SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA JOB MARKET : THIS IS HAPPINESS? : Thoreau Was Right: Let’s Head for Walden
When it comes to the idea of work, we’ve all been slipped the old rubber peach. The myth says the modern workplace is wonderful because its computers and machines free us from the backbreaking labor that wore out our forebears. We have engaging work, we’re told. We have leisure. We’re lucky.
Bullfeathers. We’re worse off even than early man. He’d spend a few bracing, aerobically stimulating and thrillingly dangerous hours knocking off a mastodon; then, while the clan took a week or so to eat it, he could paint a few pictographs for archeologists to find, or sit in the shade day after day playing gin and telling Paleolithic dirty jokes. This is hardship?
By contrast, today’s data-entry clerk, to cite just one of our crummy new jobs, spends all day and all week stuffing figures on avocado exports into some mainframe, his only stimulation the ever-present danger of paper cuts or carpal tunnel syndrome, his contribution to the public weal a total mystery. For all he knows, no one ever uses his stuff, which is probably true. Flabby, dead from the neck up, of an evening he collapses into the recliner in front of “Wheel of Fortune.” This is leisure? This is living?
A rethinking of work clearly is needed, which is why I announce today the formation of the Neo-Thoreauvian Movement. Its guiding spirit, Henry David Thoreau, wasn’t against work--he built his own house for less than it would cost to roof a free-range chicken coop in Beverly Hills--but he was against useless work and the enslavement of the soul by work.
I won’t kid you; becoming a good Neo-Thoreauvian is a job in itself. But it’s far more enjoyable than sweating over a marketing plan for Whoopee Kitty Litter, which is the kind of thing all too many of us are stuck doing. NT training involves the highest human arts: deceit, dissembling and manipulation. What could be more fun?
The main areas of study:
Feigned incompetence. The cornerstone skill, it plays off a couple of workplace axioms. First, managers flog the horses that run. And second, everybody loves a screw-up, if he or she screws up in an appealing way.
The person who won’t do a certain job is labeled a bum or a malcontent, is no longer invited to peer lunches at Ernie’s House of Marine Tacos, and before long is stripped of his job and--God help him--his dental benefits. But the person who gamely tries to do a job and falls on his face is everybody’s pet. His willingness to take it on is applauded, while his failure at it only arouses sympathy and fondness in his fellows. And why not? He has given them someone to feel superior to.
Further, competence only breeds obligation. When your boss really needs something, she turns to someone she knows can produce. My advice: Don’t be that person. It’ll spare you a lot of spoiled weekends.
So, at the beginning display a puppy-like enthusiasm for every dreary task, but be sure to mess it up enough so that others have to redo it. Start small; volunteer to make the coffee. Coffee once was made by secretaries, a species going the way of the snail darter and the spotted owl. People who used to be secretaries are now administrative assistants and they don’t make coffee unless they damn well feel like it, which is not often. So you make the coffee--triple strength, with maybe some lawn clippings or chili powder tossed in. You will never have to make it again.
As you branch out from there, you will soon establish yourself as a genial incompetent, a loveable, bumbling eccentric who means well but who needs help and protection. This is exactly what you want.
Apply yourself at home too. When your spouse asks you to paint, hang wallpaper or fix the faucets, leap to the task with happy cries and foul it up. In no time at all you will be in the den listening to Bach oratorios, while your Precious Biscuit is out in the garage under the Volvo, changing the oil.
Blatant sexist manipulation? You bet, but the sword cuts as deeply both ways. A woman stuck with the usual male expectations, for example, need produce only a short string of ghastly culinary failures--fettuccine with chocolate sardine pesto sauce works admirably--to get her male into an apron or, better, send him to the phone to make restaurant reservations. This gives her more free time for power lifting or the study of Nietzsche.
Creative groveling. It is not enough to be a screw-up; one must admit it in a disarming and humble way in order to achieve the desired sympathy and affection. Master the rueful grin, the apologetic shrug, the art of false candor and self-deprecation. After deliberately butchering the financial statements of a particularly loathsome client, for example, an accountant might tell his fellows: “Gee, what a dummy. Here I’ve been thinking all along that assets were the bad things you didn’t want and liabilities were the good stuff. But you give me another crack at this baby next quarter, and I just know I’ll come within a few thousand bucks of hitting it smack on the nose.”
Narrow specialization. Alas, even the canniest Neo-Thoreauvian eventually has to display some competence at something, or he will find his loveable, eccentric self out on the pavement. The trick here is to identify or create a niche specialty that really occupies very little of your time and cranial capacity but that you can promote as impossibly arcane and vitally important to the enterprise. Note: Always pick a specialty with frequent professional meetings in places such as Aspen and San Francisco.
Long-range planning is best because you won’t be around to blame when everything goes blooey. Failing that, choose anything involving equations or table upon table of figures; the bogus sub-specialties of economics, which use mountains of stats to conceal molehills of thought, are excellent.
Just subscribe to the journals and leave them on your desk, opened to a page full of squiggles. When the boss comes in and says something like, “Akron looks like a good spot for the new ultrahyperpolymer plant, don’t you think?,” make sincere eye contact and say, “Looks promising. But I’d like to fly Akron through the Heidigger Economic Development Analytic Protocol, just to be sure.”
There is no such thing, of course, but your afternoon is covered. Go to the movies or, better yet, dip into a book. “Walden” is still a good read, we’re told.
