work Archives - The Gentleman at Large

I used to drive kind of far to get to work. A couple of years ago I had a ten mile commute with fourteen stop lights. There were two different ways to get from my house to the office, but they each had fourteen lights and at rush hour it took about 45 minutes to drive. In Missoula, Montana, the little mountain oasis, I had a commute that wasn’t all that different than if I lived in suburban Chicago.

Driving begets driving, and as long as I was behind the wheel it was easy to run out to the box stores on Reserve Street after work or drive someplace for lunch. I went through about two tanks of gas a week, and in the height of my last summer at that job it cost more than $4 a gallon to fill the tank.

Twice a week I stood at the pump, and as the meter spun frantically I did the quick mental math to calculate how many hours of my life I was pumping into my Ford Ranger. It didn’t matter if I’d finished a project at work, landed a new client, or just played flash games all day, a tank of gas cost me about two hours behind a desk.

There’s a lot about that anecdote that is classically American, and a lot if it I consider bad form. But the worst part is that the foundation of our work infrastructure lies in our time, rather than what we do with that time. It tells us that we live in a system that doesn’t care what you’re doing, as long as you’re doing it at your desk.

When you are hired at a new job, conventional wisdom gives that your employer is purchasing the work that you will produce during your tenure. Conventional wisdom here is wrong. Your boss is actually purchasing 2,080 hours of your life each year, give or take, and betting that you will use that time to produce at least your salary in value.

Of course, this assumes that you’re working a white collar job as a software engineer or something, but the fight to increase minimum wage factors into this in a big way as well. A minimum hourly base pay is, essentially, a safety net within a free market that all but guarantees that certain inscrutable employers will exploit their workforce at any opportunity. Forget for a moment that it’s not working (hence the national debate on raising the minimum wage), and remember that this position has a point. Workers in industrial America had a pretty rough go of it.

But the existence of minimum wage legislation is a necessary evil within a fundamentally flawed way at approaching work. It encourages slow, inefficient progress and allows the (arguably obsolete) 40 hour 9-5 grind to kill our fellow countrymen slowly over a 40 year career as an insurance salesman.

Advances in technology increase our capacity to work effectively at an exponential rate. In most industries you will not be expected to churn out work at that same accelerating rate, the same way you’ll probably be fired if you start showing up to work increasingly infrequently. The result is that there’s a tremendous amount of time wasted in the average office. Your employer pays for it financially, and you pay for it with something a lot more valuable.

Even the kinds of jobs that tend to pay hourly (and low) wages place value and ownership on the person, not the work. A job on a construction site or a fast food restaurant should compensate employees in terms at least of shifts, if not as a function of production.

If the difference appears mostly semantic, you’re not wrong. Payment by the hour or payment by the shift is basically just a different breakdown of the same job. But writing a job description to a task, rather than the time it might take to do it is a significant shift in thinking. The way we define pay informs what we value as a culture, and most of us work in a system that incentivizes being inefficient with the one thing we can’t make more of.

The scene is a familiar one. You’re in a room full of people you don’t know, and your friend who brought you there has disappeared. You’re standing just far enough away from the buffet table to keep from looking like you’re hovering, but still close enough that you’re plausibly browsing the options rather than just standing in the corner comparing shoe laces. You’re clutching a Manhattan.

You’re doing a good job keeping your head low and not making any unnecessary eye contact until you reach for the last bacon wrapped date at exactly the same time as the fat man to your right. Now you’ve done it. You each go through the ceremony of offering the vittle to the other, and before you know it you’re stuck exchanging small talk with a stranger.

You’re doomed.

The conversation starts with how you got to that room, whom it is you know in common, and how much colder fifty degrees feels in the fall than in the spring. You touch on how daylight savings time always catches you off guard and maybe you exchange names. Then he asks, “and what do you do?”

What do you do for a living? What do you do for fun? How do you spend your free time? Or is this bacon-date sniping man mostly interested in how, in a single breath, you can convey to him your identity? The question is unclear.

What do you do? If you’re anything like me, then mostly you sleep. That’s an unsatisfying answer for a cocktail party. What do I do for work? Paperwork, I guess, reams of it. And wade through a latticework of bureaucratic absurdity that sits somewhere between the Orwellian and the Kafkaesque. That’s also an unsatisfying answer, apparently. The question is one that I struggle with.

“I like to ski,” I said once at a cocktail party to a small audience, and was greeted with raised eyebrows.”I try to ski a lot,” I insisted. I think they meant to ask what I did for work. But I don’t necessarily identify with what I do for work, and that’s common.

We face a social pressure to label ourselves with our professions, rather than our passions. Partially, this is because our passions are intimate, and strangers at a party haven’t earned the right to know us that well. Identifying with our LinkedIn Profiles is an easy defense mechanism. In doing it, though, we sell ourselves short.

By simplifying our existence to how we occupy the hours between 9 and 5, we fail to legitimize our other talents and interests; we fail to acknowledge the traits that make us individuals.

I’ve told strangers that I’m a geologist. That I do paperwork, or ski, or work in water rights. I’ve lied and said I’m a hunting guide, just to make the conversation more interesting. I’ve told people I’ll never see again that I promote bicycle races, or that I’m a hydrologist, or that I do environmental restoration work, which is all true. I’ve never said I’m a writer and I’m not sure why.

It’s certainly easier to give flippant response over gin drinks and crab cakes than it is to have a real conversation, and there’s a place for lighthearted small talk. But the tendency to disavow the way we like to spend our time in favor of talking about the way we pay our bills is a dangerous standard to set.

If we’re not careful, we might just start to believe that how we make our money is who we really are.

The Gentleman at Large

Keeping an eye on the forest.

work

We Shouldn’t Increase Minimum Wage

What do you do?