Much Respect Due

So within my new job I have had to work the cash register.  Wow.  I never knew how much respect the people doing that deserve.  Eight hours a day, five days a week.  I just did a two day stint and I tell you my body feels it.  My neck, my legs, feet, etc.

They have a very defined and regimented protocol for the register there.  When you get in, you go to the supervisors counter and get a little red bag full of the money for your register.  $288 in cash and change.  You count it, and put it in your drawer.  You get to your register, sign in, deposit your cash drawer in one of the two slots, and start ringing up people.  You do this then for hours.  You stand on the hard ground and just move your upper body back and forth, with only your hands using the touch screen device to enter produce PLU numbers, scan items, bag groceries, smile and send people on their way.

These shifts are eight and a half hours long, with a half hour unpaid break and a fifteen minute paid break.  I can tell you this too, you need those breaks.  You are not allowed to eat anything at the registers, but you can have water.  To go to the bathroom you have to call the supervisor and ask permission.  Usually you get to go right on the spot, sometimes you have to wait your turn while others are going.  I haven't been told no yet, but with a long line I could imagine someone may ask you to wait.  Talking among cashiers is discouraged and reprimanded.  It is agonizing physically, and trying mentally.

The first two hours seem to go fairly quickly.  You are ringing up people constantly and not physically hurting yet.  But all the concentration and standing takes a progressive toll.  My concentration and blood sugar levels seem to drop after a while and my ability to concentrate wains exponentially.  This is an obvious problem given the draconian policies for miss counting or not have you bills the right way in your drawer.  I have dyslexic moments, but so far I think they have been typing in the right produce code, and you can go back and change it.  But what happens when you have one with the cash?  I was short yesterday 80 cents on one transaction.  It was 62.84 and the woman gave me 65.04, I typed in 62.04 by accident, my mind was in a fog by that point, and the woman was really pushy.  She was treating me like I was just another subservient worker - beneath her - as is a common occurrence it seems.  She was saying its simple, the change is three dollars, she was wrong, but I didn't realize it until later.  I typed in another $3 to make the $65.04, her change should have been $2.20, and it said this, but the woman was bitching and badgering about $3 while I was trying to figure out my mistyped amount.  I gave her three only to realize a moment to late after she'd gone that it should have been $2.20 as it all added up.

I now see how common these interactions are.  Because this is a hard job.  It is so sad that all too often customers treat people at the register like morons because the type in the wrong PLU code, or miscount the change.  I would love to see all these executives and office types come down here and spend eight hours a day on their feet doing the same repetitive motion, counting on the fly, bagging, and scanning over and over for eight and a half hours.

To each customer this is their money, their food, their pain in the ass exercise in sustenance that they have to do, and want to do as quickly as possible between their jobs and getting home or to play in their free time.  They eagle eye you and have little remorse for the slightest mistake.  The cashier on the other hand is staring at a screen all day, doing the same thing over and over.  I have never had such acute blood sugar issues as with this job.  I have to eat something every two hours or I'm lost.  And I can feel it, I end up in this fog that is almost surreal.  Like you barely see the money and PLU codes as they fly by your eyes and hands.  I usually recognize the issue and grab my water or sneak a little something to get the sugar back.

Customers though don't see these ins and outs of the job.  They see the singular action, and see it as simple.  They don't see the eight hours and the pressure put on you for your job by the company.  They treat you like you are stupid because you are counting the change, reentering the PLU code or fiddling with the bag.  No, I think it's safe to say that the general public has little respect for this work, hence its low pay and prestige.  Apparently one customer who had to call over the manager at one point said to her daughter that she needed to go to school so she didn't end up as a cashier.  Right in front of the cashiers.  It is really sad to hear that, sad for society.  Yet still this is the society we live in.  A place where "menial labor" garners no respect even from those that so deeply and heavily rely on it for the very existence.  Whether you work for a company that employs cheap labor, or buy products that cheap labor makes cheap for you the world goes no where without people like supermarket cashiers, and its hard work, just like digging a ditch, mopping floors, building a roof, whatever.  Much respect due.  

The laws of the register

So I am going through training on the cash register for my new job. Wow. I don't ever want to be behind the register. I am scared to death of the draconian rigidity of the terms and rules, and how quickly the slightest slip – like not having all the bills facing the right direction – can lead to getting warned and fired.

They work on a system of a written warning, a final warning, and discharge.  In terms of being absent or tardy if you are:

• 3 times in 30 days, 
• 4 times in 90 days, 
• 5 in 6 months or, 
• 10 in a year,

you will be given a written warning that lasts for a year.  This includes sick days (though back-to-back days only count as one "incident").  If this happens you are on written warning for a year.  If in that time this or any other issue happens again (see below), you get a final warning (which last six months).  If in this time anything else happens you are "discharged" (i.e. fired).

So what is included in this?  Well with the register you are accountable to balancing your till.  If you are a penny off one way or the other 5 times in 30 days its a written warning.  Meaning no take a penny leave a penny, and if you're off by more than $5 on any one occasion it is an immediate written warning.  This means that you count wrong once, accept a counterfeit bill, whatever... you're on warning.  But it gets worse.  If within a 30 day period you have 5 instances of any of the below issues:

• excessive coins or cash
• bills not facing the right direction
• missing a coupon
• missing an EBT slip
• missing voided transaction slip
• miss entering a product code
• improperly filling out a traveler's check
• talking to the cashier next to you
• not asking to go to the bathroom
• coming back even a minute late on a break
• looking at someone the wrong way....... breathing.... ok, so I made that one up.

But really?!  You don't place the bills face up and all in the same direction!?!?!? or give someone a penny!?!?! and your in trouble!?  Enter the wrong code, give back the wrong change and in trouble you get!!!  No sir, not me.  Keep me off of that register.  My dyslexic, hypoglycemic ass would be done in a week.  I mean hypothetically speaking (and keep in mind schedules only come out Wednesday for the next week), if someone is late or sick more than 5 times in 6 months (keep in mind NYC subways, doctors, dentists, kids), and they don't put their bills all face up a few times and then take a counterfeit bill by accident, they're done.  No flexibility, only a lashing with the whip.  Amazing.    

Blue Collar State of Mind

So one thing that I did want to bring attention to with my new job is my inherent regression into ethnography.  I am working as a delivery boy.  This is of course not commensurate with my place in society - as an educated white man.  When I am out and about as a "white man" of seemingly respectable capacity, I am treated a certain way.  This became incredibly evident to me throughout my involvement with Occupy and the daily awareness of my place of power in the socio-economic system.  In those circles I am constantly reminded of it every day.  This is why it was so eye-opening - and dare I say refreshing - to be treated as just another blue collar worker once I donned my delivery apron and hat.

There are of course two aspects to this.  There is the way random people and the people you are delivering to treat you, and the way you are treated by other workers such as doormen.  No one really wants to be talked down to, or have assumptions made about them that aren't nice, but we all know this is bound to happen though.  The interesting thing for me is that knocking on doors as a delivery person immediately places you in a category that I am not in otherwise given the general demographic makeup of the delivery profession.  For example there was a woman the other day in a penthouse apartment that when I knocked on the door was very deliberately trying to not let me see in her apartment.  She came out and closed the door behind her, overtly showing an apprehension to me and what I might see on quick glimpse in corner penthouse apartment on the 40 something floor.  Now obviously there is a large amount of speculation here as to her motives.  But having been in the situation and reading it, I can only say that this was the way I felt and my interpretation given the visual and verbal cues I received, and coupled with my own place in society and thoughts.  Yet still, I felt that she did not want me to see in her apartment and also an apprehension towards me.  But hey, for all I know she had a cat in there or a naked man!  lol.

Anyway, my point is that if I was someone living in the building, or someone (eg. the person I am when I don't have my delivery hat on) that was not presumptively of lower income, but stereotypically of higher need/propensity to be "casing" the place, would she have acted to skeptically and with such reprehension?  My suspicion - however prejudiced it may be - is no she probably would not have.  Apprehensive of a stranger yes I'm sure, but if I came with a suit on and a handshake, versus an apron and an eye towards a tip, responses would be different.

Regardless though, this incident was not so much my main point as the way I am treated by other workers.  At pretty much every door thus far people have been friendly and good to me, offering both smiles and often enough tips.  But the big thing for me is the acceptance as a worker that I receive.  When I walk around my neighborhood - which is predominantly black - I am a white guy.  To the average person I am just another gentrifier.  I have to open my mouth and hope that my words sell me and allow me entry into "their club".  And my words do around here, hence my relationship with my bar and others.  However, always at first glimpse I am what I look like.

This is the same throughout the rest of my life.  When I walk into a high rise/rent building in midtown Manhattan when I'm not working, I look like I "should" live there (and yes, these people are pre-ju-dice). Door men treat me a certain way with lots of yes sirs.  And when I walk in to a upscale supermarket like where I now work I am treated the same, like just another wealthy enough white shopper.  But the minute I don that delivery apron and name tag, its like I am transformed into just another guy.  A guy that can be joked with, cursed with, and that other workers of similar stature can let their guard down with.

For me this is truly refreshing.  I do not feel comfortable in wealthier settings or with people of means and "proper" decor   I am much happier sitting around talking with people living real lives, with real struggles, that can just let themselves be free of some of those decorum things.  When I went to Binghamton and was sitting at a table of graduate students I had to be "educated", "intelligent", "on".  With "regular" people I can just be me.  I don't have to sell myself, I don't have to exude skill, competence  or confidence.  I can just relax.

The amazing thing about this is that as regular Tim Weldon I have to prove myself and work to get to this level of dialog with people, but as a delivery boy, I seem to innately already be there.  I can talk how I want, am talked to how they want, and talk about whatever any one of us wants.  There is also an inherent understanding and seeming bond through the unspoken struggle with power that is innately understood amongst "workers".  Statements about the people living there, the way they treat people, the way we are treated.  Mechanics, doormen, shop workers, janitors, whatever.  It is an ease of mentality and a welcome place of respite from the rest of the world that somehow thinks that because I am a white man that I should both be a certain way and be treated a certain way.  I like being a delivery boy, it lets me - if even just for a moment - be me with the people most like me.  

Work!!

So I officially have a job!  I had an interview a little bit back with a large health foods supermarket retailer and am very happy to say I have gotten the job.  I will be doing delivery in and around midtown Manhattan of groceries.  It is not the greatest job in the world - and not lost on me that it is the same job I had in High School - but it is steady work in a good company with room to grow.

I just had orientation this past week, and it was actually quite refreshing.  I spent two days learning about food and environmental justice, GMO's, the importance of buying local, eating good healthy foods, etc.  It was not really anything new to me at all, but there were some new tidbits that helped.  For the most part I was answering all the questions in the class and adding stuff to the teacher's discourse.  But for me it was great to get to the end of the day and say hey, they are not saying anything here that I really disagree with.

Yes, they are still a business and still are trying to make money - I will most certainly have my critiques as it goes - but in terms of overall company principles, they are a massive company pushing to have more people eat better healthier food, with less industrial food production, and less capitalist contamination of the food and environmental systems.  Now obviously, in trying to make money of this there still are going to be issues.  But they're whole principle seems to be, the more people we convince to eat more organic, local, healthy foods, and the more people we get to buy in to our corporate image of 'green' and environmentally and social friendly, the more customers we'll have.

They seem to be using a growth model for their business that will mirror the growth of the health food industry in the US.  They are not trying to take customers from similar competitors, but trying to take customers from industrial chemical laden food chains, and get them eating health food.  It is tough for me to argue with that or the logic of it.  I'm sure things will play out that bother me, but on the whole, I believe in what they are trying to do - even if it is just a ploy to make money - the outcome is a better place than we started in.

I did walk through the store quick after and certainly still have some research to do; for example: while they spout on about local local local, my honey from there is from Brazil and India   They are using recyclable this and that, and biodegradable bags and such which usually are made from corn - which drives up food prices in the global south.  Obviously, there is never going to be a perfect company to work for.  It is after all a company... and this one is of course intertwined within the expropriative capitalist system, but still, it seems like a good step for me.  Income from someone that is at least trying (even though the owners politics are appalling).  And they are at least saying good things in terms of labor and how they treat their employees.  Including that there is a lot of room to move up in the company.  They will be tripling their stores over the next ten years - 340 to 1000.  Lots of opportunity there if I wanted it.  So we'll see, I feel ok with it all.  Work itself starts Wednesday.     

What unemployment feels like

You ever get that feeling of defeat deep within the caverns of your body's core?  That sinking feeling, of utter emotional despair that rises up from the depths of your lower abdomen, consumes your chest and drops your neck and head, overtaking all other emotion?  I've felt this before.  I was so competitive as an athlete, I took defeat really hard.  Losing a football game that every ounce of your body gave something to, picking your defeated self up off the track after your dive at the finish line was too late, even sitting with someone you care about knowing you've done something unwittingly detrimental to your relationship.  But these sinking feelings only last for a moment, an afternoon or two.  The pain that I feel right now lasts.  It lasts through the summer, the winter, the days, the nights, the weeks and the months.  It's not just that utter feeling of defeat that you feel deep down though.  Its the anxiety you start to feel in your chest, the adrenal reaction to the despair emanating from your core.  Your soul is touched by it, it moves throughout your body; up into your throat, raw and tight, around towards your back where it pulls your shoulders closer to your spine like a winch being slowly cranked and knotted up.  Your legs tingle, your arms lose luster and feel listless.

The physical manifestation of pain and despair, of hearing back from another job that you didn't get, of putting in another job application only to be told you are overqualified, underqualified, or nothing.  The hopelessness of hope.  This is what it feels like.  Everyday you put in another application or two, and every day you hear nothing back from an ever increasing number of "hopes" - the essence of what every cover letter essentially is.  You read through the want ads, you get email notifications, your friends send you things.  You slowly weed through all these options to the ones that really grab your experience by the jugular, you've done this! you can do this! this could be the one!  You prioritize them all, the "perfect" ones come first  then the good ones, and then the ones that you know full well that you can do without even batting an eye but might be a bit out of your expertise or the experience you can show on paper.  You slave and slave over the letters, free writing, drafting, copy pasting from other letters, proof reading and proof reading.  Every time you reread your resume.  Is there anything that you can change or tweak to help on this application?

You're applying to lots of stuff, none of it is the same.  Just anything you think you can or would do.  Yeah, of course there is always that perfect one that you bump up to the top.  But those are the worst.  Those are the ones that you do extra research on.  Extra hoping!  You read around and Google the specifics of the industry, maybe even talk to people.  Searching for the way in.  You slave and slave, hope and hope.  but end up again in despair and despair.  You are capable of doing all of these things you are asking to do, but incapable of getting the chance to.  This is where the pain comes from.  Each effort is a test of your capacity to hope and your will to succeed.  Interviews make it even worse.  You look someone in the eyes, you shake their hand, develop a moment with them that you hope will turn into many moments.  You feel this immense pressure writhing across your back and scalp, penetrating deep down into the complexities of your heart.  You know that your life hinges on every word you say, every expression of your face, the slightest glimpse into even a singular fear or doubt residing within you.  You slip up, you don't, what does it matter at this point anyway?  You feel so much pressure either way.  You've been trying for so long now, have so much riding on this.

You won't know anytime soon.  At least not for sure.  You walk out of the interview with a hunch though.  It is usually easy to feel the energy in the room, the demeanor of the interviewers.  You know it, they know it.  Either you have it or you don't.  Sadly, for the unemployed, you have less of it each time you stretch out your welcoming palm and make that manufactured smile and piercingly assertive gaze.  Everytime you sit down in that chair and accept that glass of water you are setting yourself up for the pain of hope.

It never ceases to go away.  For every time you stand up and are escorted back to the elevator your chances are less and less.  Thanks for coming in...  (Your over qualified, your underqualified, you won't stay, you don't have this precise experience).  It hits you when you get home and start waiting.  You hope and hope, living within it even.  There is this chance, and that one, maybe even in this case you're right.  But hope fades to despair.  You didn't get it.  You didn't get it.  You didn't get it.  Is that an echo, or just reality?

How long do you hear this before you start hearing this?  I mean hear it in your throat, in your chest, your back, all the way down to the depths of your core, your self worth?  How long is it until you start learning from it?  Reacting to it.  Feeling the despair take control of you, eating you from outside in and back outside?  There is no escaping it.  Your meals get smaller, your appetite wains, your passions become listless pursuits that don't mean as much.  Then comes the roof over your head, when will that go?  How much time do you have?  What else is going to break, to wear out?

And there is no help, no one to work with or stand by you.  They all try.  You reach out more and more, become needier and needier.  Your soul needs help.  Words akin to advice and surefire ways at getting jobs morph into sympathy and solace.  They want to help, they even start feeling your pain.  Which is getting sharper now.  It runs the whole length of the right side of your back.  You wish someone would stick a knife in the knots just to release them.  What else could possibly slice through them?  Your throat is openly closed, your neck seems stiff, like you've already broken it.  Yeah, your support network doesn't feel that though.  Not to that extent.  They feel their pain for you, they care.  But they don't feel the knife.  They don't feel the intensity of the weight you feel.  They have a place to live, something of worth everyday, palatable meals to come home to.  Nothing tastes the same for you.  Its just nutrition at this point.  You know in your mind you have to eat, but you don't feel the urge to.  Not like you used to, at least not enough to go to the store.

In fact, you are wholly depressed in the worst of ways.  You are completely conscious of it.  Watching the train wreck without being able to pull away or react - fully cognizant of its happenings and even solutions.  There is no internal condition, no genetic abnormality manifesting itself somewhere deep within your psyche, not even a long standing personal trauma subtly undermining your esteem.  No this is the pain of overt confidence mixed with surreal destitution.  You know you are capable.  You've done this work so many times before, but there is no outlet now.  The world has no interest in you and your skills, even if you do.

The confidence of despair is the only thing that keeps you going.  But it dissipates ever so slightly, ever so daily.  Ups and downs mix within the cycles of applying and waiting, hearing nothing or hearing something.  You try to get out, to network.  But how do you talk to these people?  Don that fake smile while you know deep down inside you are decaying?  Looking them in the eyes without your soul.  How can they not see your desperation?  How do you not start to beg?   

The pain is transcendent.  Deep hopelessly hopeful pain.  Eventually though, that hope fades into hopelessness.  Eventually though, the despair outweighs the aspiration.  You sink.  You sink further into the depths of your mind and into the internal physical manifestations of economic catastrophe and personal solitude. You want to escape, to run away, but instead you stay at home, confined in pain.  You need people, you need a hug.  The only thing that seems to bring any ounce of life from you now is applying for more work.  It is both the cause of and cure for your pain, the only way out of this destitute cycle of agony.  Will it ever come?  There is always hope.  Which of course brings us right back to where we started...

Fighting for Fair Labor!! (just not yours)

Really?!?  Hypocrisy knows no bounds?  I just spent a few hours working on an application for an organization working for "fair" labor practices throughout the world.  Yes, I'm going to name them: 

The Fair Labor Association (FLA) combines the efforts of industry, civil society organizations, and colleges and universities to protect workers’ rights and improve working conditions worldwide by promoting adherence to international labor standards.

Sounds great right?  And then they put this great disclaimer on the bottom of the job advertisement:

FLA is an equal opportunity employer. It is the FLA's policy to employ, compensate and advance personnel without regard to race, color, religious creed, citizenship, political activity or affiliation, marital status, age, national origin, ancestry, physical or mental disability, medical condition, sexual orientation, veteran status, family care status, sex or gender.

 But then at the very bottom they say, "applications without salary history will not be considered."

Wait, you mean you don't discriminate against any of those things, and you are fighting for fair and equitable working conditions for people all over the world, but then you start any relationship with your own future employees by reaffirming the same abusive power relationship that capitalist ownership has held over their workers for centuries.

You know what, I am not comfortable giving you my socio-economic status. I am not interested in telling you how I am doing financially, or giving you a glimpse into – what in this country – is my social and political capacity. The amount of money I make (or don't make) is personal to me and should not be coerced out of me by an employer. I understand why you could want to know this; so that you can pick a person or weigh several candidates based on how much it is going to cost you to employ them. Right there you have betrayed the entire purpose of your mission as an organization. You are now evaluating – and in fact discriminating against – me based on my willingness to give you intimate details about my life and doing it in a way that is manipulative and laced with power implications of an extortionary nature. You are a labor organization, you are fighting for the rights of individual laborers, yet you have just told me that I, the prospective employee, have to furnish you, the prospective employer, with certain personal details of my life that strengthen your position and control over me as a potential worker or else you will not consider me for a position in your company. During the worst economic downturn since the great depression, where people are dying for jobs, you are going to bludgeon prospective employees with a take it or leave it position of blatant and expropriative power that exemplifies the principle hold of capital and ownership over the rights of labor.  I am truly amazed.

I considered doing a number of things. A, walking away from the application on principle. But B, I believe in what the organization is trying to do. And then of course most importantly there is C: I have no job.  I have no home in a few weeks, and little prospect of alleviating any of this in a desirable manner.  In short, I am desperate.  Exactly the emotion that they and every other power hungry capitalist business is preying on regarding labor issues.  They hold the key and strings to power over us.  Force us to compete on only their terms: with a lack of power for the people.

So what do I do?  If I send it in with no salary history it won't be considered.  But I don't believe in reaffirming that power structure by giving them my salary history – even if I could rummage up the mish-mash of corporate, academic, retail, construction, football, and nannying work I've done and translate the currencies, dated exchange rates, and cost of living indexes – especially as they are supposed to be an organization fighting for MY rights as a worker.  Just like I never denote my race, sexual disposition, or any other categorization I do not agree with on anything.  No, I think I'm going to have to make a stand on this one, and hope that they respect it.  You want someone passionate about labor issues?  Someone that is going to fight for them?  Yeah, well I'm starting right now - with you!  That's the only way I could respect myself in the morning.  And frankly, there just isn't enough of that in the world.  We all stand for something bigger than ourselves. 

So you u want to know my salary history?  Well my salary history is that of an expropriated laborer. I have spent my whole life working for people, companies, and organizations that have tried to pay me as little as they possibly could in order to get the maximum amount of work out of me. I don't own any of the means of production; I've volunteered, I've worked and not been paid, I've interned, I've worked hourly, for tips and a for a salary, I've even been used by a university as an athletic beast of burden to fill their coffers. As with most all of us, it has never been enough. The struggles I have been through, the actual dollar amounts that I have obtained though are my business: my economic, my political, and my personal business. I do not want to compete in a rigged power struggle with you before I've even met you, and I don't want you to choose whether to interview, hire, or dismiss my application based on whether I am willing to divulge personal and political information about myself.   I want to do a job for you - with you.
 

I view it as my political and social right to tell you that for fear that my application could be discriminated against on socio-economic and political grounds that I chose not to divulge my personal information.  That this is my political stance on corporate power over workers, and I will definitively take a stand against a labor organization trying to exercise such excessive power.  I hope that as per your disclaimer you won't discriminate against me for exercising that political right, but it would be even better if you would step up to your mission statement and reverse this expropriative power structure between management and labor in our - and now your - world today. 

As is, while I now have serious reservations about this organization, I can only hope this is simply an isolated theoretical miss-step and that this note is the change needed.  Still though, I really would like to do this work and would surely entertain any offer the "Fair" Labor Association gave me.

I work because I believe in what I do, and I'd work for them because I believed in what they do. But their statement about salary histories tried to make work with them just about money, which everyone knows it is not. It is about making the lives of expropriated workers throughout the globe better, sadly though, that is going to have to start right here at home with our own mindsets.

 

Competing to Love

Why does helping people have to be competitive?  Why is it that I want to get a job helping people so badly, but can't?  I want to work on alleviating poverty, I want to work on breaking down ethnic, racial, and gender barriers, I want to work on providing sustainable ways for the nearly 1 billion undernourished people in the world to be able to have food.  I want to work towards every individual in the world being able to achieve  human security, dignity.  I want to work on real, true democracy, so that the masses of the world can have real say in their lives.  And I want to work on this 80-90 hours a week.  But I can't.  I mean not for real.  I can do things on the side, I can Occupy, I can volunteer, I can apply for jobs, I can try to network or meander my way into these industries, and hopefully one day get a job.  One day.  But then if I get that job, who doesn't get it?  It's just like all the other jobs I've applied for and haven't gotten.  One job, hundreds of applicants who all want to work in an industry or on a project that matters to them and the world that they believe in.  But only one gets it.  Only one person gets to legitimately help the world in that way on that day.  The rest of us are left trying to find ways to do things in our spare time, unprofessionally, until the next application goes unsuccessfully fulfilled between waitress shifts, nanny gigs, and temp jobs to pay rent.

Obviously, this is the job market.  It is the same job market for anything and any industry.  Whether it be finance, advertising, non-profit, academia, whatever, there is a competitive market centered around making money to support one's self.  But hey, I've done things to strengthen my chances.  I have skills, I have experience, I am intelligent; just like everyone else.  Yet, I don't seem to be able to win these job competitions.  (To bad we couldn't just have a race to see who gets a job, I'd be all set then!).  But they're not. They're based on a fine tooth comb of your life, but without the life.  More on what some person sitting behind a desk thinks about your life on one piece of paper, about their company's interests, and all of that filtered through the lens of their's and society's prejudices and presumptions.  Because I moved around a lot in my 20's does it mean I will now?  Gaps in employment must mean I was just slacking off rather than couldn't find work right?  And what is to say that those "non-traditional" life moments don't add to a person?  Or that I packed a bag and went to Sierra Leone to fill that time?  Oh, wait, that looks flippant, unstable.  Being able to do anything anywhere isn't as desirable as being able to sit and role over on demand.

But it is not just me, there are also of course issues about the organizations' funding, their priorities, and whether they've been able to dredge up enough capital from the netherworld to be able get shit done.  It doesn't matter whether I can do the job or not.  It doesn't even matter that we all can do the job, or that there are too many candidates and not enough jobs out there.  What matters is that we are competing against each other to be nice to each other.  People are trying to help people, trying to put in hard work, and they can't - not on a real level.  Not in a way that allows them to sustain their own lives.  Our society has taken being nice - an inherently cooperative emotion and action, perhaps the quintessentially positive human trait - and turned it into something aggressive, commodified, and surrounded by competitive negativity.     

This is frankly just a horrible way to structure society.  Skilled compassionate people with no real and sustainable outlet for that desire.  I have skills damn it!  We all have skills!  But they are not skills that somehow mesh with or fit into this system that requires things to be big money makers.  I don't want to compete to help you.  Why don't we do it together, or divide up our efforts and help more?  No.... let's make it competitive!  Here's a vision for you: what could be worse than sitting back and watching an old lady trying to cross the street and needing help.  Two people come up to offer help to her, yet rather than working together, they turn on each other and start fighting over who gets to help her.  They don't both to take one arm and work together, or have one stop traffic and the other take her arm, instead they compete against each other and end up fighting amongst themselves.  This is where our society is today in terms of humanitarianism; we're brawling in the street over who can help the old lady across while we ourselves become a spectacle, rolling around on the ground in a fit of flailing arms and legs.  Of course the elderly woman continues to cross on her own because she's got stuff to do, until:  Smack!!  A truck comes along (whose driver is working a double to make rent and hasn't taken a break).  The two people keep fighting of course, as if the train wreck next to them isn't happening.  So sad.  We shouldn't have to compete to help people.  Organizations shouldn't have to compete for money to help people.  Nor should people have to compete for jobs for it either.  Utopian yes, but we should just be able to to be nice to each other and sustain some semblance of a life around it. 


      

Moving Forward(ish)

So this week has seen a lot of different things come and go.  I have spent a lot of time looking for work for now, but also working on finding a way forward for the longer term.  Of late though, it's mostly been about conflict.  no matter what it is that we do in life it conflicts with something that we either believe in or should/must do.  I've been getting a lot of advice of late an it all seems pretty much unmanageable.  No matter what I do, whether it's in life or specific situations, there is no victory.  If I get a job in international development like my experience and degrees point to, in some people's eyes I run the risk of becoming a colonialist, imperialist, or even a missionary.  I can of course stay working where I am and just not get paid for the too few hours that I'm working.  But even then, the job is really just another capitalist wage-labor position bowing down to the man (not paying me).  I've applied to do commercial interior painting, I followed up on a nannying lead for a toddler.  Applied to more retail, and got a networked in an application for post-conflict reconstruction work.  Who knows what if anything will bare fruit.  Yapo has also come back with some work he needs done on a prospective funding line from England.  I am not sure it is feasible though at first glimpse.  But will get further in as I can.


The heart and soul of my time has been of course on Occupy stuff though.  I am really getting further into this sustainability issue.  We have to find a way to sustain the movement's individuals in a way that leaves them empowered and energized to progress the movement.  We also need to try to find a prefigurative way to illuminate the inequities of the current system by showing that another way is possible - and functional - under current auspices.

I've had some really good conversations with a number of people about it and am starting to see a solid research project, and maybe even a group for moving forward.  It would certainly be a long slow project, but ten years from now the movement will be judged on what it achieved, not how long it took to map out a structure for success.

So there we are: I am trying to juggle life, work, occupy, and social relationships and whatever else gets thrown in there that day.  I know as per societies wishes I should just be settling in and working away.  But that is just what keeps the cycle going.  If I stay both dumbed and numbed down the status quo will maintain and most of our lives will just continue to lag behind just a few.  But I can't and won't allow it.  We will all find a way forward personally and professionally, so that we can keep working on finding a way forward for the movement and in turn a more economic and socially just society.  The journey of 10,000 feet starts with a single step....

Work Update

So the grand experiment that was Timmy the political fundraiser is dead!  Not that it ever sat so well with me anyway!  I had till Wednesday (the 18th) to show progress and be making quota.  It didn't work out.  It was an amicable split.  No drama, nothing too profound.  I will say though that I put myself in the most disadvantageous position I possibly could though probably as I spent the morning embroiled in my deteriorating domestic entanglement and running just over a mile at 6 minute pace to get there barely on time - with tears in my eyes for at least the first half a mile!!  Can't say I've ever cried and ran before that I can remember.  Anyway, so is life - holistic - one thing doesn't wait for the next.  No school, no job, and quite likely no girlfriend all in a few days.  What can you do.

BUT!!  I took a call mid way through the evening shift and already had another job, before I had even lost this one!  It's not a lot of hours, 10/week, but it will be a good start to move forward with.  It will be as a hiking guide and retail sales for an outdoor store in Brooklyn.  It really is so much closer to my heart than fundraising for sure!  It takes me so much further back to things like the Sierra Leone trip and such.  All the gear I put together, the research, all the time I spend out in the woods bouncing off rocks.  It's not enough to sustain myself financially, but it is an income for a quick moment while I figure things out.  In a month I will have a license to be a guide and I will have learned a great deal of things that will mean A LOT to me personally.  Things that I have really wanted to get further into for  long time.  It also may open some really interesting doors as well.

My first day was today (Sunday, 22nd) and it was all about training on the gear in the store.  But we did talk a bit about Sierra Leone and an idea I'd had while there about doing some trail marking to help the country with tourist trips doing ecotourism and hiking (as well as seeing how things are in another place in the world, a much poorer place than America). The one guy thought it might be a great thing to try to do through the store.  Wow, we'll see!!  Anyway, I loved it.  I'm sure it will bring some different issues in general, but on the whole I will just be learning and talking about the outdoors and spending time there.  At least it will be a nice segue to another place in life - either through itself, or on the way to someplace else.  Not to mention, its a job.  What else you gonna do! 

Unfamiliar Bedfellows

Written 3/21/2012

For years now since my undergraduate days and on through my graduate work as well as in life in general I have been trained and/or socialized in what is proving to be a very certain direction.  Much of this training has come from academic classes in the social sciences and research training in support there in.  I have taken all sorts of things from participant observation to archival research to (the dreaded) quantitative methods, but the approaches that have resonated with me most have been centered in, about, and around ethnographic styled encounters and methods.  I have realized something in the last few days regarding this though: ethnography and sales do not work well together!

At work, I am tasked with selling and fundraising.  Short sweet, controlled conversations with a very pointed and desired outcome.  Ethnographic styled interaction on the other hand is about sitting, listening, and engaging in subtle ways that do not control much of anything.  You are a participant, you are observing, but you are not imposing your will or your cultural paradigms, or anything else onto the situation anymore than is unavoidable. 

Its no wonder why I seem to suck at sales/fundraising!!  You are taught NOT to listen, to hear objections and to brush them off, to mostly ignore what people say (unless of course it helps lead you towards your objective).  In this "game", it doesn't matter if you actually want to empathize with people or their stories, you have to let it go.  They tell you to work on the pretense that what you are asking for is inherently in "their" best interests as well as yours and society's.  In short, to assume that you know what is best for "them" - whoever "they" are.  This is of course exactly the opposite of any participant observation/ethnographic endeavor.  Participate, observe, denote, and analyze later from the confines of seclusion and through other similar works or analysis.  How does one switch up speeds so quickly?

This has been one of my issues here at this job.  I have been tasked with switching up years of training, and in fact an entire way of life, overnight.  Its not coming easily.  Not to mention the fact that I actually care about these stories, I actually want to engage with them in dialog, learn and get to know the people on the other end.  But sales isn't about people, it is about money, and the only thing you need to learn is how to make more of it.