How do you define a full week?
When you are working the question is moot. You have a job that takes up the bulk of your day. Your week is already full. And with some jobs, like teaching for example, you have to include marking, meetings, union work, preparation, and the myriad time demands that the profession is heir to, many of which occur outside your stated hours.
I remember reading in some book about conscription that some highly qualified people, especially academics, welcomed the constraints of a military life because they didn’t have to think. What to do, how to do it, and when to do it were all laid down. Personal intellectual involvement: nil. In the same way I also read that the philosopher Wittgenstein enjoyed going to see trashy Westerns and sat in the front row almost up against the screen because the sound and the picture occupied the whole of the space and he didn’t have to think!
In the vacations of my time in University, I had a wide variety of short-term jobs. It was inevitable that given the short period that I was going to be employed there was little training needed or offered to do the fairly simple tasks with which I was charged. The problem in all the jobs was weighing up the offer of the payment for the work and the sometimes mind numbingly tedious work that you had to do to earn the money.
Sometimes the physicality of the job took over and then there was no time to be bored because exhaustion ensured that you embraced unconsciousness whenever the opportunity presented itself. I can still recall ‘breaks’ in the plate-laying in the Steel Works where I plonked myself on a plank supported by a couple of bricks, put my back against the wall of our ‘hut’ and in seconds, I was asleep – only to be very rudely awakened when the break was over and work resumed.
Then there is the sort of work that is mindless and repetitive, but that very mindlessness allows a large percentage of your mind to be elsewhere: your hands and 5% of your brain may have been applying themselves to the task in hand, but 95% of your personality was far, far away from the tedium of paid reality!
One of the better jobs (though it was ridiculously badly paid) was when I was a Security Guard (!). I refused to wear the uniform, except when forced by management, and had a ‘regular’ placement in the office of a transport firm where my ‘job’ was basically to log the drivers as they returned to the depot, and to do timed rounds of the premises using a clock on a strap. This had to be ‘keyed’ to show that you had been to the various locations around the place on your regular rounds, each of which had a key on a chain that was used in your machine to prove you had at least moved about a bit during your stint. Much of the time there I read and sometimes made notes for future essays because I was usually alone.
As opposed to the time I had a job in a vast open plan office where the work I had to do was soul-destroyingly uninteresting and repetitive, and I had an ‘experienced’ child watching me like a hawk, and each time I finished some god-awful task she provided me with another even worse. I only lasted a few days before I asked for the agency that had placed me there to find me something (anything) else before I went made. It was one of those jobs where, even knowing it would only be for a few weeks, was not tolerable.
With some of the jobs I had there could have been little chance of any real sense of achievement or satisfaction from the work: you were there for the money and nothing else. I remember in one of my placements that the people I worked with lived for the weekends, and talking about the weekend that had passed gave enough material for conversations during the week!
I am sure that some of the jobs that I had in the past no longer exist. More sophisticated automation has probably taken the place of fallible human operators, and AI will take care of more.
No one should have a job where there is no opportunity for development. Money cannot compensate for 30 years of mindlessness. Can it?
I remember one stop our security van made when we were delivering wage packets to a factory (that concept dates me!) and I was chatting to the girls who were working on a production line. To make small talk I asked what they were making. And they had no idea whatsoever. They did their bits and didn’t think about anything connected with the actions. I was horrified at the lack of interest in a major element of their lives, except of course that their jobs were not a major element in their lives in the way that I would have thought it should have been. Their jobs were a mean to an end, and that end was companionship with the other girls, and a wage packet at the end of the week that allowed them to live their real lives divorced from what they were doing each day.
This piece started with a question, my response would be that the week starting tomorrow is full, including such events as a dental appointment and culminating in a performance of the Emperor Concerto by Beethoven in the Palau de la Musica in Barcelona. The week takes in, along the way, an expensive (it should have been free) appointment with the police to renew my identity and residence card, and a meeting of a local Poetry Group. Throughout the week I am also conducting long distance research using an almost defunct research project of mine from the 1970s into the novelist Aldous Huxley and his use of the arts in his work. I have centred my research in the last couple of weeks on a footnote in his first novel.
I know that to most that sounds absurdly, inward-looking-end-in-itself-academic-twaddle, but I have been able to convince myself that the problems and opportunities presented by this footnote will be illustrative of technique and intent of someone who was to become a world-famous novelist. So there!
And Chat has done a lot of the donkey work involved in checking sources and suggesting useful websites and libraries, any spare moment can be taken up with a passing thought of mine being translated into something with the trappings of academe by the indefatigable ‘intelligence’ at the tap of my computer keys.
Most of what I am doing about Huxley is only possible because I am retired and because I have access to the Internet, but I am enjoying producing something that I think will be a valid addition to Huxley scholarship. And that is worth making an effort about.
So, a full week!
