I had a plan for a blog post today. I was going to write a beautiful, gentle, whimsical thing about photographs and how they distort our sense of history, making the past forever present through a frozen image which refuses to change no matter how the world around it does. I was mulling it over in my head last night. It was going to be achingly well-written. A musing on transience and time.
But no.
Instead, I am calling bullshit on the corporate world in one more small, petty way that has proved I cannot deal with offices where everyone wears pencil skirts: timekeeping is bullshit.
I say this as an admittedly unpunctual person. I turn up on time to events when you're expected to be late. I'll get to lectures either five minutes early or five minutes late, and rarely in the sweet spot in between. I've been trained by my mother to turn up to doctors' appointments ten minutes early, when in reality I don't think my GP's ever been less than twenty minutes behind schedule.
In my mind, punctuality is pretty flexible. Being assigned to work 37 hours a week means I will work 37 hours a week. If I am 5 minutes late turning up to work, I'll religiously work an extra 5 minutes. I may be 5 minutes late to work fairly often, but sometimes I'm early to work. Because that's how humans work. We have days when we wake up early and days when we can't get out of bed and sometimes we have days where traffic is slow or the lights won't turn on or we have to spend ten minutes looking at ourselves in the mirror to psyche ourselves up to face the day.
And yes sometimes I am late to work. What of it?
Has anything interesting and vital ever happened in those 5 minutes between when my contract starts and when I arrive?
My manager is apparently the only person who cares about this, because he is the one who chews me out. He's not even my boss. Because my boss is in Turkey for four weeks, and working from home. He has also threatened me with termination of my contract if I am late again.
How does that work, exactly?
If 5 minutes past 9 counts as so truly horribly heinously late that the very existence of space-time warps and number start turning backwards, then yes I will accept that I was late and this was a mistake that could have been avoided.
What about 1 minute past 9? Couldn't that just be down to our watches not being synchronised?
Or thirty seconds past 9? Or 1 second past 9?
If I am 1 second late on Monday, am I going to get fired?
Personally I'm still a little bitter about the extra 3 hours I worked to finish some important copy, only to be told that I hadn't cleared the hours in advance so they didn't count. In my head, I'm stilled owed 3 hours, which I can chip away at by being 5 minutes late every day for 36 days, and still have worked 37 hours a week.
In a fast-paced working environment, yes, I can possibly see the relevance. In journalism, where new stories can break at literally any time, I suppose it's important to be at your desk at exactly 9am, because heaven knows how you could receive communication on your smartphone while commuting. In an office where the most productive thing I've done with week is write 400 words of newsletter copy and be told the photos I selected for it were wrong, it's pretty hard to care.
So, there we go. Timekeeping is bullshit. Punctuality is bullshit. I can keep track of my own hours. I know that when they deign to give me work to do, I do it on time and well. So why should it matter if I want to have breakfast in the morning rather than arrive, starving, at 8.55?
I don't even have anything funny and witty to say. I'm just angry. And if someone wants to give me a job where the quality of my work counts for more than my timekeeping, that'd be great. I would walk out now were it not for the money. Truly, I have sold myself to The Man.
Showing posts with label internship. Show all posts
Showing posts with label internship. Show all posts
Friday, 1 August 2014
Wednesday, 16 July 2014
Living off my overdraft taught me stuff.
A while back I wrote a list of stuff I learnt from nerds with Nerf guns. Consider this the unexpected sequel: stuff I've learnt from living off my overdraft.
Though I will provide some context for this: since June 9th, I've been working in offices. After two paid of unpaid work experience in my favourite office I've been in (shout-out to SFX for treating me like a real person with some measure of writing ability!), I'm now in my fourth week in a different office, on a paid internship, and working two freelance jobs on the side.
My student loan was only supposed to last me until the academic term ended, on June 28th.
I am supposed to be paid weekly for my internship, and monthly for my freelancing. I should be really comfortably off right now, way better than a student has a right to be.
I am owed £500 by my best friend and somewhere in the region of £800 by my internship, but this is increasing every hour.
I budget well and I had £200 in my account before I started my internship. For the first time since starting university, I am living off my overdraft and I genuinely don't know when this will end.
So far, since starting my jobs, I have earned £898.87. I have received £9.37. I've learned some stuff.
- Not having money isn't the hard part. Not knowing when the owed money will come in is the hard part. Living in a state of checking your bank account every day to see when you'll get paid takes a toll on your mind, and you start wondering if you've messed up, forgotten to sign some document, misread the small print and given up 37 hours a week of your time for nothing.
- You have no motivation to work. As essentially an unpaid labourer, in what is a paid contract, you don't have much impetus to fulfil my obligations as obligations to you aren't being repaid. This might be completely self-centred, as you know the company itself is not responsible for the fact you haven't been paid, but it doesn't change the resentment you feel towards them.
- Numbers take on new significance. Expenses all arrive at the same time. Once you're into your overdraft, you just take on all the financial responsibilities simultaneously. Flights that are going to go up in price unless you book now? Heck, you're already in debt, let's do it. The bank doesn't know you're going to Manchester to go to a comic convention: have another £30 on train tickets and entry fees! You're getting kind of reckless because it doesn't seem to matter. The £1500 limit seems bottomless.
- Spending money that isn't yours is a lot easier than spending money that is. When you're already £500 in debt to the bank, an extra £25 on concert tickets seems totally insignificant.
- Lending money is also way easier. After all, it was lending money that got you into this mess. Your best friend's sob story means you felt no qualms lending him £200, knowing full well he'll pay it back the second his monthly salary comes through. Somehow that snowballed, and now he owes you half of his first pay cheque. But he definitely knows he's getting that, while you inexorably creep closer to that £1500 limit with no idea when your weekly income will materialise.
- The people in charge of your money have no idea when your income will materialise. You get emails a couple of times a week claiming to have sorted the issue. Your issue hasn't been sorted. You tell them this, and they are perplexed. Your bank account is still in negative numbers. You have no money.
- Huge quantities of money seem impossible, intangible, inconceivable. How does a country get a trillion dollars in debt? Who do they owe money to? Don't they have creditors threatening to break their kneecaps or something?
- Your dad gives you £100 for a special occasion, a well-done-on-getting-a-job bonus. It makes literally no difference. You're now only £300 away from having money like a real person rather than £400 away.
- Online shopping is easy to blow all your money on, but you know you have a bit of cash from when you got money out. You're not sure you can face the idea of taking cash out of an ATM when your bank account is beyond empty. In the 3D world, you shop frugally, because you have no idea how long you need to make this £20 stretch for.
- Really, money isn't actually that important. You get cynical. It's just a concept that we've all bought into. Take the stock market: who the hell decides how much stuff is worth? Who actually loses these millions when the values crash? Are they people rich enough not to even notice if this money that they never really hard suddenly vanishes? You're living sensibly and not blowing £2.70 on a sandwich every lunch time like your office co-workers. You feel kind of superior. You're saving over £10 a week on food.
- You're still less broke than the government is.
Though I will provide some context for this: since June 9th, I've been working in offices. After two paid of unpaid work experience in my favourite office I've been in (shout-out to SFX for treating me like a real person with some measure of writing ability!), I'm now in my fourth week in a different office, on a paid internship, and working two freelance jobs on the side.
My student loan was only supposed to last me until the academic term ended, on June 28th.
I am supposed to be paid weekly for my internship, and monthly for my freelancing. I should be really comfortably off right now, way better than a student has a right to be.
I am owed £500 by my best friend and somewhere in the region of £800 by my internship, but this is increasing every hour.
I budget well and I had £200 in my account before I started my internship. For the first time since starting university, I am living off my overdraft and I genuinely don't know when this will end.
So far, since starting my jobs, I have earned £898.87. I have received £9.37. I've learned some stuff.
- Not having money isn't the hard part. Not knowing when the owed money will come in is the hard part. Living in a state of checking your bank account every day to see when you'll get paid takes a toll on your mind, and you start wondering if you've messed up, forgotten to sign some document, misread the small print and given up 37 hours a week of your time for nothing.
- You have no motivation to work. As essentially an unpaid labourer, in what is a paid contract, you don't have much impetus to fulfil my obligations as obligations to you aren't being repaid. This might be completely self-centred, as you know the company itself is not responsible for the fact you haven't been paid, but it doesn't change the resentment you feel towards them.
- Numbers take on new significance. Expenses all arrive at the same time. Once you're into your overdraft, you just take on all the financial responsibilities simultaneously. Flights that are going to go up in price unless you book now? Heck, you're already in debt, let's do it. The bank doesn't know you're going to Manchester to go to a comic convention: have another £30 on train tickets and entry fees! You're getting kind of reckless because it doesn't seem to matter. The £1500 limit seems bottomless.
- Spending money that isn't yours is a lot easier than spending money that is. When you're already £500 in debt to the bank, an extra £25 on concert tickets seems totally insignificant.
- Lending money is also way easier. After all, it was lending money that got you into this mess. Your best friend's sob story means you felt no qualms lending him £200, knowing full well he'll pay it back the second his monthly salary comes through. Somehow that snowballed, and now he owes you half of his first pay cheque. But he definitely knows he's getting that, while you inexorably creep closer to that £1500 limit with no idea when your weekly income will materialise.
- The people in charge of your money have no idea when your income will materialise. You get emails a couple of times a week claiming to have sorted the issue. Your issue hasn't been sorted. You tell them this, and they are perplexed. Your bank account is still in negative numbers. You have no money.
- Huge quantities of money seem impossible, intangible, inconceivable. How does a country get a trillion dollars in debt? Who do they owe money to? Don't they have creditors threatening to break their kneecaps or something?
- Your dad gives you £100 for a special occasion, a well-done-on-getting-a-job bonus. It makes literally no difference. You're now only £300 away from having money like a real person rather than £400 away.
- Online shopping is easy to blow all your money on, but you know you have a bit of cash from when you got money out. You're not sure you can face the idea of taking cash out of an ATM when your bank account is beyond empty. In the 3D world, you shop frugally, because you have no idea how long you need to make this £20 stretch for.
- Really, money isn't actually that important. You get cynical. It's just a concept that we've all bought into. Take the stock market: who the hell decides how much stuff is worth? Who actually loses these millions when the values crash? Are they people rich enough not to even notice if this money that they never really hard suddenly vanishes? You're living sensibly and not blowing £2.70 on a sandwich every lunch time like your office co-workers. You feel kind of superior. You're saving over £10 a week on food.
- You're still less broke than the government is.
Monday, 30 June 2014
My feminism muscles ache.
Being a feminist is tiring.
Believing anything to the core of your being is tiring: it has to be, or it wouldn't be integral. It's like a muscle, a part of you, and when you exercise it, it aches the same way as any other part of you does. On a day to day basis, my feminism muscles flex way more than my legs do.
The past week, since starting my internship, I've found myself in a far more tense situation than usual. It's taken a good few years of my life to properly learn how to identify sexism in everyday life, and how to call it out and make a ruckus about it. I was a shy little thing as a kid, you see. I'm quite confrontational in my life now, as I've become more confident, but it's always tempered with the voice inside my head telling me I'm making a big deal out of nothing. I should sit down, shut up, carry on with a smile and be a good girl, a nice girl, try my hardest to be the pretty girl people expect me to be.
In what I assume is a fairly typical office environment - slightly more women than men, everyone dressed in similar clothes, and people working on computers for seven or eight hours a day - I've lost all my spark. I have become passive. Waking up early every day, and commuting to and from my work daily, has drained me. Trying to fit in with a new crowd of people has led me to just want to fit in. So I've been keeping my head down and staying quiet. I'm not calling out the comments that rankle me, but I'm not laughing at them either.
And it's making me like myself even less. A few days ago, some of the staff were disparaging a woman's appearance by suggesting she was transgender - and it made me angry. There's a dying orchid plant on the desk in front of me, which drops its flowers onto my laptop almost daily. I was sat there, listening, ripping the petals off the dead flower and wanting to stand up and explain the many, many levels on which they were being offensive. But I didn't. I had my earphones in, so I carried on like I hadn't heard it.
Educating people is such hard work, isn't it? I have to work at this place for twelve weeks. I didn't want my first week to be characterised by me explaining and analysing every offhand remark. I've grown up in a pretty privileged bubble, at a liberal university surrounded by other bleeding heart liberals who privately admit to each other that the University of York FemSoc page can get way too jargon-heavy, and we never actually finished reading bell hooks. The people are work are from a range of backgrounds, sectors, degrees - and it reflects on them, sometimes.
Mostly, I feel how badly it reflects on me. I'm ashamed of myself, but I am also too goddamned tired to fight it every single time at the moment. It happens every time I see feminism, or racism, or homophobia, and I don't call it out. When I read a review that uses the word "rape" when a hundred others would do. When a documentary misgenders someone. When I find myself somehow priding myself on "not being like other girls" like it's something I ought to be proud of.
We're better than this. And I know, collectively, we're fighting stronger than ever. But reading the Everyday Sexism project, or Laurie Penny's dramatic, decisive calls to action, can be just as tiring as the problems we face - because they are eloquent reminders of an entrenched plight. Even now, I'm writing this blog instead of having a shower or an early night, because I feel like it's important. Somehow. If only a little bit.
But nothing kills resolve faster than tiredness.
Believing anything to the core of your being is tiring: it has to be, or it wouldn't be integral. It's like a muscle, a part of you, and when you exercise it, it aches the same way as any other part of you does. On a day to day basis, my feminism muscles flex way more than my legs do.
The past week, since starting my internship, I've found myself in a far more tense situation than usual. It's taken a good few years of my life to properly learn how to identify sexism in everyday life, and how to call it out and make a ruckus about it. I was a shy little thing as a kid, you see. I'm quite confrontational in my life now, as I've become more confident, but it's always tempered with the voice inside my head telling me I'm making a big deal out of nothing. I should sit down, shut up, carry on with a smile and be a good girl, a nice girl, try my hardest to be the pretty girl people expect me to be.
In what I assume is a fairly typical office environment - slightly more women than men, everyone dressed in similar clothes, and people working on computers for seven or eight hours a day - I've lost all my spark. I have become passive. Waking up early every day, and commuting to and from my work daily, has drained me. Trying to fit in with a new crowd of people has led me to just want to fit in. So I've been keeping my head down and staying quiet. I'm not calling out the comments that rankle me, but I'm not laughing at them either.
And it's making me like myself even less. A few days ago, some of the staff were disparaging a woman's appearance by suggesting she was transgender - and it made me angry. There's a dying orchid plant on the desk in front of me, which drops its flowers onto my laptop almost daily. I was sat there, listening, ripping the petals off the dead flower and wanting to stand up and explain the many, many levels on which they were being offensive. But I didn't. I had my earphones in, so I carried on like I hadn't heard it.
Educating people is such hard work, isn't it? I have to work at this place for twelve weeks. I didn't want my first week to be characterised by me explaining and analysing every offhand remark. I've grown up in a pretty privileged bubble, at a liberal university surrounded by other bleeding heart liberals who privately admit to each other that the University of York FemSoc page can get way too jargon-heavy, and we never actually finished reading bell hooks. The people are work are from a range of backgrounds, sectors, degrees - and it reflects on them, sometimes.
Mostly, I feel how badly it reflects on me. I'm ashamed of myself, but I am also too goddamned tired to fight it every single time at the moment. It happens every time I see feminism, or racism, or homophobia, and I don't call it out. When I read a review that uses the word "rape" when a hundred others would do. When a documentary misgenders someone. When I find myself somehow priding myself on "not being like other girls" like it's something I ought to be proud of.
We're better than this. And I know, collectively, we're fighting stronger than ever. But reading the Everyday Sexism project, or Laurie Penny's dramatic, decisive calls to action, can be just as tiring as the problems we face - because they are eloquent reminders of an entrenched plight. Even now, I'm writing this blog instead of having a shower or an early night, because I feel like it's important. Somehow. If only a little bit.
But nothing kills resolve faster than tiredness.
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