Cubed
At the newspaper I worked for in the early 2000s, I remember a moment of great excitement when we moved into new premises. It was the dawning of a new age. Instead of the usual dreary desk arrangement, with time wasted in long conferences and senior executives sequestered in status-enhancing glass boxes, a revolutionary new newsroom would channel the dynamic work-flows of the 24-hour digital future. There was excited talk of “vertical silos” and a lot of nodding.
This is from a 2014 book review of the aforementioned Cubed: A Secret History of the Office by Nikil Saval.
Saval notes, “in news stories the word ‘cubicle’ rarely appeared in dignified solitude; instead it was prefaced with some inevitable epithet: ‘windowless’ or ‘dreary’, ‘cubicle warrens’, ‘bull pens’ or ‘infernos’. People laboured in ‘cube farms’ and were stuck next to each other in six-by‑six standard sets known as six-packs. Douglas Coupland’s epoch-defining book, Generation X, coined the phrase ‘veal-fattening pen’.”
and
Saval persuasively argues that, from the rise of the clerking classes in the 19th century and early 20th century onwards, a key ideological feature of white-collar work has been that the worker is individualistic and self-directed; believing he (the exception for she, unfortunately, needs little rehearsal) might be a clerk now, but with patience and application there’s nothing to stop him one day sitting where the boss sits. That idea, much more often than not, has turned out to be pure vapour: you fall asleep dreaming the American Dream and you wake up as Dilbert.
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Issue 17 has sold out! But never fear, it’s still available in digital formats singly or bundled. There’s also a few copies of Issue 16 — perhaps our best work to date — still gettable in print.
The Tapping of Keys
My good friend Tim recently read Shift Happens, a book about computer keyboards.
I mentioned this to some other friends, bracing myself for a comment along the lines of “blimey, that’s a bit niche,” but one of them said, thoughtfullly, “I should really read a book about keyboards.”
So who knows what’s going on out there? Or maybe this is just what my friends are like.
Anyway, Chumrad Tim shares a quote from said book with us. It invites us to consider the differences between pre- and post-War offices:
…the conspicuous silence hovering over the partitions, interupted only by the tapping of keys, comes from the enforcement of surveillance.
The full quote, really, doesn’t come from Shift Happens but from another book called Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace by Nikil Saval.
Computers and automation had brought the blues to the white-collar workplace.
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Issue 17 has sold out! But never fear, it’s still available in digital formats singly or bundled. There’s also a few copies of Issue 16 — perhaps our best work to date — still gettable in print.
Pirate Captain Jim
“Pirate Captain Jim” is a glorious work avoidance poem by Shel Silverstein, who kinda looked like a pirate himself.
“Walk the plank,” says Pirate Jim.
“But Captain Jim, I cannot swim.”
“Then you must steer us through the gale.”
“But Captain Jim, I cannot sail.”
“Then down with the galley slaves you go.”
“But Captain Jim, I cannot row.”
“Then you must be the pirate’s clerk.”
“But Captain Jim, I cannot work.”
“Then a pirate captain you must be.”
“Thank you, Jim,” says Captain Me.
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Issue 17 of New Escapologist has sold out! But don’t worry, it’s still available in digital formats singly or bundled. There’s also a few copies of Issue 16 — perhaps our best work to date — still gettable in print.
An Escapologist’s Diary: Part 78. Travel in Pictures.
This series of posts — starting with a 2009 escape and running to the present moment — answers the question “what would I do all day without a job?” in a sarcastic level of deatil.
It’s the end of 2024 and I’ve been on the road for almost two months. Here’s where I’ve been, in tantalisingly (pointlessly?) context-free pictures.
Letter to the Editor: Does the Answer Really Lie in More Work?
To send a letter to the editor, simply write in. You’ll get a reply and we’ll anonymise any blogged version.
Dear Rob,
During a recent delve into my journals, I was reminded that in 2010 we were engaged in some email correspondence about giving up shopping. I was in a wonderfully free period of life between graduating from University and starting anything else and was writing a blog about resisting consumerism.
Shortly after this I was offered a full time job [for a large charity]. Jobs in the charity sector, especially in campaigning organisations, are dangerous because they give the appearance of doing something worthwhile and politically radical while trapping you at a desk for 40 hours a week (or more, because when you’re making the world a better place it feels morally incorrect to stick to your contracted hours.)
Promotions and raises, instead of bringing forward my escape, enabled more tattoos, better coffee, tickets to see bands that other people had heard of too. I’ve always called myself an anti-capitalist but capitalism got its claws into me anyway. Punk is an aesthetic like any other, marketed to me on Instagram via adverts for purple hair dye and tattoo brightening cream.
As I enter the second half of my thirties, I find myself increasingly tired of it all. Working for a charity seems, at best, paternalistic — full of white middle-class people who think they know best about the lives of the less fortunate — and at worst complicit in a system of widening inequality and climate crisis by letting governments off the hook by providing services no longer sufficiently funded by the state.
Much better, I thought, to be fixing those inequalities at the root causes. So I ran as candidate in the [redacted] elections. The only party I could stomach joining was the Green Party, so I didn’t win, but I did well enough to be asked to stand as a local councilor. The amount of work that would entail makes my chest tighten in panic.
And I’m wondering, does the answer really lie in more work? Is the world going to be made better by all this hustle? By attending endless meetings in our spare time? By being so exhausted that we mindlessly consume terrible food and bad TV and the endless scroll of social media?
A few weeks ago I picked up a copy of The Way Home by Mark Boyle in a charity shop. Reading this, alongside the return of New Escapologist (and especially the piece about Henry Gibbs) has me thinking of escape again.
I’ve already stood down from one of the trustee boards I’m on, and started ignoring calls for volunteers on Whatsapp groups. I’ve stopped posting on social media. I’m even thinking of moving out of London and planting a veg garden.
K
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In Issue 17, we’re running an excerpt from After Work by Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek. They make a distinction between freedom through work and freedom from work, which is an important one.
Your point about punk being an saleable aesthetic is a good one. There’s a book about this called The Rebel Sell by Joseph Heath. When I interviewed him for Issue 9, he seemed to think this was all so obvious, that everyone can see through the claptrap. But is it? At that time I still believed in at least some of the punk aesthetic being symbollic of actual values, that someone with blue hair or some tats might be my tribe. Which is ironic really because in punk terms I look like a real square. But anyway, it’s a good point. Punk is for sale.
I hope you do what’s right for you, K. I won’t advise you to do anything because only you can know your full situation, but slowing down and operating far from the capital are things I’ve always put stock in and they seem to work for me. At least doing less (or just hanging out instead of working) doesn’t burn any fossil fuels. E.F. Schumacher wrote in Small is Beautiful (1973) that we should have done the work in the 1960s and 70s: used the finite “capital” or starter loan of fossil fuels to create sustainable alternatives. But we didn’t. Whatever happens now, I’m not sure that panicking about this failure is entirely productive.
What Do People Do All Day?
As you know, I am amused by Richard Scarry.
I like his style — it’s beautiful — but I’m skeptical of his idealistic obsession with manic and uneneding labour. It’s all in good fun but there’s also a sinister calvinism just beneath the surface. “Children are workers too” reads a page of his What Do People Do All Day?. Look into the eyes of that fireman cat and you’ll see the abyss.
Does “busyiness” necesarily need to be “work.” i.e. at one with the jobs the system? Perhaps that’s a question for another day.
Reader Andrew shares this short article with us. It’s a month old now because I’m a bum.
[As a child] I was terrified of being left alone, terrified of the dark, scared of UFOs and, perhaps most trickily, stricken by the existential panic of not knowing what to do with myself. It seemed to me entirely possible that at any time someone was going to take a look at me, realise I had no idea how I was going to spend my days and permanently send me to the naughty corner of life (ie, I’d end up an accountant).
For that reason, the title of [Richard] Scarry’s book was both a horrifyingly loaded question (“What do YOU do all day?”) and a soothing promise that if I read the tome, I would understand exactly how I was meant to spend my time.
The article is about the joy of “little jobs” — errands — as distinct from a career.
I’m not sure how practical it is to seek out little jobs as your main activity in life without also fretting about money all the time or becoming tied up in some sort of precariat scam administered by a Deliveroo-type company, but maybe I haven’t thought about it enough. There are probably ways. I’ve vouched for temping before. My friend Henry gets by with casual cash-in-hand gardening work.
The beauty of a little job is that it is disconnected from the culture of “career as self-worth and identity” that capitalism thrusts upon us. We are encouraged to think that our careers explain us totally – how often we get asked, “What do you do?” as though that will make us comprehensible to the world. But little jobs are not seen as tied to our souls in this way. […] A little job is healing; it allows us to divide the unbearable wash of our days into neat little segments, transforming our lives into oranges that we may peel and eat slice by slice.
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Coached
Tom Grundy recently interviewed me for his newsletter. Tom is a coach and New Escapologist columnist with a particular interest in personal development and working life. He’s also just a lovely chap who cares about the world. He escaped his own day job too.
Anyway, Tom asked me some great questions about the good life, consumerism, mental health, and the escape from work. Join Tom’s newsletter here if you’d like to to check out the interview. Part 1 begins on Tuesday.
Hawkeye
As a kid, I never liked M*A*S*H. That melancholy theme tune and the khaki-and-sand visuals switched me right off.
What a stupid kid!
I’m watching the show now, at last. I can’t believe (a) how good it is, (b) how much of it there is, and, (c) where Hawkeye has been all my life.
I think I’m a little bit in love with him. As well as actually finding him quite sexy, he’s a genius.
He spends most of his time in a dressing gown, just like I do, and he’s rigged up a gin still in his tent so he can enjoy off-duty martinis in the desert.
He seduces all the nurses. He’s a wisenheimer. He tweaks the nose of authority and stands against meanness.
In one episode, when asked about his dressing gown by a colonel, he says “well I tried sleeping in my uniform, but the medals kept sticking in me.”
And thats’ the thing. He has medals. He can be a slob because, like Sherlock Holmes, he’s lightyears ahead of anyone else. He’s a great wit, a happy drunk, and a lounge lizard – but he’s also an excellent surgeon, which is how he gets away with it all.
I love him. He’s the Bugs Bunny of the Korean War. Which doesn’t sound sexy, but somehow it is.
I love you, Hawkeye. My new idol. I’m sorry it took me so long to find you.
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Don’t Be Like Sitcom Man
There’s a BBC radio sitcom called There is No Escape:
a sitcom about a man dissatisfied with his life, whose feeble attempts to run away invariably end with him traipsing home defeated.
Sounds great!
Unfortunately it’s rubbish. Not only is it deeply unfunny, its overriding tone is “bicker.” Every moment seems to be two people nagging, belittling each other, acting according to immediate self-interest, making sarcastic remarks about previous sarcastic remarks. In four hours, there is no other tone.
I took GCSE drama at school and, before we learned anything, we’d sometimes default to this argumentative tone. This was probably because we were erroneously looking to create “drama” between two people instead of creating remarkable situations for them. Or maybe argument was just part of our difficult lives outside drama class so it was something we could easily reach for in the heat of the moment. Whatever the reason, an early lesson of GCSE drama was not to bicker, that there are other ways to exchange information (between actors and between actors and audience).
Even when I realised I was not going to enjoy There is No Escape, I thought I’d at least be able to tell you about some failed (fictional) escapes. Trouble is, he doesn’t really make any serious bids for escape at all. He does, however, have some character flaws which one imagines would hinder an escape. So let’s focus on those. Here’s how not to be like Sitcom Man.
Sitcom Man competes when he should cooperate. One episode has him struggling against a colleague for a promotion, despite the fact that promotion won’t solve his problems (he’ll still be employed by the market research company he despises). Escapologists shouldn’t compete in this way. Walk away from the dog-eat-dog workplace and use your calories and mindpower with others in service of something better. It’s not easy. But competing for promotion will not help you or anyone else.
Sitcom Man is lazy when it comes to finding solutions to his problems. His disappointment at a local shop’s failure to provide good food–“frozen turkey dinosaurs” being their typical fare–does not lead to the idea that he could set up a system by which he no longer depends on the hopeless shop simply because it is the nearest one. Growing his own veg, ordering a veg box, even just shopping online at shitting Tesco do not occur to him. That would require a modicum of imagination and a few minutes of application.
Sitcom Man hates when he should love. Actually, he doesn’t even seem to know what love is. Sitcom Man can’t get along with his girlfriend. To this I’d say: she’s not your girlfriend, Sitcom Man. You do not have a romantic relationship. If you have a perpetually oppositional stance against the person who lives with you and sees herself your partner, you’re failing them at the most fundamental level. In what way is this person your “girlfriend,” Sitcom Man? Explain yourself.
Sitcom Man falls back on old habits when he should be creative. It’s the old thinly-written sitcom problem of characters never learning, never trying anything twice. He complains and mopes and never accepts responsibility. Much like his writer who somehow never learned the basic lesson of allowing characters to speak without arguing, Sitcom Man fails to use the tools presumably available in his universe.
This sitcom is supposed to be about Sitcom Man’s escape attempts but he doesn’t try to make a break in any meaningful way; he just reacts pathetically to miserable events and ultimately accepts them. It’s a long way from Reginald Perrin, a far-older sitcom in which a middle-aged executive with a meaningless job and an unfulfilling family life realises he’s been robbed of his youth and takes exciting, eccentric action. While we’re making this comparison, I always got the feeling that any conservativism inate to Reggie Perrin was a situational product of its time; There is No Escape seems willfully conservative in its depiction of what it insists is an unalterable status-quo but really isn’t.
The satus-quo depicted in There is No Escape is one in which couples don’t like each other, jobs are to be endured, and turkey dinosaurs are YOUR DINNER, young man.
Or, you know, maybe it’s just supposed to be a pipe through which the funny is pumped into our patiently-waiting ears. They just forgot to run anything down it.
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New Escapologist Issue 17 is now available to pre-order! There IS escape.
