Working

by Studs Terkel

  We all understood we were making H-bombs and tried to get it done before the Russians built theirs, see? That’s what everybody thought. It was one of those great secret jobs where you had guards at the gates, barbed wire around the place, spies, and all that kind of foolishness.

  Some people call it the hard lard belt, some call it the Bible belt. Mostly just farmers who stepped from behind the plow, who had tenants or were tenants themselves. It was a living wage in that part of the country for the first time since the boll weevil had been through. And boy, you can’t downrate that. It seems like the vast comedy of things when a Yankee come and got us to build their H-bomb, part of the fine comedy that she should come and give us the first living wage since the War of Northern Aggression—for this.

  In Bloomington, Indiana, I saw a lot of women make their living making bombs. They had a grand picnic when they built the millionth bomb. Bombs they’re dropping on people. And the students came to demonstrate against the bombs. Maybe these women see no sense in what they’re doing, but they see their wages in what they’re doing . . .

  Some people will say, “I’m a poet. I’m better than you. I’m different. I’m a separate kind of species.” It doesn’t seem to me poetry is that way. It seems to me like mockin‘birds sing and there’s hardly ever a mockingbird that doesn’t sing. It’s the same way with poetry. It just comes natural to ’em, part of what we’re made for. It’s the natural utterance of living language. I say my calling is to be a carpenter and a poet. No contradiction.

  (Chants) Work’s quite a territory. Real work and fake work. There’s fake work, which is the prostitution. There is the magic of payday, though. You’ll say, “Well, if you get paid for your work, is that prostitution?” No indeed. But how are you gonna prove it’s not? A real struggle there. Real work, fake work, and prostitution. The magic of payday. The groceries now heaped on the table and the new-crop wine and store-bought shirts. That’s what it says, yes.

  IN SEARCH OF A CALLING

  NORA WATSON

  Jobs are not big enough for people. It’s not just the assembly line worker whose job is too small for his spirit, you know? A job like mine, if you really put your spirit into it, you would sabotage immediately. You don’t dare. So you absent your spirit from it. My mind has been so divorced from my job, except as a source of income, it’s really absurd.

  As I work in the business world, I am more and more shocked. You throw yourself into things because you feel that important questions—self-discipline, goals, a meaning of your life—are carried out in your work. You invest a job with a lot of values that the society doesn’t allow you to put into a job. You find yourself like a pacemaker that’s gone crazy or something. You want it to be a million things that it’s not and you want to give it a million parts of yourself that nobody else wants there. So you end up wrecking the curve or else settling down and conforming. I’m really in a funny place right now. I’m so calm about what I’m doing and what’s coming . . .

  She is twenty-eight. She is a staff writer for an Institution publishing health care literature. Previously she had worked as an editor for a corporation publishing national magazines.

  She came from a small mountain town in western Pennsylvania. “My father was a preacher. I didn’t like what he was doing, but it was his vocation. That was the good part of it. It wasn’t just: go to work in the morning and punch a time clock. It was a profession of himself. I expected work to be like that. All my life, I planned to be a teacher. It wasn’t until late in college, my senior year, that I realized what the public school system was like. A little town in the mountains is one thing . . .

  “My father, to my mind, is a weird person, but whatever he is, he is. Being a preacher was so important to him he would call it the Call of the Lord. He was willing to make his family live in very poor conditions. He was willing to strain his relationship to my mother, not to mention his children. He put us through an awful lot of things, including just bare survival, in order to stay being a preacher. His evenings, his weekends, and his days, he was out calling on people. Going out with healing oil and anointing the sick, listening to their troubles. The fact that he didn’t do the same for his family is another thing. But he saw himself as the core resource in the community—at a great price to himself. He really believed that was what he was supposed to be doing. It was his life.

  Most of the night he wouldn’t go to bed. He’d pull out sermons by Wesley or Spurgeon or somebody, and he’d sit down until he fell asleep, maybe at three ’ in the morning. Reading sermons. He just never stopped. (Laughs.)

  I paper the walls of my office with posters and bring in flowers, bring in an FM radio, bring down my favorite ceramic lamp. I’m the only person in the whole damn building with a desk facing the window instead of the door. I just turn myself around from all that I can. I ration my time so that I’ll spend two hours working for the Institution and the rest of the time I’ll browse. (Laughs.)

  I function better if they leave me alone more. My boss will come in and say, “I know you’re overloaded, but would you mind getting this done, it’s urgent. I need it in three weeks.” I can do it in two hours. So I put it on the back burner and produce it on time. When I first went there, I came in early and stayed late. I read everything I could on the subject at hand. I would work a project to the wall and get it really done right, and then ask for more. I found out I was wrecking the curve, I was out of line.

  The people, just as capable as I and just as ready to produce, had realized it was pointless, and had cut back. Everyone, consciously or unconsciously, was rationing his time. Playing cards at lunch time for three hours, going sun bathing, or less obvious ways of blowing it. I realized: Okay, the road to ruin is doing a good job. The amazing, absurd thing was that once I decided to stop doing a good job, people recognized a kind of authority in me. Now I’m just moving ahead like blazes.

  I have my own office. I have a secretary. If I want a book case, I get a book case. If I want a file, I get a file. If I want to stay home, I stay home. If I want to go shopping, I go shopping. This is the first comfortable job I’ve ever had in my life and it is absolutely despicable.

  I’ve been a waitress and done secretarial work. I knew, in those cases, I wasn’t going to work at near capacity. It’s one thing to work to your limits as a waitress because you end up with a bad back. It’s another thing to work to your limits doing writing and editing because you end up with a sharper mind. It’s a joy. Here, of all places, where I had expected to put the energy and enthusiasm and the gifts that I may have to work—it isn’t happening. They expect less than you can offer. Token labor. What writing you do is writing to order. When I go for a job interview—I must leave this place!—I say, “Sure, I can bring you samples, but the ones I’m proud of are the ones the Institution never published.”

  It’s so demeaning to be there and not be challenged. It’s humiliation, because I feel I’m being forced into doing something I would never do of my own free will—which is simply waste itself. It’s really not a Puritan hang-up. It’s not that I want to be persecuted. It’s simply that I know I’m vegetating and being paid to do exactly that. It’s possible for me to sit here and read my books. But then you walk out with no sense of satisfaction, with no sense of legitimacy! I’m being had. Somebody has bought the right to you for eight hours a day. The manner in which they use you is completely at their discretion. You know what I mean?

  I feel like I’m being pimped for and it’s not my style. The level of bitterness in this department is stunning. They take days off quite a bit. They don’t show up. They don’t even call in. They’ve adjusted a lot better than I have. They see the Institution as a free ride as long as it lasts. I don’t want to be party to it, so I’ve gone my own way. It’s like being on welfare. Not that that’s a shameful thing. It’s the surprise of this enforced idleness. It makes you feel not at home with yourself. I’m furious. It’s a feeling that I will not be humiliated. I will not be dis-used.
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  For all that was bad about my father’s vocation, he showed me it was possible to fuse your life to your work. His home was also his work. A parish is no different from an office, because it’s the whole countryside. There’s nothing I would enjoy more than a job that was so meaningful to me that I brought it home.

  The people I work with are not buffoons. I think they’re part of a culture, like me, who’ve been sold on a dum-dum idea of human nature. It’s frightening. I’ve made the best compromise available. If I were free, economically free, I would go back to school. It galls me that in our culture we have to pay for the privilege of learning.

  A guy was in the office next to mine. He’s sixty-two and he’s done. He came to the Institution in the forties. He saw the scene and said, “Yes, I’ll play drone to you. I’ll do all the piddley things you want. I won’t upset the apple cart by suggesting anything else.” With a change of regimes in our department, somebody came across him and said, “Gee, he hasn’t contributed anything here. His mind is set in old attitudes. So we’ll throw him out.” They fired him unceremoniously, with no pension, no severance pay, no nothing. Just out on your ear, sixty-two. He gets back zero from having invested so many years playing the game.

  The drone has his nose to the content of the job. The politicker has his nose to the style. And the politicker is what I think our society values. The politicker, when it’s apparent he’s a winner, is helped. Everyone who has a stake in being on the side of the winner gives him a boost. The minute I finally realized the way to exist at the Institution—for the short time I’ll be here—was not to break my back but to use it for my own ends, I was a winner.

  Granted, there were choices this guy could have made initially. He might have decided on a more independent way of life. But there were all sorts of forces keeping him from that decision. The Depression, for one thing. You took the job, whatever the terms were. It was a straight negotiation. The drone would get his dole. The Institution broke the contract. He was fired for being dull, which is what he was hired to be.

  I resist strongly the mystique of youth that says these kids are gonna come up with the answers. One good thing a lot of the kids are doing, though, is not getting themselves tied up to artificial responsibilities. That includes marriage, which some may or may not call an artificial responsibility. I have chosen to stay unmarried, to not get encumbered with husband and children. But the guy with three kids and a mortgage doesn’t have many choices. He wouldn’t be able to work two days a week instead of five.

  I’m coming to a less moralistic attitude toward work. I know very few people who feel secure with their right just to be—or comfortable. Just you being you and me being me with my mini-talents may be enough. Maybe just making a career of being and finding out what that’s about is enough. I don’t think I have a calling—at this moment—except to be me. But nobody pays you for being you, so I’m at the Institution—for the moment . . .

  When you ask most people who they are, they define themselves by their jobs. “I’m a doctor.” “I’m a radio announcer.” “I’m a carpenter.” If somebody asks me, I say, “I’m Nora Watson.” At certain points in time I do things for a living. Right now I’m working for the Institution. But not for long. I’d be lying to you if I told you I wasn’t scared.

  I have a few options. Given the market, I’m going to take the best job I can find. I really tried to play the game by the rules, and I think it’s a hundred percent unadulterated bullshit. So I’m not likely to go back downtown and say, “Here I am. I’m very good, hire me.”

  You recognize yourself as a marginal person. As a person who can give only minimal assent to anything that is going on in this society: “I’m glad the electricity works.” That’s about it. What you have to find is your own niche that will allow you to keep feeding and clothing and sheltering yourself without getting downtown. (Laughs.) Because that’s death. That’s really where death is.

  WALTER LUNDQUIST

  He’s fifty; a commercial artist, designer. “I deplore the whole idea of commercialism. I find it degrading.”

  I was a kid in 1942 when I got out of art school. I wanted to make a lot of money and become famous. In five years I’ll own the world. I’ll be in New York driving a Cadillac and owning my own plane. I want gold cuff links and babes and the big house in the country. The whole bit. The American Dream. (Laughs.) That beautiful, ugly, vicious dream that we all, in some way, have. I wanted to be a key man in the industry. Over the years I realized there isn’t any key man—that every man, every human is a commodity to be exploited. And destroyed and cast aside. For thirty years I’ve been a commercial hack.

  The problem isn’t the work itself. Does it have a real meaning or is it a piece of commercial pap? The question gets down to who the hell pays for it. Okay. You want a living, you want to eat. Say you’re a bookkeeper. Are you counting something of human value or are you counting for the Syndicate or the Pentagon? Are you a bookkeeper counting dead bodies or children at school? What kind of an individual are you? Do you feel you’re something because you create a cute commercial spot that sells a product that has no human value? Is it all purely style? Is there no content?

  I had my own organization, fifteen people. “Let’s go out and do a job for the client. Yes, sir. Let’s lick his boots.” Who’s the man with the checkbook? What does he want from you? Now you take nice things and make them into some dumb package. Some plastic thing which is not biodegrade-able, which will not decompose, which fills the society where you want to scream, “We’re drowning in plastics!”

  You think of the advertiser and his influence on our sexual climate. Vaginal sprays are now on the market. Why is a woman spraying her vagina? Because she’s tastier? Who’s going down there sniffing? You see two young girls on TV talking about a date. One tells the other she’s using a vaginal spray. Why doesn’t her girl friend do it? God! What a cunt-lapping society we’ve become!

  I wanted to be at the drawing board, creative, doing something I believed in. But I became a pimp. I didn’t start drinking until I was thirty. I surprised myself. I found I could outdrink any of my clients. They got drunk and I didn’t. What an absurd way to live! To make money because you could booze it up and cater to someone else’s frailty. His need for a boot licker’s comradeship, listening to his cheap jokes at some expensive bar. I got the work all right, but it made me sick. I couldn’t stand it.

  We had a client who was providing additives to meats and food preparations. My job was to make it into a trade publication ad. I’m sitting at these meetings with the president of the company and the sales manager. We’re out to provide a service to the meat packers so they can cheat government analysts who are going to inspect the sausages. They don’t see it as cheating. I say, “Why are we doing this ad for mustard?” They say, “Mustard acts as a binder.” It holds together the globules of fat the client is putting in. So we make a living selling mustard because the guy wants to put fat instead of meat protein in there. So the public’s been cheated and these sons of bitches are out there playing golf . . .

  We were doing a beautiful job for a big brewer. They’d just bought a new brewery and found out the beer was too nutritious. It had a lot of food value. They did market research and found out that psychologically inadequate young men consumed beer as a way of competing with one another—the kids in college. “Can you drink fourteen bottles of beer while I drink fourteen bottles of beer?” How many can you drink before you puke? The beer that sells the best is the weakest and the thinnest and doesn’t fight you. The first thing they did was to take the richness out of it. They got it down to alcohol and water.

  My role was to create a fun-filled image, an exciting boy-girl gaiety in the competitive market of light beer. “Light beer”—that’s the ad phrase for watered and thin beer. So the schmucky kid thinks he’s a stud fighting for the babe by consuming all that alcohol.

  You begin to say, “What the fuck am I doing? I’m sitting here destroying my country
.” The feeling gets stronger and stronger and suddenly your father dies.

  The turning point in my life was the death of my father. It was a funny thing. Here you’re watching a beautiful guy with white hair lying in his bed, dying of a heart attack. You hear him ramble and wander and talk about his life: “I was never anything. I didn’t do a job even in raising my children. I didn’t mean anything . . .” You watch death. Then you say, “Wait a minute. What’s going on with him is going to hit me. What am I doing between now and my death? If you take actuarial tables of insurance companies, I’m running on borrowed time.” You begin to assess yourself and that’s a shock. I didn’t come up smelling like a rose. “Am I going to go on forever being a goddamn pimp? What’s the alternative? Is there another way of earning a living?”

  I had a client who was my best friend. I’d known him twenty years. We’d been sitting together talking casually. I was telling him my feelings. He was shocked. “For Chrissake,” he says, “you’re my enemy. From now on I’m never going to deal with you again.” I haven’t seen this poor guy in four years.

  At this moment I have a job on the drawing board that’s pretty good. This one client has some degree of conscience. It’s an ecology poster for children, given away as a premium. It’s a beautiful thing to hang on the wall, acquainting a child with the cycle of life. I’m working on two film strips for education. One’s on Luther Burbank and the other’s on Franz Boas. But—tittle dough.

  Now fifty percent of my time is taken up with antiwar work. Of course, nobody pays for this kind of message. The big problem I’m facing is how to support my family. I’m straddling two worlds and I’m trying to move over into the sane one. But I can’t make a living out of it.