Three dread words — laid in a row
My first formal title was Efficiency Planning Manager. And the role was bestowed with ceremony.
My boss clicked through vast spreadsheets and explained the title’s constituent parts.
‘Efficiency’ was when the numbers went down — a good thing, something to be desired:
It’s all about maintaining the same level of output with fewer FTE.
So said my boss. Which I translated in my head as:
It’s getting the same amount of work from fewer people.
And then, thinking frantically:
It’s firing folk and piling their work on the enfeebled team left behind.
‘Planning’ — that was my responsibility
Setting targets for firings. Nagging leaders to make the cuts. Recording the rounds of corporate bloodletting.
On good days, I lost myself in the abstraction. I recorded efficiency gains in columns that rippled with colours (angry reds, happy greens).
On bad days, I felt like a drone operator, sitting in a cubicle in a pressed shirt, maiming people from afar.
Click. There goes your career, Cell G3349. Click. Click. Postpone that mortgage application, Cell G5287.
Seeing the person was my mistake. My career as an Efficiency Planning Manager was soon over and I picked up the duties of a National Development Manager. Much more… constructive.
Why those titles?
Why those acronyms? Why the advanced level of abstraction? Because if we were honest about our occupations, we might be ashamed.
I read a lot while I held those jobs. Dad had a new flat with room for me, and I was grateful. We admired the big empty rooms. And put off buying furniture or getting a TV.
Books we welcomed. They propped open doors and served as coasters. Stacks grew from the carpet like stalagmites. Piles of crushed spines, bearing masculine titles. For Whom the Bell Tolls. Down and Out in Paris and London. The Call of The Wild.
Steinbeck was my favourite. Other novels were picked up, set down, floated about the flat. The Grapes of Wrath stayed anchored by my bedside.
The novel brought me back
When I was hollowed out after a day of efficiencies, Steinbeck stirred my soul.
His book followed an uprooted family as they sought work. He made the Joads seem giant in spirit, while explaining why they were unremarkable in the extreme.
Unremarkable, because a system was running 1930s America. Climate punished the innocent. Corporations bled them dry. And Steinbeck, first as a reporter, then as an author, documented the organised violence around California’s orchards.
The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all.
That achievement of Steinbeck’s would have been enough to make him important to me as I updated spreadsheets. He sharpened my despair — and then tempered it into resolve.
It’s not lightning or earthquakes. We’ve got a bad thing made by men, and by God that’s something we can change.
I heard Steinbeck’s message
Reading The Grapes of Wrath, you side with the migrant farmers, with the Okies and the Joads. These are people who know and love the land. Their honest need to work is more dignified than rich Californians’ obsession with value, price and yield.
And whereas the wants of the Californians were nebulous and undefined, the wants of the Okies were beside the road, lying there to be seen and coveted: the good fields with water to be dug for, the good green fields, earth to crumble experimentally in the hand, grass to smell, oaten stalks to chew until the sharp sweetness was in the throat.
If you don’t understand what your work means in the world of objects and people — if you await results that can’t be perceived by sight, smell, taste or touch — stay your hand. You might be fermenting the grapes of wrath. An efficiency with great cost.
Aidan Clifford writes for Pinstripe Poets – artists who love their day jobs. This post is part of a series called ‘Write like the Greats’. See the rest here.
