New Escapologist : December 2020 😷
Home for Christmas
Season's Greetings Everyone,
I write to you on Day 4 of self-isolation. Yes, SARS-CoV-2 has found its way to Escape Towers.
On Friday morning, my partner woke feeling unwell and quickly understood the situation. She'd lost taste and smell, was running a fever, and felt generally confused and discombobulated. Unlike me, she's not one for calling in sick at the drop of an extremely tiny hat, partly because doing so involves a 6am call to her sleeping manager, which isn't something a part-time employee likes to do without good reason. Even so, she made the call, ordered a home test kit, and now we self-isolate for at least ten days.
That I am not showing symptoms myself complicates things a bit. Do we social-distance from each other in our own home or do we accept that I'll get it eventually if I don't already? It's tempting to do the latter since social-distancing from your only loved one would be the absolute pits, but it could mean the difference between ten days of care-giving and my ending up on a ventilator, my final thoughts being "fuck you, Boris Johnston". So we decided to distance.
After cancelling my one appointment and obsessively disinfecting every surface, light switch and doorknob, I set to work converting our multi-purpose spare room (and thank goodness we have one) into a serviceable sick room, where Samara now spends her time napping or listening to podcasts or watching YouTube. She is talkative and cheerful despite still having the symptoms.
I remain symptom-free, still clueless as to whether I'm an asymptomatic case or if I've somehow got away with it. The worst thing (for me) is not being able to be close to my partner, serving her food from two metres away, conversing through masks, and all the rest of it, especially with the lingering thought that such measures might not even be necessary. It's a complete nightmare and it won't be over until at least the 27th.
My advice for you now, madam, is to take precautions seriously. We always washed hands, socially-distanced, and stayed at home where possible, but we still got it! If you're older than we are or less fit (and I am positively unfit), don't take risks! How often do you hear "don't take risks" in New Escapologist? Never. So heed it! PSA over.
A weird thing about this is how getting COVID-19, the virus from the news, feels oddly like being visited by a celebrity. Some years ago, when Samara (a Montrealer) was dissing New York City for its lack of style, I countered with "But how can you be bored by New York? It's like being inside a celebrity!" I hadn't meant it to sound so creepy, but you know what I mean: something recognisable at every corner and you in the centre of it all. COVID, meanwhile, is like having a celebrity inside you! A celebrity in your lungs and rushing round your veins. The ramifications of this have not yet begun to dawn on me. I just hope it doesn't leave an autograph.
Your friend in quarantine,
Robert Wringham (and Samara) x
New Escapologist
Two New Books
Now that the bad news is out of the way, I'll tell you what I was working on before the virus complicated everything: I'm writing two new books.
One is a miscellany and the other is a novel. They will be my first books in six years that are not of the New Escapologist stable, but they are still Escapological.
The novel is about a man with a terrible job (not an office job, I should add) and the minor act of escape in which he has allowed himself to indulge: taking a bath.
Yes, it's a whole novel about "taking a bath" (sort of) and I'm having a whale of a time writing it. The protagonist is not very much like me and is in fact a wholly new character, which feels good. It's an Escapological novel in the spirit of Coming Up for Air by Orwell, Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis, and The History of Mr. Polly by sexy old H. G. Wells, but it's presented in a far more contemporary style along the lines of Flights by Olga Tokarczuk (except light and funny). It includes topics dear to many an Escapologist's heart: trains, booze, music, love, and surrealism. I'll say no more for now, but I do think you'll like it and it would not be a waste of attention for any freedom-loving Escapologist.
The miscellany meanwhile is a collection of ~30 short pieces I've previously published elsewhere, improved and reformatted to be worthy of a book. These writings are not as Escapological as the novel (though I've refurbished a couple of pieces from New Escapologist and the Idler) but I see it as the sort of book an Escapologist would enjoy reading: short, funny, apolitical, eternal, and hopefully just a good time.
More than anything, I see them as manifestations of Escapology. In New Escapologist, we write about living well while these books are acts of living well. I am writing them as implements of the good life, to be time well spent.
If you'd like to read my new books when they emerge in 2021, I encourage you to buy them in advance through this Kickstarter campaign. Your material assistance will help me to finish them, but your support will also give me the knowledge that there's an audience to speak to and not just the void. It will also pay my friend to design the book jackets, and help a couple of indie publishers publishers. I don't think you'll regret it. You'll also etch your name on the eternal tablet by appearing in the acknowledgements! Thank you. Here's that link again.
The Art of the Rage Quit
I’ve been enjoying this thread on Twitter.
It’s a torrent of stories of workplace woe (from offices, kitchens, media outlets, grocery stores) and how the worker abruptly walked out one day, leaving a ball of fire in their wake.
There are some funny stories here but most of them just make your blood boil. It begins by marking the three-year anniversary of a positively scruptious “rage quit”:
3 years ago, I was late to work b/c a man set off a bomb in the subway. Most of my team hadn’t arrived when I got in, but my boss YELLED at me anyway. I let her finish, smiled, then told her I quit b/c I was starting a job at The New York Times. […] There is nothing unprofessional about making fun of managers who disrespect you or your work. Silence around abuse only allows it to propagate.*
That’s the way to do it!
Hundreds of other people have chimed in with their own rage quitting storiess. Here are some highlights:
I can top that one! 9/11 was on a Tuesday. My office was closed Wed, Thurs and Friday. We all came back Monday. On our next paycheck we were all docked pay for the missed days.*
Can you imagine? Docked for days not worked during 9/11!
I rage quit 3 years ago. I was laughed at in a meeting for asking for help & told that if I didn’t have things that were back filed put away I would be fired. Immediately walked to my desk, wrote a resignation, and told them I quit. Moved to a new city & started over the next week.*
My personal favourite:
A job colleague did a planned rage quit. She left a whole side of raw salmon in her locked desk drawer, crazy glued the lock, locked her office and crazy glued that lock. After a week they called the hazmat team. The office never really smelled ok after that.*
As much as I dislike going to work, I never had bosses as bad as those ones. There was the coffee shop manager, I suppose, who threatened to fire any team member who went home for Christmas (and thus be unavailable to work as usual on Christmas week) but I’d been planning to quit anyway so it didn’t exactly come to a rage quit. I enjoyed how this manager passive-aggressively failed to reply to my notice letter in any official or unofficial way though: I was just gone.
To counter the idea that bosses have to be awful (i.e. because being awful is a choice) here’s a nice one:
my best friend died a few years ago and my workplace gave me a week of bereavement leave. “But we weren’t related” I said. “You were friends for 22 years. Close enough. Go be with the family” said the boss. It’s possible not to be a jerk, bosses!!*
Bang Head Here
Reader Graeme writes by email:
I recently moved into a new office. It is the first time I’ve had the pleasure of having an office all to myself – thanks to Covid. The space was previously occupied by a revolving door of procurement and administrative staff. Many of their personal effects remain. The hard hat of a man fired three years ago still hangs on the wall. As I was staring off into space this morning at my desk I noted a faint message on the poorly maintained whiteboard. It read: “Bang Head Here.”
“Bang Head Here” is a standard of “defeated office worker” humour, isn’t it? It tells the story of executive know-nothings being impossible to satisfy and ever-expandable, constantly changing project briefs. Fuck it!
The specifics of the white board message aside, I love this sort of thing. “Left-behinds,” I call them, and there’s a sort of forlorn magic to them. I ache slightly when I see things like the sacked man’s hard hat: it’s a minor version of the eerie feeling one gets when looking at pictures of abandoned places. I can only imagine the magic of such items has intensified during the pandemic for people like Graeme who are currently working in deserted offices.
In every office I ever worked in, I became slightly preoccupied with staring at the tiny pieces of Christmas tinsel (or just blu-tack or push pins) in some corners of the ceiling. My name for this sub-genre of left-behind is “Ghosts of Christmas Past.” The story they tell is of the decorations being put up as a time-wasting exercise while the end-of-term spirit prevails and then being torn down quickly and unceremoniously upon the staff’s return to work.
Graeme’s message reminds me that white boards are actually a very good place to find left-behinds: the impressions of meetings of yesteryear. Meeting room white boards, in my experience, aren’t used very often so when the someone in a technical team draws a diagram of how a website or an arrangement of computer servers will work in theory, it’ll be there for us non-techies to wonder about for months while we try to survive our weekly team meetings or annual appraisals.
There were also the bits and pieces I wrote about in The Good Life for Wage Slaves (in a slice of memoir called “put the office in the bin” about a wonderful throwing-out session we had when forced to downsize our department). We found the left-behinds of a long-ago-retired colleague in the bottom drawer of a file cabinet. It was quite the archaeological adventure and it brought to mind the image of her fleeing on her last day. “Leave them, just go, go, go!”
Peering Over the Shoulders of the Junior Staff
From Rachel Connolly in the Guardian:
One of the worst jobs I have ever had was made particularly bad by the micromanaging efforts of my manager’s boss. He seemed to spend all day skulking around, peering over the shoulders of junior staff to check that whatever we were doing looked like work. If he spotted someone doing something he considered untoward (usually reading the news or, on slow days, perhaps online shopping) he would come up behind them, point at the screen, wag his finger and say: “Not work!”
Sometimes it actually was work, but there was no point in arguing. It was a frustrating and corrosive environment, and not conducive to getting things done. His measure of productivity was clearly a blunt instrument and, instead of fostering a motivated workplace, he created an atmosphere of jittery paranoia and low-level resentment.
Amen to that. The writer goes on to reveal that, with most office work taking place online this year, there has been a surge of interest in technology to monitor the activity of remote workers, yet again leading to “jittery paranoia and low-level resentment.”
This is the Anarchist in me speaking but it’s also the psychologist and the economist: leave people alone!
Whatever happened to results-led practice? i.e. treating adults as adults?
In the event that a worker isn’t doing their job, regularly failing to deliver what they’re contractually obliged to deliver, then there’s a problem (and there are productive solutions to match it). But until that day, leave them alone and let them do their job at their own pace and according to their own methods.
It’s bad enough that they have to work at all, let alone be bullied and hassled around the clock, suspected of petty slackery when they’re probably just taking a brief pause, cleansing the palate before moving on to another task.
My old boss was an extreme example, but in any open-plan office it is normal to be watched almost constantly by your superiors. […] a common experience is trying to orientate the appearance of your productivity around what you think is being measured, rather than trying to do your work to the best standard; dragging out tasks to stay late so your boss will not think you are shirking your responsibilities by leaving early, for example.
Scarpering Monthly
To help pass the time in self-isolation, I’ve been watching some ’90s comedy. During a particularly pungent episode of The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer, I sat bolt upright with alarm.
Vic and Bob describe a magazine called Scarpering Monthly and a competitor called Leg It News:
Scarpering Monthly is dedicated to those people who like to do a bunk, withdraw, or abandon any particular scene or incident.
[…] the part of Scarpering Monthly I particularly enjoyed is the inclusion of a pattern here, a suggested route plan, for if you’re escaping from someone perhaps firing a rifle at you.
Well, that’s essentially the gag at the core of New Escapologist, isn’t it?
I would have seen this sketch back in the day and it does faintly ring a bell, so I wonder if the idea became lodged in my brain like a splinter of the One True Cross after it exploded?
It’s possible. Their version was funnier though.
And Finally...
The coupon code I mentioned no fewer than three times at the blog hasn’t been working properly and I only just found out.
It seems to be working now and we’ve also extended the offer to December 25th.
So if you’d like £2 off The Good Life for Wage Slaves, here’s where to go. The coupon code is RAGEQUIT3.
Sorry to anyone who has been trying and failing to redeem the coupon this past week.
We are now back to being a fine-tuned, well-oiled machine. You’ll see!
Number of days without a disaster: 0.
Don't let this offer put you off backing the Kickstarter though. That's where your money will do the most good and The Good Life for Wage Slaves will of course still be available in the new year.
Season's Greetings, one and all, and please stay safe.
Ho, ho, ho, etc! *cough*, *splutter*. Oh, Gawd.
Robert Wringham
www.newescapologist.co.uk