Having a job is like owning a pet. There is always one more thing to do. It’s an endless responsibility, the weight of expectation and duty can be overwhelming. You might be able to slide under the imperious noses of supervisory and managerial staff, but tasks and duties pile up, desks groan, and creak under the weight.
Eventually a representative arrived, sling from his waxed canvas briefcase draped over the shoulder of his starched, white button-down shirt. His hair was as uniform and neat as his shirt, which matched the pleat straight up the legs of his navy-blue trousers. Upper management noticed all the late fees from her department and wanted to know why.
After two weeks of investigation the word came down from the mountain. In their wisdom, and omniscience they hired her an assistant.
Two people walking around talking about how they couldn’t possibly finish the work in the allotted time, eating odd combinations of mismatched food. After a brief training period they branched out. Split up they could cover twice the area in an eight-hour day. They alternated lunch hours to improve coverage and efficiency.
Worry and concern began to creep into the daily route. The catsup and candy bars began to taste ashen and bland. Late fees on past-due invoices were getting larger, and threats of a reduction in the company’s credit rating were floating in, ominous, ethereal notices floated in on the limitless waves of email. It was too much.
We found them, in separate bathrooms, sobbing into tubs of strawberry yogurt and tuna fish. The pressure was too high, it started fracturing the carelessness, and whimsy. In the end, the wandering performance artists couldn’t hold up.
It was a perfect example of overwhelming responsibility taking its toll.
We took up a collection to help defray the cost of therapy, but we never saw either one of them again. Nobody knew what happened for sure.
Work, for them, had become life, and life had consumed them.
Most of us mold ourselves to our work. We insinuate ourselves into the human structures that assemble into the logical framework of tasks that make up the social fabric of modern employment. We don’t indulge to the same degree as my long-gone co-workers, who perfected their self-assigned duty to a degree most mere humans couldn’t approach. It’s a constant, though, we approach it as a puzzle and try to squeeze our way into the places we find logical or have an opening. Fit is unimportant, as the whole thing changes shape in a kaleidoscopic rotation, a constant re-naming of the parts. Place is provisional, passing, almost fantastical in appearance. Flexibility is key.
Working is survival, but it’s also entertainment. Friendships form, grow, and diminish, wax and wane. The whole mandala of existence plays out on the battlegrounds of warehouses, production facilities, office suites. We struggle to find our place. Some of us never find a comfortable spot.
It takes a village to raise a child. It takes a village to produce a work order or assemble a desk lamp or unload a train car. We need each other. The intricacies of employment are the next logical extension of education, it might be the last chance to find a place in the world.
There is no stronger sense of community than an organization built around a specific set of goals. For profit or charity, a loose structure of independent departments connected only by the bottom line or a rigid hierarchy of carefully linked units working to achieve well defined, concrete goals, either way, it’s the humanity that makes it work.
You fit in as best as you can, and even the outliers find a comfortable spot.
I didn’t see any of this, not really, until after I retired. Then the pieces coalesced into a clear vision. Employees exist to serve a company’s needs, and companies exist to achieve a clearly defined set of goals. But it’s mostly irrelevant, nothing exists in a vacuum, and working toward a desired goal provided by a board of directors, or a private owner, gives a common cause to a group of people who might have nothing else in common. Everybody has a place, even the people who don’t fit in.
—
This Post is republished on Medium.
—
Photo credit: iStock
