Every time my local bank gets a new teller, I have to train
her (or him).
Most retail service workers have a verbal routine or “tic”
that comes (or at least develops) with the job. Clothing store clerks wander
over and say, “May I help you find something?” Waiters coo “Is everything all
right?” anywhere from one to fifteen minutes after serving you … although it
appears to be a point of pride to do it as quickly as possible; I’ve had the
question posed before I’d taken a bite of the entrée.
(My family traveled in the former Yugoslavia in 1970, and I
remember my parents being struck by how refreshing it was that shop owners
actually seemed taken aback or pleasantly surprised to be asked what something
cost. They just stood by, silently beaming, while we wandered through their
place, as if proud just to be a business owner or to have a visitor looking
over their offerings.)
At least the clothing store and restaurant queries have some
semblance of a rational connection to the business relationship between yourself
and the employee. As potential customer or diner, you might indeed have a
response that relates to your needs.
But at my bank, the conversational gambit invariably involves
a reference to the weekend. On a Monday or Tuesday, the teller might ask: “Did
you have a good weekend?” On a Thursday or Friday, it’s “Got any plans for the
weekend?”
This always catches me up short. I don’t have weekends,
really. In the three and a half years since I lost my last day job and went
free-lance as a wordsmith and actor/model, anything can happen, on any day.
I could be working at home on my laptop on any of the seven days
of the week (and late into the night); I could head out for a commercial video
or photo job early on a weekday morning or an indie film shoot on a Saturday or
Sunday. By the same token, I can go to a movie or social event on a weekday
afternoon, and often have.
Every day is different; every day could be an adventure or just
another day. There’s no clear distinction between a weekday (or “workday”) and
a weekend day (another potential workday). So when a teller asks about my
weekend, I tend to get a blank look and say “I don’t know.” My window of
alertness tends to extend no farther than the next 24 hours (what I have to
prepare to do) or the past 24 (what I’ve most recently achieved).
That got me to thinking about the pattern of most Americans’
work lives – the clichés of TGIF, “working for the weekend,” referring to
Wednesdays as “hump day,” and so on. Even during the many years I was a
nine-to-fiver (or eight-to-fiver, or eight-thirty-to-fiver), I was never
inclined to say “TGIF.”
To me, it’s a symptom of how tied down one is (or has made
oneself) to a wage-earning position. Such remarks also devalue the weekdays,
one’s job, even oneself for five-sevenths of life during most of our time on Earth.
In effect, it says a majority of one’s adult life “doesn’t matter,” except for
the financial reward one gets out of it and expends on weekends, summer
vacations, and goodies advertised on television, online, in the Friday
entertainment sections and color supplements (for those of us who still
subscribe to a newspaper).
The week becomes a miniature version of one’s professional
life as a whole: hanging on for retirement. I know people who specifically and
explicitly hate their job but are clinging to it to get the pension and other
retirement benefits; whether they know what they’re going to do with their time
or not (and some appear to have only the foggiest idea), it as if they have put
off “really living” until they’ve completed a genteel, contemporary version of indentured
servitude.
The sad thing is, the price they’ve paid in stress and other
health costs often means they die before they’ve had a chance to enjoy much of
their golden ticket of retirement. I can think of several people off the top of
my head about whom I wonder, will they really survive until they can retire?
The person who does what she loves for pay, year after year,
is fairly rare, I think; most people know in their hearts that their job does
not constitute their identity. Yet most people also know in their hearts that
it’s wrong to text or make a cell phone call at the wheel, or drop a cigarette
butt on the sidewalk, yet do it anyway. Somehow, we’re always the exception.
In the same way, folks betray the fact that they’ve allowed
their workplace to become an integral piece of their identity -- their
voluntary enslavement to a day job -- when they say things like “thank god it’s
Friday,” “it’s hump day,” and “quittin’ time!”
I didn’t love most of my wage jobs; I merely made the best
of them. They were a fact of life, not its essence. Mark Twain once said that
he never let his schooling get in the way of his education; when I was a wage
earner, I used to say I tried never to let my job get in the way of my work. Yet there was always the potential
for something wonderful to happen each day, even inside an office.
Also, I readily volunteered to hand-deliver packages and messages
in every job I had over the 19 years I had day jobs in Portland: to other
campus buildings at Portland State, to separate offices like the fire station and
the library at the City of Lake Oswego, and to the courts and other law firms
when I worked as a legal secretary. It was always good to get out in the
weather and stretch my legs.
Friends occasionally congratulate me for “living my dream”
now. I’m not convinced I’m necessarily doing that. I’m just doing what seems
most rewarding, on the most levels and within my reach, at this time. That
could change. I don’t wish to return to working a day job, but sometime in the
future I know that I may decide it’s necessary -- maybe even preferable.
But if I do, I won’t be saying TGIF or calling Wednesday
hump day.
As for the tellers at my bank across the street from our
apartment, it only takes two or three visits to train each one to avoid
referring to the illusory weekend. Sooner or later, they switch to “How’s your
day going?” perhaps. Or even “Got a new acting job coming up?”
Posts
Heh. I don't have weekends, either. :)
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