Bored at Work

A Blog about being bored at work.

[idlemindatwork-blog]

Simplicity and Repetition

I once remarked to someone that I thought it might be nice to work on an assembly line.  She'd spent decades of her life working in auto plants around Detroit and said nothing in reply, instead gave me a look filled with rage already tempered by a decision that I was not as asshole, just an idiot.

Of course that was a ridiculous thing to say, these jobs are a deep mark on unfreedom on our society, but what about the part of me that meant it, and what did I really mean?  

When I noticed a busy coworker of mine who was a bartender cutting lemons on an especially busy day I offered to help.  It was just the kind of simple repetitive task I could take off her plate and free her to do the harder stuff.  But she said no, precisely because it was also the kind of simple repetitive task she could do to fill time between harder stuff, and more importantly, ease her nerves on a stressful day.

The pleasure in repetition and simplicity is precisely what made me think life on an assembly line wouldn't be so bad, I know it well from the repetitive tasks I embrace at my own job.  Indeed, it's not different from the freely given time of those who practice repetitive crafts like knitting, weaving, or beading.  It's a profound pleasure, one that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick notes is founded on an embrace of non-being.  Cutting lemons eases my coworker's nerves because it's “mindless” and so she can “zone out.”  The soothing quality is derived from relieving the weight of presence, especially for a bartender whose “harder” work is indeed to be present.  The simple tasks become automated in the body, and the repetition allows the mind's focus to not dwell on any given sense but lightly embrace a moving sensuous whole.  This embrace allows one to become full with the world like the knitter who makes subtle finger motions, counts loops, and watches TV.  Simplicity and repetition manifest a mode of being that might as well be non-being, or at least isn't particularly concerned with fighting to protect one's “being there.”

But I was wrong about assembly line work because I failed to recognize that part of the constitution of the assembly line beaks this pleasure in a way that could easily also happen for my bartender coworker.  The break is founded not on duration or even speed of the task, but rather by the fact that the tasks in a job and more precisely a job where one neither owns nor controls ones labor.

Cutting lemons for my coworker was a choice, as was what to do with the lemons, and this is what allowed her the pleasure.  It's one of the perks of food service with its varied tasks and basic structure that resists over Taylorization.  Rather than dictating each motion, the boss gives broad instruction to “wait tables” or “tend bar.” But still the difference is clearly quantitative not qualitative.  My coworker knows that when the manager explicitly directs her to (or not to) cut lemons, which can happen at any time, all the richness of non-being evaporates.  The pleasure in cutting lemons is only accessible when one can do it, “mindlessly,” and “zone out.” The boss however doesn't want you to do it, “mindlessly,” they want you to do it carefully, precisely, and to be ready to be directed to do something else at any moment.  If I actually did work on an assembly line, I might be able to find pleasure, but probably only for the first week or two.  After that, as when the manager directs my coworker, it would become clear that I had no choice in the matter of doing this work, and the reality of it being a job would interject and force me back to reality, back to being.  

It is when I am reminded that my work is only part of the machinations of generating profit, that I am forced to be present.  To put this anther way: freedom is a necessary precondition for non-being.

Pleasure in simplicity and repetition is a pleasure taken freely or not at all.  At work, it is stolen from the boss, directly against their will, and a mark on my unassailable and persistent freedom.  It is not an act of passive resistance, it is an act of active resistance. It is an act of the primordial strength of my being that stands as a mockery to the absurd notion that I have “sold” my labor-power and thus that while I'm on the clock my boss “owns” anything besides my agreement not to disabuse them of this fantasy.  It is only because I, as myself, can never become completely incorporated into the machine of profit generation that I can zone out at work.  

~~~

Historically, this situation marks out a new station in the history of freedom. Capitalism creeps into the daily rhythms of survival and picks tasks to make “valuable,” which is to say to inscribe them into a system of production founded on the worker who neither owns nor controls their work.  Over the course of this creep, excluded and de-valued necessary labor become transformed into products that face us fully formed.  Where once a portion of the day was needed to knit a scarf, Target's shelves now offer the attractive finished product without comment on its making.  In buying a finished scarf from Target one is finally offered a choice of whether to knit, or not. Choosing to knit is now newly free and this opens new territory in the practices of non-being as the pleasure of “zoning-out” becomes something you do with your free time, which is to say as a hobby.  This is the capitalist station of freedom, of choice, of imagining not “having to” do anything.  

Capitalism's creep can however never be complete.  The absolutization of the freedom to never have to knit if you don't want is hollow.  This fact is the true lesson taught by the maintained existence of an imperial periphery and feminized home-front where unvalued work is still obligated to be done.  There are always things that, “have to be done.”  Moreover, knitting as a hobby is so often pleasurable precisely because it is a continuation of resistance on the job in that it offers a relief from the pressure for presence at work, and contrasts being on the clock so dramatically.  This immediate freedom apparent in capitalism thus cannot be as absolute as it claims, and indeed is empty.  The emptiness is also the significance of the worker's pleasure in simplicity and repetition.  The freedom inscribed in this resistance is a negation of capitalism's immediate freedom from within.  Specifically it takes the scenes that manifest that immediate freedom, but point in a different direction.   The freedom to buy a finished scarf is not the freedom to never knit, but the freedom not have to spend all your time knitting scarves (one should take this line metaphorically).  The freedom implicit in the worker's resistance is one that is agnostic to whether or not the work has to get done, it's instead of negation of being forced to do it.  Moreover, it's a negation of the boss's drive for constant presence and capital's rejection of non-being.  Pleasure in simplicity and repetition opens the possibility of freely moving from being to non-being.  This freedom is determined not by the possibility of being liberated from production, but rather from finally being able to integrate into the productive process in a way radically different from the boss's desire for the worker to become machine.

The worker, meaning concretely myself, dreams of being able to work freely and move freely from being present, to “zoning out,” thus of ending a prioritization of presence and opening the conditions for radically reconsidering this conceptual terrain itself.  

That this freedom only appears now in stolen form, whether on the clock of after when it is a hobby, means that the material preconditions for it becoming prevalent and universal are not there.  On the assembly line the simple repetitive work takes up all of your time, at the bar the boss maintains control of your work.  Thus two developments are needed for our dreams to become real: first a level of technological development sufficient to allow a sweater to be produced while also leaving enough time to move on to another task, one more or less “mindless,” one more or less simple and repetitive.  And second, the absence of the coercive force from work and thus the abolition of private ownership over the means of production.  While these seem far off today, they are necessary and possible steps in workers movement for freedom.

[idlemindatwork-blog]

Liminal thinking spaces

I started writing this on the train home from work. Actually, I wasn't headed home, I was headed to a meeting.  In a meeting, especially one about big things like strategy, and action planning, things take my thought, express my powers, and illicit positive recognition.

Thinking in a meeting is often, in a way, dramatic.  Strategy is about crafting a whole arc of events, and the thinking is all about relating the concrete in front of you to the grand categories of history.  In this way, this thinking is saturated, and dangerously satisfying, dangerously close to self-satisfaction. There’s a whole other twist of thinking in the spaces in and around work. The 10 minute break, the trip downstairs to the store room, the train ride home. These spaces where you’re alone with your thoughts, are spaces of a very different valence of thinking than the drama of a meeting.

They’re too short to trace a complete thought, you're still too stuck in a stupor of boredom to develop a productive thinking rhythm, and most importantly you’re too alone to actually craft a externalizable thought. The great ideas of history are not actually realized in these spaces in between "doing things." Maybe you have a flash of inspiration about who to put on your fantasy football team, or even something more esoteric like the relationship between thinking, boredom, and liminality, but that’s just a moment held over from some space of more dramatic thinking.

The liminal spaces of work are built for a very different kind of thinking, one that is not very dramatic, and not actually memorable.  Rather than thinking as a process of producing thoughts, these spaces call for thinking as an activity of passing the time.  The activity isn't even usually intentional or voluntary.  Thinking in between is a background the erupts in the absence of, "something to do," or "something to think about."

So what do you think about?  You think about that itch from the stupid visor they make you wear.  You think about how bummed you are that no one likes you back on tindr.  You think about how uncomfortable it is to be older than many of your "cool" coworkers.  You think about how you should really stop buying milk-shakes on your lunch since you can't really afford it, but they're so good, and that berry seed is still stuck in your teeth.

There are no questions here, besides ones like, "what's the smell? Is it me?" There are no problems here, besides ones like, "how do I time my bathroom trip so I don't have to bring my cup in there?" There are no thoughts here, besides ones like, "the waters need to be stocked." Most of the thoughts are registrations of some reality, a feeling, a sensation, or a self affirmation.  Maybe you don't want to call that thinking, but dammit your not just "being," your doing something and that something involves reflection and manifests itself in and around language, if only internally.  You're thinking.

I'm still thinking on the train home, just liminal thinking that refuses to escalate itself to drama, but articulates a flow of reality that isn't yet interesting, and probably never will be.  Developing an atunement to thinking in between is more than thinking harder, it's orienting oneself to the field beyond, below, and between the dramatic.  Committing oneself to the centrality of this liminality is committing oneself to a reality that takes drama as one moment among many, one who's imperatives are contingent and constantly losing traction in the face of that tear in the carpet they never get around to fixing.

[idlemindatwork-blog]

On Sleeping People

It's been a while since I slept in public, which is funny considering my propensity for it in college.  In chairs by the windows of the library, couches in quiet study lounges, or the lawns of the campus, sleeping in public was natural and pleasant while I was surrounded my a quiet, casual public of fellow students, benevolent professors, and disciplined campus workers.  There was no scary public of strangers that threatened my peace.  Of course that peace was enforced and produced by violence, both active and historical, but despite my innumerable political commitments at the time I took full advantage.  Now, in the grown-up world of abstract, terrifying strangers, and an untrustworthy public, I find it hard to imagine sleeping in public. Of course many people do, but I doubt even those folks who make this a part of their daily lives ever feel safe from harassment by strangers or worse by the state.  The airport though offers a strange liminal space where so many norms are suspended or at least we feel much less attached to it.  Everyday I walk by so many sleeping people, who are very much in public. Flights being cancelled, standby passengers waiting, arriving well before your early morning flight, and being stuck on a long lay-over after a sleepless flight are all plausible reasons to sleep in an airport terminal.  Frankly, I have no idea what people's situation is.  All I know is that I walk by sleeping people all day during my job, though it's mostly in the early morning when I'm barely awake and I'm filled with jealously of these people building tents with their coats and nap sacks. It's hard to tell if they feel anything close to the casual safety I felt in college.  They probably don't, but they do trust that the bustling public around them will leave them alone.  Whatever the reason for their napping, whatever story that's leading them through the airport, they trust that other travelers will leave them to the story because they have their own story taking them away soon enough.  And how could someone judge you for sleeping in the airport, you must be doing it for any of the good possible reasons and besides, who knows what to do with all the interminable waiting of the airport anyway? In this trust that they won't get messed with, people build their own little worlds.  They arrange their stuff for maximum comfort, get creative with blankets and eye covering, and even find unused nooks of the terminal where they're even less likely to be disturbed or at least away from all the racket other people make.  They build space, perform comforting rituals, or just surrender to the strangeness of it all and put their bodies on embarrassing display.  These can be individual worlds built by the solo traveler as an expression of resilience, or small collective worlds of families or companions sleeping on each other, or not, like the young girl who slept face first in the carpet well into foot traffic while her mother seemed fully distracted by her own grogginess.  In their camps, they stand side by side other camps, little worlds arranged horizontally independent but connected in their simultaneity.  But what about me?  Walking by with my security badge, my uniform, and my sense of purpose demonstrated by a cart full of food stuff or trash, or merely a walk like I know where I'm going, I don't think it's fair to say that I'm working in my own simultaneous little world.  I'm working in the background for these many little worlds.  I'm working with the janitors who make sure the chairs and floors are clean enough for future camps, with the TSA agents who define the entire space of the airport and with the flight crews that make the eventual escape from the land of public sleeping possible.  In the background the work is not connecting the little worlds, but producing their conditions of possibility.  The small or big narratives that move people through the airport take my work as assumed, and a presupposition of their being.  The workers standpoint that doesn't ask about the details and internal logics of people experience, or the product that my work produces.  The worker asks for the conditions of possibility for that experience, from a position in the background that is both transcendent of any little world, but wholly immanent to each one. But I'm getting dramatic.  What does it mean to be part of the background?  Obviously sleeping people and travelers more generally still see me as a person, and even the biggest most disrespectful assholes take the care to attempt to ruin my day, a courtesy that the urinal would never receive.  Their little world doesn't peel back so far from the wall as to lose touch with other worlds, or more importantly, from the humanity of the worker who makes their world possible.  Perhaps the most important moment here is this resilience of my personhood in the face of people covering their eyes with jackets and building walls of luggage.  No matter how far down the rabbit hole of their little world they go, they can't escape the realities of what it takes to keep their narrative going.  They don't have a relationship to their neighboring camper out of mutual recognition like airport terminal sea-steaders.  They have a relationship because they're both throwing themselves out from the common substance which is the product of my work.  They're here with each other because there's a here in the first place, they feel safe to sleep here because they're protected by the stewards of their possibility, those who clean the toilets, maintain the seats, and generally keep a level head while they sleep and things go good or bad, or just go.

[idlemindatwork-blog]

Smack a Plane

Every morning I fantasize about smacking a plane.  It's not an elaborate fantasy, and it's not an abstract one.  Every morning, I walk by a plane and I think for a moment, wouldn't it be amazing if I just went up there and smacked it.  Sometimes I think about it like a drunk frat-boy in Iowa would smack a cow, just run up, a moment of anticipation and the "SMACK!" followed by a giggle filled scurry away.  Sometimes it's more cartoonish, like high-five-ing the plane.  I hit it at the end of the wing, which for some reason bends and appears like an arm all while the plane winks with it's cockpit eyes and smile with a mouth that has no functional analogy in a real plane.  Where my morning fantasy sits on this spectrum from real to absurd usually depends on how much sleep I've gotten, or how much I had to drink the night before, or how confident I feel, or how angry I am. Either way it's exciting.  I feel like I'd get a palpable thrill from smacking that Continental Airlines flight going somewhere.  I feel like it'd be some kind of powerful transgression, some assertion of my active presence against the cold modernism of machinery, some great story to tell friends, strangers and future friends, and most fundamentally, something I'd never thought possible. There are of course people for whom touching a plane, and touching that plane, brings no thrill, no excitement.  In fact, touching the plane is boring.  These are the workers who mill about beside me, loading and unloading luggage, charging plane batteries, fueling, delivering food, and all the other work it takes to produce commercial air-travel from the tarmac, while touching the side of the plane. This dulling effect is characteristic of work, it's a central condition of being-at-work.  Things that seem exciting at first become mundane with endless repetition.  The call of some things to linger and explore never gets answered because you can't spare the time, and what if you got caught not working.  Realms of potential lose their interest since they will never be actual.  The course of the day is out of your control and it does not include exploration, lingering, or elaborating potential, and thus these possible futures are mere fantasies, moments in the present that pass once the assigned task is done.  In the context of work, the stakes of following the call are not merely discovering something is not actually interesting, or a manageable "getting in trouble."  Getting in trouble has the high stakes of ones life, looming over everything is possibility of getting fired and losing ones life-line to money and so the ability to keep yourself going. Pleasure, excitement,  and general good feelings are held at bay.  This is work after all, the real pleasures happen in my real life, that is, the time spent off the clock.  Work is structured by forces outside me, alien forces.  In part it's my not so alien boss, but it's also the very alien regulations on airport security, or the even more alien physics of jet engines and luggage conveyor belts.  Either way the atunement called for at work is a light one.  It's one where anything beyond your alien work is approached with an ambient scanning of the background or the incidental.  The drama, excitement, and potential of any small fantasy is still there, but dulled. I work on producing one of the many other facets of commercial air-travel: the in-terminal-restaurants that provide the comforts and satisfactions of food service for people in the insecure emotional state of time spent post-security at an airport, or for people who are and have been traveling for work and who no longer feel that exceptional insecurity in the face of their routinized and, more importantly, compulsory time in airport restaurants. For some reason this job brings me past a plane every morning.  At first that was a thrill.  I would look up bleary eyed, still unadjusted to my new sleep schedule, and smile, thinking, "here's this amazing thing, that so few people ever get to see!  Oh how great our society is that produces planes, and moves millions of people millions of miles.  I've seen planes so many times, but never in this so rare position!"  That exciting optimism died quickly.  I adjusted to my sleep schedule, and the sight got familiar with repetition.  But more importantly, the alien forces of waged work tore at any developing drama or care about the sight and smoothed my visual field into a background for the constraints of boring work.  I ran late for work and had to rush past the plane without pausing on my fantasy.  I dreaded the arduous physical tasks I'd soon have to do and scorned the plane and the passengers who seemed so free to leave.  The plane and the fantasy mocked my inability to smack it.  I'd lose my job and/or get arrested and in reality the fantasy would develop into the bad kind of drama. In this context, the context of work, my fantasy remains, but muted.  It's a small moment in the full rhythm of my day which changes subtly each day, or doesn't.  In the context of an alien plan for my time and tasks it's just a small blip on my radar.  It's a personal moment, one that gives me a little feeling, pleasure, strangeness, or familiarity.  Or it brings up small bad feelings.  In the context of work the fantasy fails, it fails to build to a larger narrative, it fails to lead to drama, and it fails to be the basis for any future, remaining a fantasy that is wholly within the present.  And it is something in that failure.  It's a component of the texture of my being-at-work, a texture of passing alien time.  Like my walking past it, or the touching done by the luggage handler, or the security check undergone by the career traveller, it becomes boring.

[idlemindatwork-blog]

Oh Boy!

Play April 2013 The cure for boredom is play, too bad that's the antithesis of work.  But that's not true, I play all the time at work, and so do my co-workers.  The other day we all started using Mickey Mouse voice for everything, to the point where a customer ordered something from me and I replied "Oh, Boy!" in my best falsetto.  One time, a couple of my co-workers made a fruit cup the size of a condiment cup.  I then helped convince a group of students to purchase the joke fruit cup for the full list price of $3.95.  On another occasion I took a cardboard box and drew ramparts on top along with the label, "Luis' Fort."  I then placed it on the counter of the coffee cart where students place their orders and waited with my arms crossed, beaming from ear to ear. The notion that there is some absolute division between "work" and "play" makes a lot of sense.  Play is self-directed, and more importantly it's fun.  Play are the things we do because we love to do them, and even when it takes participation and coordination from lots of people, the success of play comes from the free giving of time and energy of everyone involved.  Work is then the exact opposite.  Work, in the context of a job, cannot involve the free giving of time and energy, we show up because we're told to and the consequences of not getting paid coerce us to keep doing what we're told.  The coordination of multiple people to fulfill a task succeeds when everyone does their part and submits to the general idea of the job.  If it makes so much sense, then what do we make of all the playing that happens at work. I think most are not surprised by playing at work, everyone knows Jack Nicholson's mantra from the Shining, "All work and no play make Jack a dull boy."  Of course we're going to play, we don't want to go insane and try to murder our families with an ax.  But the important part of our play is that it's ours, the workers, it's a time to be ourselves stolen from the boss.  As far as the boss in concerned time playing is time lost, is value lost.  In that way the boss becomes the policeman for productivity, rooting out instances of play and ensuring their marginalization.  Sure, in Zappos you can have flair in your cubicle, or at Google you can go get a massage when you want it, but these attempts ultimately see play as an opportunity for workers to recharge, and reproduce themselves so they might remain or be more productive in the next moment.  Play for us workers will always be our time not to recharge but to be creative, and in that way to be a little human.  In these chunks of time we try and create something that is truly ours and is a true expression of who we really are. What's magical about this is that our humanity becomes divorced from the material reproduction of our  lives.  Our "jobs" and thus the "work" we do is what we do to keep alive, our play is what we do because we want to.  Even in our free time off work, when we can play with our friends, doesn't involve much work to keep ourselves alive, we often buy prepared food, buy made clothing, and take our children to school or day care while we're at work.  Of course for myself and my coworkers this is not true in reality (because we can't afford to eat out, buy new clothes, or pay for childcare), but it's at least true in fantasy, we'd all like to have that luxury.  Our play enacts a dream of doing "whatever we want," and being free from work itself.  We dream of being free from "having to" do anything, whether it's because our boss tells us to or because we or our loved ones will die if we don't.  If we dream of raising our kids, growing our food, or sewing our clothes, because we want to not because we have to.  And for those of us who dream of making music, or making art, or doing science, or writing plays, or lying in the grass with a lover all day, or reading fantasy romance novels, or playing basketball, we dream of not having the burden of reproducing ourselves so that we might follow those passions and do whatever we freely give ourselves to. But what do we make of play at work?  What do we make of play that occurs only in the "down-time" and liminal spaces that we can steal subtly and in a way that's not too audacious as to arose repression and a yell of "get back to work."  Our play at work does not amount to a stable, self-reproducing "world" in which we can live.  Our play is always interrupted and more importantly never given the resources needed to reach its possible heights and to truly be "what we do."  We never have to confront the real material problems of reproducing our play, and so our dreams of life without work can remain untainted by the practical realities of life.  Obviously a key problem in that reality is that our play will have to be collective, we will have to help each other reproduce our play.  We never build a world with our playmates when they're our workmates.  We see them sometimes outside of work, but we don't build our whole lives around them.  George Rawick argues that a stable racial identity of blackness was in part built in the gatherings of slaves at night on plantations, Jacques Ranciere details the production of proletarian class identity in the poetry and songs of Proletarian Nights, and in the company towns like Homestead Pennsylvania of the early industrial America the whole community was united around the lives of those who worked together.  The kind of community, for lack of a better word, that runs deeply across work might exist for some of my coworkers, especially those who grew up blocks from my work, but it doesn't exist for me and it doesn't exist for most of the folks I know.  That kind of community is the basis for an alive culture and world that might be a material base for a world of play, but it's one that I don't think I have. It makes me wonder what a world built around my play at work might look like.  Is the dream of a world without work really just like any other fantasy that, when realized, is ultimately unsatisfying and even terrifying?  The answer I don't think can be deduced in the abstract, history has to decide, history that is essentially the activity, both work and play, of me and my coworkers.

[idlemindatwork-blog]

After Automation

My job is already automated.  The other day I went to the grocery store and rang myself up at the "self-check-out" station.  I did roughly the same thing I do hundreds of time a day while on the clock; I used a touch screen to log that I'd purchased something and swiped a card to register payment.  Unlike my job, I wasn't paid to do this, I was doing it for myself, in fact I was paying with my own money. The service sector isn't like making cars or refrigerators, where the invention of sophisticated robotics have automated hundreds of thousands out of a job, and some say it's the solution to automation because it "can't be automated."  But that's bullshit.  My job is already automated. What's wild about my situation, isn't that there's been some invention that could do my job (like the new burger making robot), but that the machine that I use everyday, could just as easily be turned around and the customers could use it themselves to ring themselves up.  In fact, sometimes when I feel playful and I trust a student, I let them ring themselves up.  They usually get a big kick out of it. There's an obvious question there about why I'm even there.  Why is my boss willing to pay me $9.25 and hour to ring people up?  I think that's an interesting question, and one that I think has a political answer (surprise, it's about maintaining the bosses control over the workplace!), but ultimately it's just an interesting question.  Short of a practical effort to restructure of society, it's just another problem that can keep my occupied while I stand stuck in the situation that problem attempts to critique.  As such it's viable fodder for this blog, but I want to leave that for another post. I want to dwell on what it feels like to be a living anachronism.  I mechanically go through the motions of a task while being confused as to its purpose and knowing that if the world were a little more rational I wouldn't have to do most of what I do all day.  The confusion and frustration that come with this has a strange way of being present to mind.  I very rarely consciously think of it, or register it.  In moments of reflection I may or may not explicitly acknowledge it, but I do still know it and would readily admit it if pressed.  It's true, I accept and have that, but I don't usually care about it.  It's like a customer, standing next to the actual customers who I also don't usually care about, another part of the scene.  My rational self-consciousness that holds the "truth" of that scene is just one part of that scene, it's not even a particularly important part of the scene when it comes to getting from one moment to the next.  I might pick it up to entertain me, but then I'll put it down when I customer comes and I have to ring up another ranch wrap.  I care about what's going to get my through this moment and into the next, sometimes that's my job, sometimes that's a joke, and sometimes that's a self-awareness of the absurdity of the whole thing. When I do pick up that self-awareness I only do so at arms length, it feels entertaining but dangerously useless.  It feels entertaining because it makes me feel smarter than the world around me,or because it lets me laugh at my life as if it were a sitcom (hopefully one of those witty NBC ones), and because it gives me a puzzle to work about to why things are the way they are.  But to really own the thought, and make it an organizing principle for my consciousness would imply making it practical, which it cannot do.  I cannot change the structure of my job, or the systems it's part of, in any immediate way.  Moreover, any attempts to make those changes involve great risks, ones that I might be willing to take, but are so far removed from the present moment that they're not worth scaring myself over.  Unless it feels fun to be scared by them. Part of me feels like this position is a position of defeat, that if things were different the light of self-conscious reason would have absolute practical purchase.  But part of me thinks it's just the way life is.  Modernists want/wanted the world to become an image of the human will.  I have a lot of sympathy for that sentiment and I think we need to take it far more seriously than we do, but part of me is bored by it.  There's more in heaven and earth than ones philosophy.  In moments of raw self-consciousness I usually find myself laughing, much in the same way I laugh at my goofy coworkers.

[idlemindatwork-blog]

The Chip Guy

I'm the chip guy.  I stock the chip rack every day.  No one else does it, though there are some occasions when I ask someone else to do it, and then I guide them and give them advice.  One of my coworkers thinks I have some kind of over-zealous territorial impulse around it, that this is "my chip rack!" but that's not it.  Instead it's a small pleasure for my day, one that I feel disappointed not to get.  Moreover, part of that pleasure is the continuity, of doing it one day and then the next.  Another coworker thinks I'm a fucking weirdo for how much I like it.  I agree with her.  I often quip that my pleasure in stocking the chips worries me, but it's a pleasure that helps me survive and I want to hang on to it, even through worrisome weirdness. The chip rack is a simple thing: five half circle shelves about two feet wide with about the height of a personal one ounce bag of chips between them.  After much thinking, I've decided there are four rules governing stocking, and five guiding principles that determine best stocking practice.  Here are the rules:

 All available space must be filled with chips.  A full shelf can be left empty in extenuating circumstances, but not a half shelf.

One kind of chip cannot be on two different shelves.

Chips of the same type must be clumped together.

There can only be two or three types of chips on a shelf.  Having one and four types is allowed in extenuating circumstances, but it's still breaking the rules.

Here are the guiding principles:

It's better to have two than three kinds of chips on a shelf.

It's best for clumps to be of about equal size.

Chips of the same brand but different varieties are best kept together (for example, Doritos Cool Ranch and Nacho Cheese are best next to each other).

Best not to open a new box of a kind of chip until the old ones sell out (this is to avoid having to rotate stock, which suuucks).

On a given shelf it's best to have at least one kind of chip that has more in the back (that way that shelf can be stocked tomorrow without having to move stuff around to be able to add more to the shelf).

I feel so strange writing this out, having spent ten minutes of my time off the clock to elaborate this formalism for something that literally no one else cares about.  Maybe one of my newer coworkers would find this interesting, but they would ultimately think I was strange and disregard my advice.  None of that changes that I took a great deal of pleasure in writing it. I have not spent this much time thinking about this because I have to, because the boss is actually not absurdly strict about the chip rack, nor the problem is really so difficult.  I could easily get away with caring much less that I do.  I care because it gives me a challenge, an on going problem that carries me from 2:30 to 2:45 each day.  At times even, when it's slow and I'm standing at the register before it's time to stock the chips I'll strategize about how I'll stock them today. Making this tedious project a problem and a sort of game is part of my survival strategy through the boredom.  I do it with a lot of other parts of the job.  This blog is in fact part of this strategy.  When my daily tasks are games or at least challenges I'm able to feel some kind of accomplishment when I complete them, I'm able to feel some level of self-gratification in my own power, my power to solve the problem, win the game and innovate new methods of playing and winning.  It doesn't feel competitive at all, rather it feels personal.  When my coworkers look askance at me, I don't feel like they're just "not on my level." And when someone else stocks the chips I don't feel slighted, I feel bummed that I didn't get to play my game today.  I'm happy to let each person come up with their own survival strategies, this one is mine. I'm making proverbial lemonade from the lemons I'm handed at work.  But that's a dangerous metaphor, because lemonade is delicious and lemons aren't that bad.  My game of the chip rack is not delicious, I find it weird and worrisome.  I'd really rather spend my mental energy on something other than developing rules and guidelines for stocking a rack full of chips, most of which I find disgusting.  Actually, I shouldn't be so quick to judge their taste, I haven't even tried most of the flavors of chips I'm stocking because they're off limits to workers. In some ways, I feel like the my daily attempts to keep myself sane are slowly driving me insane.  I'm forced to squeeze whatever pride, creativity or meaning from the tasks I'm handed, which in themselves are absurd and meaningless.  At least they appear to me that way.  I'm forced to lie to myself, in small ways, in order to get me through the next 15 minutes.  Bracketing my knowledge of the futility just long enough that I can get something done.  Ultimately it adds up and I find myself like Wile E. Coyote having run off the cliff, trying desperately not to look down by imagining that I'm not off the cliff at all.  With no other concrete option though, and need to keep running lest I fall comically far, I keep taking things like stocking chips or making coffee too seriously and pretending that what I'm doing is fulfilling and creative and worth being proud of.

[idlemindatwork-blog]

Anger

I'm very rarely angry, on or off the clock.  I think it's because anger scares me.  When I feel angry I feel out of control, and uncareful.  But I feel that way when I'm ecstatic or drunk too and it's not so scary.  What's scary about these lacks when I'm angry is that I also feel bigger and more powerful.  The lack of care and control breaths life into a bull-like will, and more frightening to me, a self aggrandizement that has no doubts as my superiority.  I want to be measured in my will, and I letting myself get too big means I'm probably going to end up out on a limb.  Anger feels dangerous.

Anger at work brings with it a host of complexities.  Yesterday I got frustrated while stocking.  We'd just gotten a new drink order in, and the storage was packed with Gatorade stacked to worrisome heights and drink cases crammed into over full shelves.  What's more, the coolers had been thoroughly depleted, making stocking an extensive proposition.  Each step was slightly difficult, and there was an over abundance of steps.  Each step was slightly frustrating, building on the frustration of the previous.  I got angry.

It's not a good idea to be angry at work.  First it'll ruin your day, but more importantly it will upset the delicate affective survival strategies of the workplace.  Being angry makes it hard to be meek, and hard to let bullshit run off your back.  In so far as anger feel connected to power and size it's dangerous for a worker to have it.  This comes with a certain politics of anger in the workplace, a distribution of who is and isn't allowed to be angry.  My boss (and I would not hesitate to generalize to "the boss"), she who is largest and most powerful, maintains authority through a monopoly on anger.  This is not surprising, but what's more interesting is she's also the authorizer of anger.  Her favorites are allowed, and even asked to get angry.  The shift lead gets angry when you're slacking off, or not following a rule, or not respecting authority.  Anger's capacity to affectively ground and assert the rectitude of ones position (one feels more in the right in anger), is here used to bolster the rectitude of workplace hegemony.

  Eventually I got lost in stocking and paid too much attention to the minutiae of the task as my anger grew and with it my will to fucking-do-the-damn thing.  When this lostness resulted in losing track of time, my shift lead got angry at me.  In a small way and she apologized for it later, but she did.  Her anger was authorized, dangerous for me, but part and parcel of the boss being larger and more powerful than myself.  My immediate response, one learned through survival, was subservience.  I later calmed myself, and returned to detached meekness, that took the bullshit around me as someone else's.

[idlemindatwork-blog]

Salt shaker problem

Here's a math problem that kept me occupied for a little while at work.  I've been asking my smarty-pants friends about it, and they've gotten a solution using computers, but no slick closed-form equation yet.  Have fun!

The other day my boss suggested we clean the salt and pepper shakers (there is a pair at every table).  I noticed there were still a lot of table occupied, so they couldn't all be done at once.  Besides, doing them all at once was an incredibly tedious proposition.  So I thought, what if I cleaned some set number n every day out of the total N pairs.  Each day I picked n pairs at random and didn't keep track of which ones I'd cleaned the day before.  How long before I was 99% sure I'd cleaned them all?

I'll ask some of my friendly nerds to post their solution so I can link to it.

[idlemindatwork-blog]

About

This blog is about being bored at work.  More specifically, it's a depository for the wanderings of my mind while at work in an effort to stave off the more crippling effects of that boredom.

My job is boring.   When I started this blog I worked as a front-of-the-house do-it-all at a university cafeteria.  My duties included running the cash register, making coffee drinks, stocking coolers, cleaning tables, smiling and be charming to everyone, maintaining social cohesion of coworkers, protecting myself and coworkers from the ire of management, and holding a grip to my sanity and physical health so I can come to work the next day.  It's busy, it's a full day, but it is boring.

Now I work at the Portland Airport, back-of the house this time, but still in business of producing customer dining experiences.  I move stuff from one place in the airport to another.  I'm paid to be able to move, and haul, and respond to requests, and go essentially anywhere in the Airport at essentially anytime.

I come to it from a privileged upbringing, and a privileged education, and a privileged social position.  I was raised to have a sense of power and self-worth as a white suburbanite.  I was educated to have a respectable dexterity with language, abstraction and the history of contemporary thinking, as a physics student at an elite private university.  I was socialized to be in the position of agency and see my image in the image of the powerful, as a straight, white male.  All of these things are turned and twisted in my hours spent on the clock, and my boredom is inflected deeply by each of these conditions.

Sometimes this blog will be a song that I've got stuck in my head, sometimes it'll be an amusing happening, I've got this thing where I develop math problems about my job, and most ambitiously it'll be theoretically inflected discussions of the ontology of work.  I treat this as an experiment but also a way to perform a kind of work on myself  aimed at coming to terms with this boredom, and to coming to terms with the concrete material reality of most of the hours of my life.