New Escapologist : November 2019

What a Weird Month

Readers will be surprised (and possibly disgusted) to hear that I, Robert "Slippery" Wringham, spent the month of November working in a city-centre office.

I don't think it's hyperbole to say it was one of the worst times I've ever had. Well, maybe that is hyperbole, actually, but it really was quite bad.

The job, a time-limited project, was supposed to be for four months. I applied and interviewed for it in good faith because I liked the sound of the project, it being an opportunity to influence culture in my own city (though I'll say no more lest I give away the identity of the organisation). Moreover, as I generaly live in what most people would call "stinking poverty," the money would have been enough for a Bohemian like me to live on for more than a year. Kerching!

In the event, I lasted just three weeks before handing in my notice, gleefully escaping just in time for my birthday. The project wasn't quite what had been advertised, the creative decisions having already been made and the end result being just another crock of laborious and condescending-to-the-public shit.

What's more, the office was hoaching with bullies and had a shockingly toxic atmosphere. I (along with my fellow inmates) was over-supervised when it didn't matter (grown adults being ticked off for being ten minutes late thanks to poor train service) and under-supervised when help was really needed (putting some of us in legally-dubious situations). It struck me that in all my time writing about the perrils of work, I never got down into the really grubby, non-systemic problems and what happens when you're being pushed around behind the call of regular pushing-around duty.

Since the office was housed in a Victorian building with single-pane windows, the place was freezing too. This was more than apt for a place in which I was made to feel like Bartleby the Scrivener. I considered coming to work with a pair of fingerless gloves to complete the vision, but my vertical haircut already made me too noticable in the open-plan pumpkin patch.

Unlike my fellow inmates, I had the luxury of walking away. Like Bartleby, I was able to say "I would prefer not to." I considered filing a grievance in hopes of improving things for the poor sots I'd be leaving behind, but I learned on Quitting Day that no fewer than six others had fled the workplace in 2019, that all had gone through the report-a-cunt formalities, and that nothing had changed.

If I can face thinking about it all again, I took some notes during my incarceration with the idea of them forming the basis of my next Patreon essay. Join us there if you'd like to get the low-down lowdown.

Yours from the outside,

—Robert "The Scrivener" Wringham x

Absconding

Say you could still just bail when you felt like it. You know what you would look like when you did it? You would look like this raccoon.

Many thanks to reader and supporter MV for bringing this absconding racoon to our attention.

The Hairpin commentary on the racoon is a tad bleak. It posits that we can’t abscond anymore because “there is nowhere left to bail to. The darkness is closing in on all sides.”

I know what she means. Workers’ rights are being eroded. The precariat swells. Free movement is under attack. But I’m still at large and if I believed for a second that escape was impossible I’d lose my final marble.

“Happy to discuss,” as a bastard might write at the end of workplace email.

Everything I Wanted to Do

I recently gobbled up Neil Gaiman’s little book, Art Matters. It’s a collection of thoughtful bits and bobs, including a speech he gave to new arts graduates, on the subject of art and writing.

It’s eminently quotable and there are a couple that will resonate with Escapologists:

I escaped from school as soon as I could, when the prospect of four more years of enforced learning before I’d become the writer I wanted to be was stifling.

And, most importantly:

The nearest thing I had [to a plan] was a list I made when I was 15 of all everything I wanted to do. … I didn’t have a career, I just did the next thing on the list.

That list is pretty much the same thing as the “life audit” I suggest making in Escape Everything! and NG was obviously very clever to do it at fifteen. It’s never too late though: stand back, take stock, and decide what it is you want to do.

The possibilities are endless. If not Endless.

Life in a Cornish Shed

[The tourists] stopped their cars on the crossroads and spent ages trying to capture my shed with their expensive cameras. I couldn’t understand it at first. My shed was not typical of Cornwall. It wasn’t picturesque, like the granite cottages. I decided, in the end, that the shed must have looked like freedom. It was clear, by then, that someone was living in the broken-down building. Someone–me–had managed to escape.

In Escape Everything! there’s a chapter in which I describe the lives of hermits, people who have gone off into the woods to live in sheds or lean-tos. My tongue was half in my cheek when I wrote that. I wasn’t really suggesting that anyone go live in a shed, while also allowing that one could. One really could do it, and I gave some examples of it.

The reason I did this is because the extreme idea of going out into the woods and not coming back–being legally homeless and living by your wits–is perhaps the worst case scenario (WCS) and, as I say elsewhere in the book, it’s important to identify and understand the WCS. Not only does it show you, clearly, what you risk and so you can own you fate but also you’ll find that a specific WCS probably isn’t as bad as the general sense of “ULTIMATE FAILURE” you might otherwise carry around.

Now, a great and well-told book-length case study of living in such circumstance comes from Homesick: Why I Live in a Shed is a new book by Catrina Davies and I can’t reccomend it highly enough.

Catrina lives in an abandoned metal-sided shed that once served as her dad’s workshop. Although it was rough circumstance–family poverty, the housing crisis and, ultimately, capitalism–that led Catrina to her unusual dwelling, she approaches the situation with a beautiful Stoicism and finds that it at least dovetails with her values. At least living in the shed, practically for free, she can write books and songs instead of slaving in horrible jobs to make ends meet and pay the rent on someone else’s overrated property.

The book goes into how she made it all work (getting water online, furnishing it), the horrors (having to evict spiders and rats when first moving in), the heartbreak (being burgled and then crashed into by a car), and the moments it truly pays off (swimming with seals, gazing at the moon and stars).

The book is available now and is clearly an important addition to any Escapologist’s library. ’tis good!

Letter to the Editor: Rapidly Approaching Fifty

Hi Robert

I’m not sure I ever said thank you for sending the book?  So just to be sure I’m writing to say how much I enjoyed it.

I am rapidly approaching fifty years old and working hard to escape the corporate world so the book chimes loudly with me.

I’ve passed the book to my daughter now. She is quite an expert at buying second hand clothes and still looking stylish. I’ve started to try and follow her example and now wonder why I always purchased ‘new’ previously.

Thanks,
T

Letter to the editor: They just... lost track of me?

Hi Robert,

Re: the intangibility of debt. When I was 20 or so, I took out a $5,000 personal loan and a credit card with a $5,000 limit. The loan was to pay for the removal of my wisdom teeth and the credit card was because I thought it was just a thing adults are supposed to have.

I ended up moving overseas for two years instead of making any attempt to pay them off, and in that absence they just… lost track of me.

A few years later, I applied to get a copy of my credit report and there was no record of either of the defaults.

The only info they had on me was an address I used to live at, and one of the many jobs I’d (officially) worked at. There was almost no detail whatsoever. I’m not off-grid or anything; I’m on the electoral roll and I pay taxes so it’s not hard to find me.

So, yeah. I don’t think the whole red letter, scary-scary, “protect your credit rating at all costs” thing is real.

I think I probably got lucky – but only a bit. It was two unrelated financial institutions, so I think it must be pretty common. I figure the people who attend to low-level debt are just random people who aren’t great at their jobs and don’t care about them (nor should they), so of course it doesn’t get tracked well.

I don’t know if I can go as far as actually recommending people just stop paying their consumer debts off, but I can definitely recommend that people not feel like they are under a perpetual dark cloud. Because the bank sure as hell as isn’t thinking about it.

Yours,
Q

All for now! I plan to get another newsletter out before everyone kicks off their shoes for the holiday season but, in the event that I do not, let me take this opportunity to wish you a warm and happy ho-ho-ho time and all that.

Don't be a stranger. Send me a "letter to the editor" by replying to this email. You’ll get a reply and we’ll anonymise any blogged and/or newslettered version.

Merry Blessings,

Robert Wringham