Do Not Look Finished

I once finished a day’s work before lunch and spent the afternoon concealing it.

This was at a small company that sold fittings. I never became clear on what fitted into what. My job was to take order slips from a blue tray, copy certain numbers into a ledger, and file the slips. There were mornings when the numbers seemed to breed while I was looking at them. On this particular morning they behaved. By eleven-forty the tray was empty.

I wanted to go outside. There was no appointment. Nobody was waiting for me. I wanted to buy something wrapped in paper and eat it in a place where I couldn’t hear the telephone. Afterward I might walk past the furniture store and look at the beds. This was the extent of my ambition, and I had accomplished everything standing between me and it except being employed.

The woman at the next desk looked at the tray.

“Keep something in there,” she said.

I took a folder out of the drawer. She nodded without looking up again. There was nothing sly about her. She was telling me where the fire exit was.

For the rest of the day I moved the folder between two positions. Sometimes I opened it. If footsteps approached, I frowned. A frown was better than a pencil because you couldn’t run out of it. Once my supervisor stopped at the desk, saw my face, and continued on his way. I had successfully impersonated a man with a problem.

There was work to do the following morning. The company had not exhausted the world’s appetite for fittings. But on that afternoon, the worst thing I could have said was the truth: I’m finished.

I wasn’t defending my craft. I hadn’t developed a special bond with the order slips. If somebody had offered me a machine that could get those numbers into the ledger, I would have helped carry it up the stairs. The trouble would have begun after we plugged it in. I could picture myself standing beside an empty tray, trying to think of a reason to be paid on Friday.

This is what interests me about the tentative three-year agreement in Oakland. It includes a requirement to retrain or reassign city workers displaced by AI instead of firing them. Tentative matters; a proposed protection is not yet a settled one. But even in that unfinished state, it permits a thought I enjoy having: perhaps I could admit that a task ought to disappear without volunteering to disappear along with it.

Reassignment is not the afternoon off. I can read. There would be another assignment. Retraining means being the slow one in a room again, which I dislike even more than being the slow one in private. Somebody would say, “It’s very intuitive,” and I’d have to decide whether to ask the question that proved it wasn’t.

Still, I could learn something else. This is not a stirring declaration. I’ve learned things I had much less reason to learn. I once learned which floorboards outside a girlfriend’s room would wake her father. Nobody gave me a certificate. The prospect of continuing to receive money might sustain a similar degree of attention.

What I don’t want is to make a beautiful case for the blue tray.

I can already hear myself doing it. The quiet concentration. The satisfaction of accuracy. The intimate knowledge accumulated by a person who has spent years with the slips. There might have been knowledge there worth keeping. There were also afternoons when I copied a number, checked it, and immediately forgot whether I’d checked it. I would hate to have to stand up in public and describe that as the part of my life which made me human.

It would be especially bad if the speech worked. Then I’d have to go back on Monday and keep doing it.

Fear can make a man an enthusiastic spokesman for almost anything he can’t afford to lose. I’d like to know what he thinks after the rent is out of the argument. He might have a useful objection. He might know that the numbers don’t mean what the machine’s purchaser thinks they mean. Or he might say yes, for God’s sake, take the tray. I’ve been trying to get rid of it for nine years.

Those answers are different. I want to hear both. I don’t want a defense of every task extracted from somebody whose wages are tied to saying the task is indispensable.

I keep remembering the woman who told me to leave something in it. She had probably saved me a scolding. I was grateful, and took her advice. By three I had worn a soft place into the corner of the folder with my thumb.

There was a perfectly serviceable person at that desk, available for something. Not a particularly eager person. I wouldn’t put that in the advertisement. But I could carry things, make a call, learn where the stock went. Instead I sat there advertising a shortage of time to anybody who passed.

I don’t want to rescue that afternoon by claiming I was secretly writing a novel in my head. I wasn’t. Mostly I watched the minute hand and wondered how early I could put my coat on. The folder contained orders that had already been entered. Downstairs were fittings I didn’t understand. Somebody could have shown me.

They would have had to let me say I was done first.

Source: US public workers are fighting to protect their jobs from AI – and some are winning