In Africa she may have once been an Aida...
...or then again she may once have carried water or molded clay and dug roots, or weaved baskets and fried-up locusts--it really didn't matter. Because what I saw her now doing--week after week--under florescent lights and over an outgassing carpet was a denigration of her person.
There wasn't a cent of nobility in it--she simply needed the money on the one hand, and hated going to the office on the other.
This was progress?
Hadn't this gorgeous, venerable creature been reduced before my eyes? Where once she had made things now she typed shit for shitty bosses in a shitty office. Today's work meant less than nothing; her ancesterally work meant everything.
Oh don't get me wrong. I don't pretend to want to go back to the "good old days."
But just as important-- Nor do I align with today's climate that mocks the "good old days" as really just "bad old days" in disguise.
In fact--the mistake now seems to be in the other direction: we are quick to giggle and snigger and wink that there really wasn't any good in the "good old days."
That's a sin of gluttony. And like all sins, it shames us.
We wax nostalgic because we have in fact lost something.
Indeed we are most fully realized when our work is most intensely linked with our survival. There is a joy in making things that not only help us survive--but things that also, because of their essential goodness, survive when we are gone.
It's called the art of livingry.
We desire fair and honest and essential work.
Not shitty stuff to type in shitty offices for shitty bosses.
Who ever gave a shit about that?
If capitalism's treadmill of creative destruction does not enrich our lives with vital employment... then no matter how much it enriches us with gadgets, entertainment, and abundant foods--IT FAILS US.
Arguably, capitalism is now failing us.
Ironically not because capitalism doesn't work, but because it works so well. The creation and the distribution of goods has never been so efficient--so wonderfully and univerally and robotically dispersed.
But look at the jobs capitalism is creating...
No amount of slick marketing ("contact center professionals") can change the fact that these jobs are worse than typing shitty forms for shitty bosses while inhaling shitty carpet fumes.
The NY TIMES recently had an article about call centers that the great security guru Bruce Schneier sneered at for all the right reasons.
Originally my post was aimed to piggyback his comments. Namely--that we worry too much about our Big Government Brother and not enough about our Big Corporate Uncle.
But then I read the Times article and saw these hamsters:
"Monitors listen in on calls at Aon Consulting, one of the nation's biggest third-party call center monitors, in Melville, N.Y. Nationwide, about 2 percent of the millions of calls made to call centers are monitored."
And then read this:
"Tapping into calls from his cubicle in Melville, N.Y., Stuart Pike is one of an army of listeners employed by these companies. He has an unrestricted view of how corporate America deals with the public - and how the public talks back.
The business of assessing the behavior of operators has taken on a new urgency in recent years ...
That reality has turned third-party call monitoring into a fast-growing industry watching over the nation's six million call center operators as well as hundreds of thousands offshore. And people like Mr. Pike, who listens to about 150 calls a week, have become the equivalent of factory foremen policing America's service economy."
This is progess?
We all have to survive.
But in a world of increasing plenty... how can a culture ask people--with a straight face--to spend their one working life on this planet this way?
For shame.
