[1174] Work Sucks, I Know

Before I let the day get away from me, I very much need to write.

For about a month, I’ve done a handful of gigs from Instawork. They’ve involved being “event staff” for Taylor Swift concerts and, last night, Bands of America, where I dutifully manned an escalator for 7 break-less hours.I also broke down and loaded equipment after an international food-cooking and awards event. The displayed hours you’re supposed to work haven’t matched up once. The job descriptions are woefully incomplete or misleading. The pay is never higher than $18/hr, but more likely $14-$16. I live at least an hour away from the companies utilizing the app.

At the event breakdown, we were initially tasked with wiping down greasy, milk-spoiled heater rack containers, outside in the cold, with a handful of rags and sanitary wipes, and no running water. So, those didn’t really get clean. We mostly moved things like tables, boxes, mats, banners and poles, and cheap furniture from one side of the convention space to the other. There’s no formal leadership structure, so an emotionally unwell obnoxious guy who can’t help but to drag from his cherry cigar every few minutes might be “in charge” because he’s familiar to the client.

Now, you can be on your feet the entire shift, 8-12 hours. You can have no idea when/if you’re getting a break or be on break longer if they can’t proceed with something, say, because the union members need to complete a task first. You might have 5 to 10 not-really bosses who will pop up and question what you’re doing in any moment, like I did when, “I can’t have you sitting here on your phone” guy clashed with the girl who literally told me 2 minutes ago to go on break 2 hours into my shift. They might ask for volunteers for a position and then find out, because of the population they’re employing, 2 got fired an hour in, 1 is too high to work, and a family emergency pulled a supervisor back home, so can you shift over to another thing instead? Thank you for your help. (As though you’re not getting paid.)

I don’t know how other people feel, but I feel like trash. I feel like the left-overs that a company is trying to collect off plates and call a meal. It’s an entitled class-based feeling. The things I observe in these environments are typical of low-income work. It’s a tense, brooding, barely-contained chaos at all times. The expectation is to repeat, “It is what it is” and, “I give it up to God” ten thousand times until your shift is over.

As I was putting down a set of tables, a shelf edge hit the bridge of my nose. As I was walking with a large box, I shin-kicked a big black electrical device. I mangled my shins on a few other things during the warehouse gig. I wore callouses into my pinky toes and had sore feet for days after walking around in my only black shoes well past their expiration. I had an old-man hunch reminiscent of my grandfather when he used to go on walks.

Part of what informs feeling like trash is the lack of communication or clear expectations. When I first arrived at the Taylor concerts, they had us standing around for up to an hour after when we were supposed to clock in. That means you show up early enough to park 15 minutes away, walk to get there early, wait around for an hour, and then think you’re not getting paid. Yesterday, the clock-in supervisor explained she clocks everyone in at the shift-start time regardless of when we actually get out and start working. The missing clarity on this foments frustrated comments from others waiting and contributes to the overall poor-person angst.

The next is the details like being given a jacket you're not convinced was washed after last shift. It's them providing a hole-in-the-wall “break room” that’s a pass-through storage and large-equipment moving space, which, last night was left open to the cold so band equipment could be moved through.There’s one elementary-school seating table, the ones with the 8 circle attached seats that fold and roll, and maybe 15 people will be on break, so you can sit on the concrete, stand more, or chance an electrical box is sturdy. It's finding your own jacket on the floor after your shift because you had to leave it on a rack of everyone else's who can't be bothered to care or pick it up when they knocked it off.

You can feel each supervisor’s general exhaustion. The largest one had a conversation with someone that went like this,

“Are you already checked in? Why do you have a uniform on if you’re not checked in?”

::mumbles, silence, blank stare::

”Were you here earlier? Did you take your uniform home?“

::Points in the distance, mumbles something about someone who checked him in::

”Okay, but how do you have a uniform?“ ”Are you from the first shift?“

::Mumbles::

”Were you working earlier today?“

”Yes.“

”Okay, we need to get you checked out, go down there and turn stuff in.“

It was longer than that and the questions were asked several more times.

Then, like far too many things in modern life, you’re constantly being rated. If you show up early, do everything asked of you, but slip in any way or just rub someone the wrong way, you might open your app after an exhausting shift to find out you got a ”1-star“ rating, mocking you in the face of your otherwise 5-stars. You don’t know who it came from, why, but it’s an invitation to micro-analyze your every interaction with coworker and supervisor alike. It’s also a not-so-subtle suggestion that your job is eat shit, like it, and ask for more, not have any reasonable human expression about the conditions or chaos. To what extent these ratings have any real impact on whether a shift is offered to you or an employer is willing to hire is unclear, but you have no reason to assume the best.

Gig work is akin to “scabbing” to me. Each shift you’re undermining how your culture might otherwise approach labor, time, or what to do if you break your nose or ankle working for someone. You’re essentially constantly begging for mercy. You hope the tipper is in a good mood. You hope the spot you’d otherwise stand in for 8 hours has a chair. You hope you don’t get too hurt or looked at like a “problem” who can’t hang and deal. You hope that ambiguous 1-star rating won’t haunt you indefinitely. As such, you look for little reprieves.

The first day of the cooking competitions and awards, they were still taping while we were tearing things down around them. You, broke, having driven an hour and 20 minutes for maybe* $120, get to scrub spoiled-milk smelling containers, then pass by the scent of the best-smelling food all day. On day two, when filming is done and the cooking competitors are wrapping up their make-shift kitchen areas, if one passes you a world-class brisket, you’re going to eat it, and in my view, deservedly so. Of course, you’re then going to illicit a shitty comment about the “time crunch” (mysteriously absent until now) we’re under, and, “You’ve already had breaks,” from the also-gigging guy pretending to be in charge. What would the under-class be without petty internal squabbles about who is or isn’t really working* as they resent that you took 2 minutes to enjoy the luck of your cold scraps?

Each shift, I find talkers. I generally get people talking, so I’m willing to believe it’s a me thing, but each person comes with a large backstory, opinions, and way in which it really sinks in why this is the kind of work they are doing. There’s sometimes a baseline class-indicated short temper and aggression. It’s stories told through crooked or moldy teeth and bad breath. It’s lengthy theories and explanations for “the system” which, you know they haven't spent any real time or effort building a case for, but is on the back of personal experience, rumors, and cultural truisms.

I’ve been told cancer isn’t a real thing, been schooled on vaccines by someone who was adamant about their capacity to google. I learned of a gentleman’s chronic strained testicle situation that the military offered to pay to fix, but he was wavering because of how much he enjoyed smoking weed. I think I got him to understand how scary and consequential chronic pain can be though, so he might actually choose wisely after our talk. I heard a story of someone raped, ignored, abused and labeled, and forced to engage with her attacker every day for years afterwards. She now plots revenge and finds the strength to barely keep it together. There’s the guy who was retired from administrative work who just likes interacting with people and doesn’t want to sit at home. There’s the guy with, allegedly, 20 properties across Indiana and Ohio, some worth more than homes in Carmel, but for reasons I can’t discern was stuck, just like me, waiting for the endlessly self-congratulatory Avon marching band to get the fuck off the field and go home.

The handful of women, in particular, who could see the less-than enthused look on my face as the night dragged on who said something like, “Thank you for being here! I know it’s a long night!” I think this is what pissed soldiers off who get “Thank you for your service” lol. If you cared, you’d be polite and leave. If “The system” cared, it’d have me off at the stated time. If “society” cared, I wouldn’t resent having my time bled because I’d be getting paid enough and live close enough to where I work that I wouldn’t be getting home at nearly 3 AM. I would have had a break and snack in a basically acceptable space and not been left adrift indefinitely on no information. If you’re the kind of person to thank the tired or grumpy gig-worker after you’ve overstayed your welcome, you’re rubbing salt in the wound.

I’ve referenced several people with what I would consider debilitating conditions, in one form or another, from which I don’t suffer. I’m not sick. I’m not proud of what I don’t know or understand. Teeth aren’t rotting out of my mouth. I haven’t been raped, labeled an addict, and treated with naivety or ambivalence for years as I beg for help while my abuser mocks me in real time. I’m not even, necessarily, married to the nature of a gig style or environment, as I start back in towards my white-collar 40-hour space early tomorrow.

My goal, is never, to merely complain or lose perspective. If sitting around and waiting or driving late as though I don’t prefer to stay up all night, is the worst thing that happens to me for $150, no one’s crying for me. Therefore, my goal is to hopefully paint a picture of the nature of our cultural narrative disparities. The people at the bottom of the income, neighborhood, options, or general capacity to be much beyond frustrated meat to be shuffled around occupy an entirely different universe of expectations, language, and ultimately values that guide their decision-making.

If you ever presume to be “well-meaning” or a “problem-solver” or from a place, like Avon, where your band has more spent on it in a week than the person who helped you to your seat will make in a year, where would we even begin to bridge that gap? You don’t “fight for $15,” you demand $30. When you’re auditing, well first you bother to audit, where tax dollars are going, you’re investing in schools and healthcare. When you’re organizing, you start local with simultaneous lines into a broader federal or cultural vision. Then, you stay on that message and effort for decades.

I’ve been offered a dozen opportunities to view myself through the lens of the culture which breeds gig work. I’d be reasonable in walking away with a conclusion that my time doesn’t matter. What I know or whether I’m competent at my role is secondary to occupying the space in service to a performative agenda. Regardless of who I’m working with or where they are coming from, I will need to accept their “rating” and live in fear of unfair scrutiny and punishment if I get out of line. And the way to cope? Chronically engage in it, like you’re addicted, until you normalize the self-abuse. Silence and shit-eating become wise moral virtues. Criticism, not genuine criticism of an operation or “the system,” but of yourself, your others in your small ilk, becomes the self-corrective.

It doesn’t take some mastermind evil cabal to orchestrate things this way. Attention is limited in every human brain. Rich people are doing rich-people shit, not slaving away over how to cut you 1,001 times when 2 or 3 normative language strokes or business practices will set you to task cutting yourself indefinitely. It’s the same reasons and forces that find normative balance which undermine my faith that people will change or fight or better account wholesale. Trump got elected. People want to blow shit up. But Trump isn’t going to blow up the systems that keep them oppressed, just more of the extremely fragile things that barely contribute to keeping them going. Fuck, maybe ironically this is what provokes a proper revolution? I doubt it, but one can dream.

[1167] Players Gonna Play

I’ve been wanting to write about my experience temping for the Taylor Swift concert at Lucas Oil Stadium since the moment I arrived. It’s Monday, after 3 days of walking the perimeter and collapsing lines in the world’s worst shoes. It’s a little after 5 PM, and I can honestly say for all of the thoughts I wanted to explore about class, privilege, and the specific conversations and interactions I had, the loudest thought right now is still, “I’m tired.”

My first job was in a movie theater. This role brought me back there. Crowd control is the same, as well as the clothing requirements. The, extremely soft until a cop shows up, power to move people around. The ones I worked with ranged from groups of, what appeared to be high-school, but maybe college, athletes to people with the kind of standing aggression and swagger of growing up in lower-income neighborhoods. There’s the grungy white guy with dreads, varieties of neck tattoos, and snap-to-attitude when a moment highlights the nature of their underclass status.

The first day, it was chaos. You enter the stadium area via escalators at the end of a large hallway and convention center. Another long hallway connects to a staging room where just beyond you either enter the grounds, or go up into the main lobbies. There were over a hundred people milling about, either temping through different agencies, or part of the previously mentioned athletic groups. There were regulars who were scouted and picked out of the crowd to join teams with supervisors who liked them. One younger gentleman got called out by the fattest and looked-most-in-charge guy who aggressively said, “You got white shoes man, those ain’t gonna work!” He was subsequently still hired on for the day.

The Insta-work app portrays the role as being from 2:30 PM until 2:00 AM. You’re expected to show up early so you can clock in on time. I learned our particular temp agency was the lowest status step-child. This means everyone in that room got checked in, their credentials, shirt, and walked to their positions before we were allowed to. This meant if I got there at 1:45 the first day, I stood in place until almost 3, or just after, each day, before I was officially clocked in. These kinds of things are the first cuts in death by a thousand.

The “attitude” of the space stuck out to me. I’ve been decently white-collar for the last few years. There’s an, often enough disingenuous, light touch and politeness that I’ve come to take for granted in those spaces. I noticed my “pleases” and “thank yous” and “yes ma’am or sirs” existed in isolation and felt mildly “wrong.” When I smiled and softly said to teary-eyed scammed hangers-on that they needed to leave from meandering about the gate, behind me was my supervisor, literally yelling, “Get up, keep moving, get off the premises!” Often, they were moving and readily compliant, and still met with his approach. The generalized complacent exhaustion of people consigned to their roles in life blanketed every moment.

Leaving aside the quasi-self-imposed pain of the wrong shoes. the job is extremely easy. You’re either standing scanning in tickets, or saying the same handful of things over and over about where something is located. At first, no one told me where anything was located, so I misdirected people as to where the floor seats entry was, along with a large portion of the other staff. Before we ever got started, we were expected to just literally stand around and hang out, in total for about 2 hours before we had any kind of task to carry out, lending itself to the story of why they wouldn’t bother to clock us in on time.

Now, I’ve heard as much as anyone about Taylor Swift and her concerts. Beyond perhaps a larger portion of people willing to dress up, in general it felt very normal. I got some bracelets. The people were mostly in good spirits. But, there is a dark side underbelly that weaves its way through the sea of synchronized claps and “There’s a lot going on right now” T-shirts.

Dozens of people got scammed. The stories all involved tickets that were sold twice, obtained fraudulently, or bought from “Stubhub, or, not Stubhub, but facebook Stubhub,” which, of course, isn’t a thing. I heard the bemoaning of lost dollar amounts from $2,000 to $9,000. Girls pretending to flirt with me. People offered cash for my jacket. A couple wanted to get loud and fight and “see the policy” that said they had to move from lingering outside. One girl broke down, fell to the ground, and had a seizure when it was clear they were scammed and not getting in.

Incidentally, as I was walking to my first shift, one of the loading pages for When We Were Young festival said I was in. Two years ago, I had 7 browsers open that took 2 hours or more for one to allow me onto the page to buy a ticket. I planned to do the same thing this year before I took the shifts. So, because obviously, right as I’m about to go in, I have to navigate what is often a stressful, time-sensitive, and buggy-as-fuck process from my phone. I fail 3 times to pay for the tickets, and think I’m fucked until they announce day 2. I manage to still select the 4th tier, more exploitatively priced, tickets, and throw them on layaway. The show isn’t until October of next year.

Taylor might almost be more popular than every band that will be at that festival combined, if only because they all get 2 days, she got 3 just in one city. These people are such big fans and willing to be desperately crying and wandering the premises that they haven’t looked for a ticket or discovered the fraud until now? The nature of Ticketmaster and reselling hasn’t made it’s way into the broader culture knowledge bin yet?

I think it’s incredibly important to set the stage of both I, and every Taylor Swift concert-goer’s environment. We’re, extremely, decadent and privileged. I’m working a temp job, but I still feel well within my rights and capacity to spend a few hundred dollars on a trip, and capable of paying off debt. These people paid $1500 minimum for each ticket to fill up a football stadium. The ones who looked for and found tickets up to 2 or 3 hours into the show, paid anywhere from $2000 to $6000 for a half hour or hour from the worst spot on the floor or random nosebleed. Does anyone have that much sympathy for anyone willing or capable of throwing that kind of money around like that? They certainly don’t project it towards me and my debt or indulgences.

I can only speculate what it’s like to live a life like that. I’d be drawing on my experience of yelling, “You can go to any line, even if you have a bag, disregard the sign” directly into someone’s face, and they, after having locked eyes and nodded along respond without hesitation, “But what if I have a bag?”

I feel like you must have that, I want to use the word “impossible,” lack of self-awareness and attention in order to operate at the level that doesn’t think twice about spending thousands for a ticket, that you never tried to get well in advance, hundreds more on merch, alcohol, and maybe a limo ride to the stadium, and when presented with clear loud instruction…what? What is it you’re doing besides responding like a barking dog with no grasp as to what’s happening around you? But the sign! BUT THE SIIIIIIGN!

Many people laughed and responded quicker when I eventually discovered saying, “The sign is a lie!”

It only took until the end of the first day for the people in charge to recognize what I bring to any role I take. I was assured I would work the next two days regardless of my “technically” “paid backup” status. A supervisor picked me out of the crowd on day 3. The importance of what I take for granted as “the basics” get highlighted in those environments. Are you basically decent in your disposition? Did you follow the, albeit woefully incomplete and slightly changing or contradictory instructions as you were given them? Could you be trusted to not look painfully bored and distracted even when there wasn’t that much to do?

Taylor concerts are long. As someone who’s been to 170-something in the last 3 years, I had a lot of them to compare the crowds to as they were leaving or leaving early. This quasi-religious event mostly seemed to exhaust people. It doesn’t mean they didn’t have fun, but it does mean I felt myself feeling suspicious about the motives and headspace of the many fans. Broadly, you wouldn’t necessarily think someone who’s way too into a band or artist is particularly mentally well. But Taylor has a culture built around her that reminded me of The Dead. It’s gross to dance barefoot in unidentified moisture, and makes me uncomfortable when everyone around you carries on like it’s cool or normal.

There’s a lot of normalized pathological behavior and attitudes that come with wealth or just too much money for you as an individual to know how to utilize it effectively. That’s baked in to the “joke” written on the T-shirts about how much dad had to spend for tickets. I started saying that you’re either living in a way too comfortable place, or way too darker than we wish to imagine place in being part of that crowd.

I say this as someone who has spent, at his peak, $1800 for 4 days of “Owner’s Club” at Rockville last year. Back then with my job, that was about 1 paycheck, and I don’t have kids or more than $5000 a year in must-pay bills, so I understand how enough people can arrive at a place where the high cost still makes a certain kind of sense in their life. It’s harder to understand if you have rent, a mortgage, or “keep up with the Jones’s” kind of life. I’ve never had a crazy-high end paying job, so I’m sure there’s plenty wiping their ass with thousands I could barely imagine.

You just kinda realize that it’s not about her? These people didn’t look or sound any happier or “better” than the people I’ve been around at $15 shows. It’s generic to say that people want to belong to something, and even trying to frame it in terms of “people” doesn’t distinguish seizure-girl from out-of-touch mom from 20-something daddy’s-girl who clearly doesn’t appreciate where the money was coming from. If the tickets were 1/3rd of the price, and that money went to paying everyone on the grounds double, and people who were fans who could never afford one currently were as prevalent as hedge-fund children, like, wouldn’t “the world” be better off? Why do we have to swallow Ticketmaster monopolies, subsidized and greedy sports-stadium practices, exploitative temp agencies, and the general aggressive resentment yet ambivalence that comes with knowing, deep in your soul, and with practical penalties, you don’t belong in the bowl.

I envisioned poor kids sneaking in and peering through cracks at a coliseum while I was there. You never see, at least in movies, someone coming over and throwing the kids off the wall. Today’s kids might be a touch more dangerous, but I think there’s something to the notion of music and an alleged community built around it doing as much as it can to foster and expand. I know in Seattle she set up a whole system so people could watch from the parking lot who didn’t have tickets. I know she gave her whole crew major bonuses. How do we get more of that from everyone everywhere who has the power and money? If we’ll never be able to matter-of-fact expect them, when will we get around to compelling?