The Pleasures and Sorrow of Work

I’m still struggling with “On the Road”. I’m tempted to go into Google and type “What’s it all about, Jack Kerouac?” Seems like a gay novel to me, but I’m not an expert on that kind of thing. Sal, the narrator, keeps running away from Dean but hopes that he’ll chase. Which in fairness, he usually does. Maybe in 1950, that was an establishment rocking moment, but to me it reads like an out take from “Will and Grace”.

I’m nearly at the end, but I’ve already started cheating on Jack. While he was sleeping soundly in my knap sack, I slipped out and picked up a copy of “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work” by Alain De Botton. Alain is a philosopher, so he’d understand when I tell him that Jack just doesn’t do it for me anymore. I need the thrill of something new. Jack doesn’t need to know that I’m seeing somebody else. I’ve had three books on the go in the past and got away with it, although the lying and subterfuge does get a little tiresome.

I have a feeling I’ll be a lot happier reading about work, than I am about crisscrossing America in a beat up Chevrolet. Work is, after all, something I’ve been doing all my life (my parents had us changing our own nappies at six months). I also have some theories in this respect, which I’d like to save for posterity. That way, I’ll be able to look at this blog in twenty years time and act like a smarty pants because my predictions came true. If the turn out to be nonsense, I’ll just say this posting is fiction, like pretty much everything else I’ve written.

As a caveat, I should point out that most of the ideas expressed in this posting have come from watching the History channel while balancing a pizza on my stomach. That is the way all knowledge should be imbibed.

Work, in the organised sense, only really began with the Industrial Revolution. So in the overall scheme of human existence, getting up at 7am to go and sit in somebody else’s building and work for them until 7pm at night, is relatively recent. You have to ask yourself who benefited more from this change? We poor fools who get up in the dark to go and work in offices that produce nothing tangible? Or the billionaires who profit from our toils?

The initial plan was to cull thousands from the fields and corral them into sweatshops for twelve hours a day. This worked for a few years until the workers got all bolshy and started organising themselves.

Seems they wanted to be able to go to the toilet once a day and not have their arm ripped off by an industrial hammer.

So we had a few years of revolution, World War and a depression before Hitler came along and conveniently took everyone’s minds off the issue of work. A strange thing happened during that Second World War. The machinery of killing had overtaken the old ideas of warfare. Men were no longer stupid enough to group in large numbers and climb out of trenches to be fodder for the other side’s cannon. So the people who sit thousands of miles behind the front and send others to their death had to come up with a different approach.

Their solution was to organise soldiers into small platoons of ten to fifteen men. These men would bond with each other and be more flexible and moveable. It worked so well that people would dive on grenades to save their comrades and do other things which are frankly dumb.

America of course benefited most from World War II, not only because it’s infrastructure was still intact, but also through the agencies it was able to establish and agreements such as Bretton Woods. Having neatly sown up the world as a servant of the American master, the US settled down to organise work in a manner that would stifle worker revolt and maximise productivity.

Business leaders, such as GE’s Jack Welch, looked to the lessons of the war for their template. They realised that if they organised their workers into teams, they could squeeze a lot more from them. The comradeship of soldiers would come through and staff would start doing things like working late to cover for team mates or so as not to be seen as “letting the team down”. Pretty soon, the most negative thing you could say of a worker was that they are not a “team player”. Not something that was a problem in the cotton mills of the 1860’s.

The other brilliant wheeze that business leaders came up with was to set unachievable or vague goals. Welch realised that if you asked somebody to make ten widgets a day, they would struggle on day one but eventually get the hang of it and pretty soon be able to finish their allotted work by 11am and spend the rest of the day surfing the internet, or whatever the equivalent was in 1960. And this drove the likes of Welch mad. They wanted to feel that they owned their staff, in the manner of some 19th Century Virginian plantation chief.

So staff were set goals like “make more than ten widgets per day”. This introduced an element of uncertainty which. Pretty soon staff would be producing fifteen widgets a day and going home agitated and depressed. If Welch wanted to squeeze the last pips from the ragged corpses of his underlings, he could call them in and tell them they failed to meet their goals because he expected them to make twenty widgets per day.

We stand today at the end of paths taken. Something fundamental will happen in the next few years which will change the way we look at work and the way we run society itself. Capitalism and the Bretton Wood concepts are dead and a new world order is at hand.

“What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

As long as it’s not Jack Welch, I don’t mind.

On the Road with Jack Kerouac - Part 1

I’m struggling with “On the Road” at the moment. Have you ever read a classic novel and wondered what the hell it’s about? It’s a bit ironic that I’m reading this now because I’m on my first real road trip since coming to Australia. I’m not presumptuous enough to compare myself to Jack Kerouac but I kind of understand his problem.

He travelled back and forth across America and I’m sure it was tremendous. But it still comes across as a ten year olds story about his school tour.

“We went here and then we got back on the bus and then we went there”.

Road trips are an important part of Australian culture. Many young Aussies have jumped into a combi van at some stage and taken off across the country, with just a few jars of Vegemite and some locally grown weed for subsidence. It’s an epic journey, in scale at least, if not in beauty. Because if truth be told, there’s not a huge amount to see between the cities.

I took off from Melbourne as a pale autumn sun was setting in the west and pointed the car towards Sydney. Radio fades here as soon as you leave the cities and to be honest it’s not much good when you can hear it anyway. Today, for example, all the evening radio shows are talking about a video that is doing the rounds on email. It involves a rubber chicken and is the biggest news item in Melbourne since the Kennedy assassination. It’s a dull enough story anyway, but discussing a video on the radio seems pretty pointless to me. They might as well have had some jugglers or a mime artist.

Luckily, I came prepared. I bought one of those slightly dodgy radio transmitters that let you listen to your Ipod in the car. I stuck it on shuffle and pretty soon I was relaxing to the dulcet tones of man hating female country singers as I drove through the darkness on the Hume Highway.

Sal in “On the Road” didn’t have such luxury. As I sat in cruise control, he was racing across America in a 1947 Hudson that had a radio that only seemed to work when they were near Tucson, Arizona.

Night was falling on my trip and I’ve been told that this is the best time of day for spotting Kangaroos. I’ve seen a few Wallabies since I arrived here but I’ve yet to see a Roo, except on a dinner plate in steak format. It’s getting to the point where I’m starting to question their existence.

Perhaps Australia is pulling a huge confidence trick to boost their tourist industry? Wallabies are plentiful but they are only little fellas and could be mistaken for rats with short front legs. So maybe they got a few midgets to stand beside them in a photograph to convince the rest of the world that the animals are massive.

I have another theory. Most kids have a belief at some stage in their young lives that the whole world is a massive conspiracy in which everyone is a knowing participant except the child themselves. I suffer from a variation of this paranoia. I think I live inside a grotesque “Far Side” cartoon where kangaroos stand around smoking cigars until one of them spots me coming round the corner and yells at the others to hide.

After a wildlife free excursion, I reached my stop off point for the night. Albury is the first town in New South Wales and hugs the Northern bank of the great Murray River. Many Australian towns resemble wild west locations from Clint Eastwood movies, with wooden porches on the building and majestic colonial banks on each corner. Albury looks like an altogether more modern place, with flat roofed warehouse shops designed to cater for the local farming industry.

As I walked around its faceless streets, I was reminded of Sal’s comments on the American towns that he passed through. I kept waiting for him to get to the point until I realised he was only interested in the journey and not the destination. I continued reading about his exploits while enjoying a tasty brew in “Paddy’s Irish Bar”. I was edgy and anxious to reach Sydney the following day and I found myself wondering why I struggle to enjoy the moment and feel the need to get to the end as quickly as possible.

As with many things, I blame my dear old mum. The last movie I remember her going to was “The Perfect Storm”. When she came home, I asked her how it was.

“Pretty boring”, she said. “These chaps went out in a fishing boat and they hit bad weather. The boat sank and they all drowned”.

George Clooney would no doubt be horrified to have his big cinema breakthrough reduced to such a basic level, but that’s how my mum looked at the world. It was all about results and not process.

With this in mind, I was determined to enjoy the next day as much as a possible. The sun was up and I set out for a hearty breakfast before I started my journey. Unfortunately, it was Good Friday morning and it turns out that the Australians are much more traditional about observing such things than we Irish are. Albury was stubbornly observing the fast day, so I travelled for an hour as far as Wagga Wagga (so good they named it twice) before I could get my fill of bacon and eggs.

From there it was a straight road to Sydney. The sun was setting as I hit the City limits and the wild animals of Australia had taken another day off. I found my sister’s place and ignored the fact that it was Good Friday by indulging in a few beers. I retired early and took Jack Kerouac to bed with me. Sal still hadn’t found what he was looking for but he seemed to be enjoying the search.

I’m not sure I’d encourage ten year olds to read “On the Road”, what with the constant references to sex and drugs. But it strikes me that if they did, the stories they tell of their school tours would come become a lot more interesting.

Two sons of Abraham

Bernie came to Australia in the sixties. He spent 1967 flirting his way around Europe in the great summer of love, when out the blue he got a message to call home. His Dad told him that Israel was at war and that a letter had arrived for Bernie that morning with his enlistment papers.

“It didn’t take me long to decide,” he said. “I’m more the ‘Shalom’ sort of Jew than the war mongering type. I had an aunt in Melbourne and she promised to look after me. So I caught a flight the following Saturday. I guess I was running from something. But when you think that it might have been a bullet from an Arab Kalashnikov, I don’t feel too guilty about it.

“The ironic thing is that the first guy I met at Melbourne airport was a Syrian Arab who was running from the same war. For years afterwards he’d call me up if any trouble kicked off in the Middle East.

‘Praise be to God that we’re not there,’ he’d say. And it never struck either of us as strange that we were praising different Gods.”

“I never had an argument with that guy”, Bernie said. “Except about football. He was a Carlton fanatic and I barracked for St Kilda. Sometimes I think the world would be a better place if the only thing we fought over was football.”

Bernie’s Aunt had a bakery on Acland Street that specialised in Eastern European pastries and every Saturday it was filled with Yiddish chatter mixed with heavy Slavic dialects. Bernie worked there for a while but had no time for the “Russians” as he called them.

“They came here after the war and kept up their traditions and language. And just when it was dying out, the bloody Soviet Union collapsed and thousands more of them turned up.
“They are Jewish like me, but they are not Israeli and despite what the world thinks, the two things aren’t the same. I was part of the first generation born in the new state. We saw everything as new and bright and not shrouded in the dark mists of the past. And we don’t have any allegiance to old Europe, unlike that lot," he said, as he sneered at the Café across the street.

Acland Street is the iconic heart of St Kilda with cafes and restaurants that nod allegiance to the suburb's original immigrant populations. The Western side of the street is older and has many buildings that have not seen a lick of paint since Noah was decorating the Ark. Dimly lit cake shops that sell Strudels and Hungarian buns mingle with shoe shops selling only obscure Israeli and Russian brands.

Bernie wanted to break away from this, but he got no further than the other side of the street.
“One day I was cleaning up outside my Aunt’s place, when I noticed a ‘For Rent’ sign directly opposite. I noticed that St Kilda was getting busier and that the Esplanade Hotel started opening later. So I figured I could make some money serving their customers some late night food. I travelled a lot when I was younger and the one thing people want late at night is a hamburger. So that’s what I decided to sell.”

His menu is certainly a tribute to his international travels as the variations of burger available are sorted by country. An Aussie burger will get you egg and beetroot, the Mexican some spicy sauce and the Swiss one has some cheese with holes in it. I asked why there was no Israeli burger and he gave me a resigned smile that suggested he’d been asked that question thousands of times.

“I don’t want people thinking this is an Israeli place. There are enough idiots out there who would have a problem with that.”

As he spoke I was joined at the counter by a dreadlocked African who greeted Bernie in Hebrew. Or at least I think he did. I was working on the assumption that Bernie wasn’t fluent in Ethiopian. Their conversation became heated.

“My name is Joel”, he said, turning to me for moral support. “I am also the son of Abraham. Part of the lost tribe of Israel”.

“Well, you’re in St Kilda mate,” I said, affecting my best Aussie accent. “So I’d say you’re pretty bloody lost”.

Joel had turned his attention back to Bernie. Free food was his objective and it was clear that his spattering of Hebrew hadn’t done enough to earn it. So he switched to pleading.

“I’m your brother and it is your duty to help me”. Bernie wouldn’t be in business if he gave in to that plea every time.

“The only person you can ask help from is God”, he said. But as he did, you felt that his heart sank. God doesn’t show his face very often in burger joints and a strange stillness came over the place.

“I’ll give you a hotdog,” Bernie said. “But you must promise me that you will do something tomorrow to sort your life out.”

“God is my witness,” Joel said. “A man who helps his brother is doubly blessed. And you will be rewarded in heaven.”

Bernie smiled. I sensed that he would prefer his rewards to come a little earlier than that. Joel turned to leave and had devoured most of the hotdog before he got to the door. My chips were ready and Bernie seemed shocked that I wanted to pay for them. “I’m sorry about that my friend, but this is St Kilda and there are a lot of hungry people here. God be with you”.
“How about I leave God here with you”, I said. “With some of the customers you get, I think you need him more”.

I ate the chips on the way home. Acland Street was quiet. The cake and shoe shops had long since closed and the Italian restaurants were packing up their outside tables. Joel was crouched in a doorway, trying to get some sleep after his evening feed.

“Shalom”, I said. “I hope you sleep well”.

“Shalom to you too, my friend,” he said. “I will sleep well because I don’t have to beg for it”.