#14 - Everything Changes, Everything Stays the Same
Wherein Your Author Deviates From The Standard Format To Spend Some Time On A Single Thread
For the past four and a half months, I’ve worked part-time in a retail service role at a bakery. Prior to this year, the last time I worked an hourly service industry job was about a decade ago. If there is one yardstick by which most would measure the past ten years, I imagine it’s probably change. So much seems to have changed since 2011 that I suspect a number of people have trouble casting their minds back to then, putting themselves back in that place.
[As an aside, I recognize the irony of posting this, as an American, at the tail end of September 2021. Many in my country spent the second weekend of this month casting their minds back twice as far. There is, however, something very different about revisiting such a shared event. Despite my comments above, I’m sure many have little difficulty thinking back to 9/11, the general start of the 2008 financial crisis, the 2016 election, and so on. The last of these examples is in fact one of many seemingly Earth shattering events that make thinking back ten years, and truly immersing one’s self in that mindset, so challenging. But I digress…]
Maybe it’s a function of age, but when I think back to 2011, I feel very much like I’m looking through the same haze as when I think back to 2001. Nostalgia tinges my mid-20s in much the same way it does my teenage years. Even so, I’m not terribly convinced all that much has actually changed. Certainly the conversations we are having about matters of the world has shifted, and not always for the better as evidenced by the rehabilitation of some of the worst figures of the W. Bush era, but the underlying structures we are examining today were in place in 2011, 2001, 1991, etc. The problems which COVID served to highlight aren’t new, but rather became untenable as more and more challenges piled on.
When I try to compare my recent stint in hourly service work with my last, this contradiction between the feeling of change and the reality of change is cast in stark relief. That is to say, the gap between what feels different on cursory recollection and that which we can demonstrably show is in fact different feels very wide indeed.
Really, the work itself hasn’t changed all that much. At least, not for those hourly service workers not yet subsumed into ‘gig work’. Sure, COVID has made working around customers and food a very strange, and inconsistent, proposition over the last year and a half. This problem has been exacerbated by the fact that we never took the necessary step of stopping the mechanisms of the economy for long enough to allow the pandemic to settle down. Making matters worse still, in the absence of any real, useful guidance, mitigation and safety measures have been haphazard at best. Businesses with strict distancing, masking, and capacity requirements often share a wall with other businesses that are happy to pretend absolutely nothing is amiss. But all of this will, at some point, fall into the general background noise of a past that seems to be slipping out of reach a bit faster every day.
Hourly work is still a lot of things: tiring, irregular, punctuated by phases, sometimes disorienting, frequently monotonous. Sufficient hours are often hard to find, work often feels highly precarious, fear too often runs rampant. I should be clear here; very little of the negativity directly applies to the job I’ve been working. It is tiring and irregular throughout the day, but I consider myself lucky for where I found work. On top of a general atmosphere of respect and diligence, we’ve kept reasonable COVID precautions with all employees masked and customers kept at a distance in most situations. Those among my colleagues who want full-time employment have it, and those of us looking for a few hours have that. Instead, I’m reflecting on generalizations about hourly work. It is far too often as insufficient as it is exhausting.
But it can also be engaging in an unexpected way. I’ve had coworkers who balk at the idea of a 9-5, 40-hour week, afraid at the psychic power such an arrangement might have on them. I’ve had others who work at the bakery in support of the seasonal sporadic work which is their actual passion (some of my colleagues love to farm or teach sailing, work which they can only find in the summer). And of course I work with people much older than me in need of extra money and teenagers in need of the same. The people I’ve had the pleasure of meeting in my short stint have been well outside of those I’d have had the chance to meet otherwise. There is an incredible diversity of folks in hourly work, something I haven’t always felt in full time roles in the past.
There is something tangible about (some) hourly work that can be very satisfying. Whether providing phone support for university students or packaging excellent baked goods, hourly work often focuses around “tangible deliverables,” discrete and real things as the result of your work. A working computer, a bag of croissants, a carved wooden spoon. Knowledge work, the catch-all term often applied to the kind of work I did for much of the past decade, offers engagement of another kind but fewer tangible deliverables. There are levels of abstraction through which one must wade in order to make a 1:1 comparison of those things made by hourly service vs knowledge workers. And there is just something very satisfying about being able to hold the results of one’s work.
Juxtaposed against this hourly service work, at least for me, is full time knowledge work. Knowledge work sometimes felt like a lot of the same, but in retrospect that's only on average. I would have to flatten out a whole year of projects, launches, conferences, etc in order to honestly cast it as the routine, day in and out, it sometimes felt like. In fact, the work can often feel as though it is changing far too often even as one falls into ruts or routines. Choose your poison: would you like to design you day down to the minute, or react constantly to an ever growing list of tasks. Nine to five and never more, or always on until the inevitable burn out. Step right up. This fast changing character to the work doesn't make it inherently meaningful, but for the right person it can ensure it continues to present new challenges. The work can really be something different everyday depending on how you come to it.
On the other hand, hourly retail work is virtually the same, day after day.
This isn’t a criticism. It's simply a fact. Pretending for a moment that all hourly work is like mine of the past months—that is to say, far better than most—one can juggle around how they do things, reorder their todo list, trade around daily necessities. One can fudge a bit here, spend more time of a preferred task there, but with the exception of inventory or some similarly onerous task, the work is fairly repetitious.
For the right person, in the right time, this can be exactly what one needs. For me, and especially given the context in which I was working, it has been a bit of a reset. I took the job at the bakery in service of going to school. I took it knowing my wife could support us on her salary for a time. I took it because I liked the place and the fringe benefits (location, free bread and pastry, better than average COVID precautions). Though the days are very much the same, I’ve found places to enjoy myself, taken on responsibility as I’ve quickly become one of the more experienced people on the floor (summer seasonal work saw a lot of folks come and go), and offered management suggestions for improvements to our flow.
To be honest, I have more thoughts on hourly vs full time work, many of them meandering and deeply politically tinged. Most hourly work is very bad. The media often spoke this summer of a labor shortage. This is not a thing. We have no labor shortage in this country. Instead we have a large cohort of people who are done putting up with unacceptable, dangerous, hateful, and exploitative working conditions, all for meager pay and no benefits. But I don’t feel this applied to me in this particular job. I believe my excellent coworkers deserve more than they are paid, but we are also paid well compared to the federal (and local, much higher) minimum wage. As mentioned previously, those of my colleagues who want to work at the bakery full time seem to have the opportunity.
No, the reasons for my reflection are two-fold. First, and again previously mentioned, is that I have not been in an hourly job for many years. The work, and the worker (that’s me), have changed a bit over that time, but more is the same than wasn’t. My attitude has changed, and years of too little pay for too much work has awoken something necessary in many workers. I hope that, with organized fights and clear need, we are on our way to a much better working environment for the vast majority of folks.
The second reason, which I think drove my need to reflect even more, is that as of this publication, I am transitioning back into full time employment as a “knowledge worker.” That is to say, by the time this email hits your inbox, I’ll be in the middle of a week of onboarding into a job more like what I was doing when I began Ephemeral Punchcard. This shift back, so soon after the shift out, does not feel as strange as I might have thought. Instead, it feels as though it makes perfect sense.
You might be curious why the change…again. It was only a few issues back that I finally revealed, after much unnecessary secrecy, that I was leaving my career of 16 years to go to school to become a teacher. This came after far too much consideration.
A few months back, I was thinking about the doors we walk through in our personal journeys. There is so much potential for anxiety, given how precarious our personal and collective lives today seem, in making a big change. We are besieged on all sides. For every caution we hear to be conservative, practical, mindful, there are just as many insistences to throw caution to the wind, just as many wisen and aged folks imploring younger people not to let opportunities pass them by. What neither of these narratives seem to understand is that doors are very seldom welded shut once one walks through.
When a recruiter reached out with a good opportunity, I let it go. I archived the email. When she reached out again, I did the same. When I saw the third, I decided to remain open. I prepared, but I didn’t stress. I kept on working the path I was on. I attended to the possibility but never pulled my focus away from the path I set out on some six months back. When the other possibility showed signs of bearing fruit, I considered it but always with an eye to prior decisions.
I just let the possibility be a possibility, until it was an offer.
Fear not. I’ve put my teaching program on pause. This door will not weld itself closed either. This door will stay ajar. The breeze through this door will continue to enlighten me, as I remain open along with it. It’s felt rather good so far; I think I’ll keep to this perspective a while.