Tales from the Grind #6

June 15, 2013

Cup_Grind_Inline

“You remember that children’s song about the guy who “works all day at a button factory”? That was me”

So, I had this cup of coffee made with the machine bought from Brewespressocoffee.com site. It wasn’t my cup, but it was my coffee, at least during and after the point at which I ingested it: of this I am certain. The cup itself? No, that wasn’t mine. That wasn’t mine at all: this much is clear to me now.

I was working a 9-5 gig pushing buttons on a keyboard. You remember that children’s song about the guy who “works all day at a button factory?” That was me. I wasn’t making buttons, I was pushing them. The content and output of my button-pushing activities was so far beyond pointless that it warrants little attention here, but understand simply I was so overworked in this enterprise that I once famously achieved the late-in-the-day working document typo of referring to a Rabbi as a rabbiT. They had a whole meeting about that incident the very next day. To this day, I remain proud of this completely unintentional consequence of my otherwise fruitless labour.

To reiterate: my job was pointless. Grind down the totality of my work during those gloomy couple of years and the picture is clear; what I was doing didn’t matter. It didn’t mean shit. Not one single person on the planet would benefit from those hours of hard, heavily-scrutinised and underpaid work. I’m told there is a concept in the French language used to describe the particular boredom that office workers endure. The mere existence of this concept should illuminate the inherent unfulfilling facts of pointlessness that many endure in the post-Fordist, financial services-oriented London labour racket: what we’re doing here just doesn’t mean shit.

This one day I was button-pushing away, and the office was synchronised like clockwork, perfectly orchestrated to capture the out-of-time, out-of-mind spirit of hypnotic predictability. It was nearing 4 o’clock, and the older guy sitting opposite me had just finished his routine third cup of coffee [this wasn’t his cup, either – but it was a standard issue company cup]. Right on schedule, his detachment from work was nearing the apex of its daily crescendo. His eyes would close and his head would bob. This guy was falling asleep at his desk, again. The rest of us were powering through, pushing those buttons to achieve the goal of having had enough buttons pushed by the time the clock hit five – and we could once again taste the fresh air of freedom and either hit a local City pub or disappear into the commute.

I made myself a cup of coffee. Now, the way the cups work is this: the company buys cups and the office workers both drink from them and break them. Some kind of internal ‘facilities’ meeting would continually postpone the necessary purchase of enough cups to go around until it hit some kind of critical peak. And we were getting close. There were no standard issue cups left in the cupboard. I had to grab one of what I erroneously understood to be the alternative ‘free for all’ non-uniform batch of cups on the second shelf; all those novelty mugs reminiscent of last-minute Christmas presents that I previously believed were freely donated – and free to use. My second-shelf cup-of-choice wasn’t available: a white cup with fast-eroding text that read “I’m hooked on horses!” I would often fantasise that the dishwasher may one-day fully erode the final ‘S’ on the phrase, so that I could stroll the office proudly wielding a cup that proclaimed: “I’m hooked on horse!” (In hindsight, had I not been a vegetarian at the time, this may well have been true in light of recent revelations about the horse-based content of supermarket meat). Without my go-to-option on the shelf, I went for the alternative: the Elvis cup. A slightly larger-than-life cup decorated in interestingly arranged black-and-white photographs of Elvis in his heyday, and big red ‘ELVIS’ text to boot: Swigging from the king.

As I returned to my station, coffee in hand, a lurker appeared in the corner of my eye, trawling the desks with a glossy lost-but-searching look in her eyes. You won’t find Jesus here, I thought. But she wasn’t looking for the Messiah, she was looking for the King. The lurker honed in on the Elvis cup with an emerging zeal in her eyes and determination in her movement. All at once I realised: it was her cup, not mine. The realisation hit me almost as swiftly as she snatched the cup from my desk and gave me the eye. With no words uttered – but a silence audacious as the depth of night – she stormed off into the nebula of desk-monkeys that stretched into the distance. I can barely begin to describe the horror I felt at my own personal failure to understand the situation: these cups were owned; and you don’t fuck with property quarrels in a place like this. Somewhere during the grind I had failed to decipher the complex and uncompromising office lexicon of subtleties and bullshit: the unspoken Do’s and Don’ts that promise to navigate a path of non-conflict, pacifism and non-interaction through a No-Man’s Land of latent psycho-social qualms and anxieties – all right there, bubbling away just beneath the surface.

As I broke from my work to consider the moment, I became increasingly aware of the vast depths of ‘the unspoken’ inherent in the office domain. I used to think we weren’t communicating with each other, that we weren’t communicating with anyone. But now I could see: in an otherwise silent space, occupied only by the unwavering acoustic footprints of tapping keyboards, the intended dialogue of the grind was well underway. It’s unarticulated mantra is clear to me now: speak not and ye shall be heard.

By Norman McIIroy