Observational Comedy of the Interior

Back at my desk I sit and slowly collect money that I can use to pay the rent on my apartment and on food so that I can continue to live and continue to come to this room and sit at this desk and slowly collect money.

Thus spake Halle Burton’s “Millie,” the protagonist of The New Me.

The book is a millennial tale of feeling awkward and not fitting in anywhere, best of all at work, which is an alienating and precarious nightmare.

I like this bit:

I make $12 an hour, the best-paying job I’ve had in more than a year. If I’m paying twelve, they’re paying the agency at least fifteen, up to twenty, so in the middle let’s say eighteen, times thirty-five is $630 a week, times two weeks is $1,260, times two is more than $2,500 a month to have me, the idiot, sit in a chair, doing about four hours of work a week, sixteen hours of work a month, which puts the rate for my actual services at around $150 an hour.

It’s a strange paragraph to like in a novel, let alone to want to share. It’s all just numbers! But I remember those trains of thought while working as a temp. It’s well-observed. It’s observational comedy of the interior.

I don’t remember working out my actual hourly rate like that but I see what Butler means. Sometimes, I’d have so little to do that I’d almost feel guilty for making the money I needed to stay alive. Almost. Because I didn’t ask for that job. Except I did by applying for it. But I had to do that because I wanted to stay alive. Work isn’t consensual in the way most people seem to describe it.

Back to those numbers. I remember finding out that the agency was paid the same hourly rate as my own. My boss was paying double what I was actually getting, for secretively scrolling through Facebook and reading the Guardian and going slowly bananas. The agency was getting paid the same as me for doing nothing, but their share was for openly doing nothing. We were supposed to be at the cutting edge of Quaternary industry in that job, but it was little more than an iron rice bowl.

The saddest financial calculation I can remember making was on my very first morning when I mental-arithmeticed my way to the conclusion that, while I’d already had enough, I hadn’t yet made back the money I’d spent on a new shirt for the job plus bus fare. Urgh. Never forget!

In that weird paragraph of numbers Halle Burton tells us how boring office work can be, how alienating it can be, how the arrangement is primarily economic, how the power imbalance rots minds.

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Escape! Escape! is all I can say. Read I’m Out to help with your escape plan and The Good Life for Wage Slaves for a shoulder to cry on in the meantime.