Banksman

​I started another job as a construction guy, and so I showed up today, and it turns out I'm going to be a banksman.

In the classic style of working for an agency, they don't always tell you what the job involves until you show up on the day. 

But here I am, guiding the forklifts as they pick up pallets of bricks for people to put down as paving stones. 

It's pretty chill, all things considered. As with most minimum wage jobs, you tend to spend most of your time pretending to be busy rather than actually doing any work. 

But I've learned to love it. I've learned to embrace it. The art of looking busy. The art of looking like you're working. 

Because if you don't look like you're working, you end up in trouble, I guess. 

It's weird how the system works, but at the end of the day, we don't have much of a choice other than to get on with it. 

I guess that's what's strange about the world of work. You enter it as a young person, thinking that if you work hard, if you focus, if you do your job well, it'll somehow benefit you. 

But as far as I can tell, in every occupation, that is not true. Actually, the best thing you can do to survive a workplace is to do the bare minimum and to only do what you're told to do. 

Because if you do too much or you try too hard, you tend to make other people feel uncomfortable. You tend to make other people feel insecure. And so it's not so much giving up, but it's learning where and when to actually try. 

And you've got to be a little bit strategic about it, I guess. But at the end of the day, when it comes to minimum-wage jobs, the work culture necessitates a kind of unwillingness to do work in the worker. 

I don't know. I mean, it's true and it's untrue. It's true and it's untrue. Actually, people at work genuinely want to do a good job, and they want to get on with things. 

And they do get on with things, otherwise, nothing would get done. But it is an art. The art of labouring. I'm a labourer now, today, and so I might as well embrace it.