls from folks with IT issues across the country, from Memphis drawl and broken English to quick-talking city slickers of NYC. Sales people were quick, recruiters were warm, managers were detailed and demanding, regionals were more demanding. Each of these groups had charm all their own relative to their home towns. This role built my sense of what American work is, and how Americans compose themselves in the pursuit of money.
As an IT Manager, I dealt with people in other geographies much less, and interacted much more with corporate workers, people who made decisions on behalf of those that lived in these far off locations. This layer of abstraction weakened my understanding of what was real. No longer would I hear stories of Memphis branch employees being held up at gunpoint by angry warehouse workers demanding their paycheck; no longer would I support branch staff in Fresno as immigration services break down the front door and demand compliance in order to make an arrest. Instead, my world consisted of decisions about row colors on spreadsheets and coffee flavors in the break room. My view of the working world became myopic. I observed others as they found ways to work less while being paid more, speaking flowery language to disguise personal faults. Through my interaction with the corporation, I began to attribute all work in all communities across the country as a fractal of the interactions I had with this group of people. In being paid more to work on a specialty, I effectively limited my worldview to that of a small subset of American life and started to pay more attention to the employed that do minimal or no work, accusing the vast expanse of American workers as being lazy manipulators that do nothing while workers in China do the hard labor of building their sneakers and sweatshirts.
I worked as an ice cream server before working for a corporation - good work meant working quickly to produce a physical product with a smile. In the "information economy" there is little work with a concrete product. The customer is frequently someone else within the same company, and the product is, more often than not, trust. In a corporation, there is an element of corruption of trust in every interaction as earning more money can be frequently achieved by gaining favor with the right person. It's the focus on gaining favor through communication rather than demonstrable good work that appears to seep into the interview process for these jobs as well. Regardless of my ability, regardless of what skills I may have, the shot to prove myself is only granted through a surface level conversation, a piece of paper, and a handshake.
The great pay gap between technical work in a corporation and work in food service has caused me great confusion in finding good work today. I know that work in food service was much more difficult than the corporate life. Maybe I should be working to escape from the lazy comforts large sums of money provide, even though there is a tremendous feeling of accomplishment in making it. The feeling of "making it", of being on top makes customer service, managing expectations, manipulating staff pay feel like very important work, even when it doesn't fit my own definition. My definition may be wrong - I must always be gauging my judgements in the context of my limited sight. One thing is clear, and that is that the damage done from being a working fake has created a lackadaisical shell of who I once was. It's clear that work is required to pay myself back for that destruction and provide for my own existence.
Works Cited
Deresiewicz, William. "The Dispossessed." Major Themes for Modern Writers. By Harvey S. Wiener. New York: Pearson Longman, 2008. 153-60. Print.
