WORKING IN JAPAN: PT. 25

The immediacy of manual labour

You’re at your office desk. The company has a project and they ask you to make an Excel file. Or a fucking PowerPoint. You can’t be bothered but you go ‘Yeah’ because you’re obligated, although the deadline is in two days so you convince yourself it’s fine to put it off. You tell yourself it’s 3PM now and you aren’t at your sharpest. Tomorrow morning would be the best time to focus on this detail-rich assignment, just as you’re having coffee.

Besides, today there are customers to reply to, and actual customers take priority over the production of materials for in-house planning. You reply to one of these very precious clients then do nothing for the rest of the afternoon because it’s gone four by now and no one around you looks like they’re up to much anyway. You go on Reddit to read people debating, delete your browser history, and go home. Another day of strategic procrastination complete!

The above describes me, during much of the ten years I did a keyboard job. My impression was that the people around me acted the same, much of the time. Occasionally, all management disappeared from the office floor for a meeting, and during those hours in particular the typing sounds stopped. A silence fell over the office until our bosses filed back out, whereupon fingertips restarted drumming in a cloudburst of performative workerly effort, the noise like a sudden rain.

But those were my former office days, and cleaning is a different beast. In case you didn’t know, this blog series is about me being a train station cleaner. It’s about the physical labour I embraced to flee the modern torture chamber we call an ‘open plan office’. I could, and will, post a long and mentally dysregulated screed about my abhorrence of these despicable places… but not today.

Right now, I’ll talk about physical labour, a very immediate kind of work that must be dealt with on a tighter schedule. Unlike the keyboard-and-screen gig where you can persuade yourself it’s OK to do things next week, each component of the day is unavoidable and, mostly, unchanging. You can’t shortcut wiping a metre of handrail. And the garbage needs moving from A to B. It needs to be done the day, perhaps the very morning you’re told, a process you can’t accelerate with copy paste. The way to remove a hundred kilograms of sticky drinks containers from a train station is to carry them by hand or push them through crowds in a cart. And the time to do it is the day you’re told, or else it spills out over the platform and you’re fired.

There are benefits to manual labour. For one thing, it keeps you fit. A day’s cleaning has me walk at least 18,000 steps and I’ve noticed, since I started, that I don’t get tired when I’m out and about. I can do a brisk walk for several kilometres, totally relaxed, and not care. The farmer’s walk with sacks of bottles has my arms strong. My body has a warm glow and I sleep well at night.

Plus, I’ve repossessed the inside of my skull. The cleaning company may impose a schedule on the movements of my body, but they aren’t about puppeting my brain. My sales job, which also involved translation, research project management and elements of accounting, felt like being possessed. There was no slack to daydream, no leeway for flights of fantasy, during the fulfillment of these duties; you were a machine and petty functionary before you were yourself, a profitable entity absorbing information and secreting it out. Some people enjoy this, and experience it as a ‘state of flow’, but I don’t. It makes me feel like I’ve gone away.

Hence the guilty stalking of Reddit, in the day’s last office hours once the basic work was done. And hence the slow, then rapid, then alarming pace of my mental and spiritual devolution over the course of my decade getting gently stepped on with the rest of the white collar gravel. Hence the emotional decision to quit the business world, become unemployed, and, ultimately, do something that pays less and leaves my thoughts alone.

Sweeping and mopping, I needn’t worry about numbers, invoice accuracy, fonts and figures and the formality of emails, nor the judgments of some division boss who sits ninety centimetres from my FUCKING desk ALL DAY. I can make plans and dream and go on adventures inside myself instead. I can go to the bathroom whenever, get a drink, or sit in the broom cupboard to check my phone. Even take a two-hour break. I can do all this, unmolested and unwatched, so long as the work itself is done by day’s end.

And all this while exercising in fresh air. Not recirculated stuff from the ventilation system of an office with unopenable windows. I mean real, natural, unregulated atmospheric gas that changes temperature and sometimes has rain in it. I used to feel like I was kidnapping myself, handing my brain over, when I went to an office, and now I feel like a person again.

Last but not least, the immediacy of manual labour has taught me a life lesson: things get done by doing them. You can’t get a thing finished by procrastinating, fretting or inventing narratives diminishing its importance. Things get done when you DO them and that is the nature of the work I engage in now. It’s bleeding over into my everyday life. If I have a thing to do, instead of whining I simply attack the task.

The satisfaction of having a thing done is a hundred times greater than the minor relief of putting it off. It took a specific job to force me to learn this, but it’s to my benefit that I did.

Here is the next instalment, Part 26.

You can read Part 24 of this series here.

Also, I have a cool sci-fi novel called Disease, which you can read on Kindle.