The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

by Alain De Botton

  Towards the close of the fair’s final afternoon session, I learnt that Sheikh Ahmed Bin Saif Al Nahyan had cancelled his visit due to the illness of a favourite falcon, and would instead put out a press release outlining the main points of his $22 billion purchase. Wishing to delay for as long as possible my return to an empty hotel room, I wandered through the Airbus stand, inspecting see-through model fuselages of yet-to-be-built aeroplanes, admiring the meticulous rows of miniature seats arranged inside and reflecting on the ambitious plans in the works for the future of Business class. Now that most of the delegates had left, cleaning crews arrived and set about wiping fingerprints off engines and rearranging brochures on countertops. The insistent hum of their vacuum cleaners seemed to call into question the significance of what was referred to by its manufacturer as the Airbus family, and for the first time in days, I found myself thinking of something other than aviation.

  I should not have worried about my evening, for when I got back to my hotel, I discovered that a closing-night celebration was in progress. Realising that the majority of their guests were connected to the fair, the management had seen an opportunity to raise additional revenue by throwing a pay-as-you-go party at the bar. Here was my chance to meet in the flesh people whom I had over the previous few days been able only to imagine on the bases of the whirring sounds made by their toilet-roll dispensers, and their sides of mobile-phone conversations, as heard through the thin and even bendy walls which separated us. The hotel did not seem to have been housing anyone in a position either to buy or sell a plane: such dignitaries were more likely to have booked into the Crillon in central Paris, and at that moment were perhaps sailing around the Île de la Cité on the Boeing-sponsored dinner cruise, searching for appropriate remarks to make about the illuminated flying buttresses of Notre Dame, first built by stonemasons in the 1240s. By contrast, this place was the preferred lodging for those known within the industry as Tier 3 or 4 suppliers, people involved in the manufacture of smaller and less sophisticated parts of aircraft, or indeed, even further from the end product, in the fabrication of the tools required to form these parts.

  Over an Orangina-based cocktail, I made the acquaintance of a salesman from Fort Worth, Texas. His company produced the rubber hoses responsible for circulating oxygen, fuel and oil around commercial jets. With unintended lyricism, he described to me how these prosthetic veins sent their liquids coursing under passengers’ seats as they soared obliviously over cloud-covered seas towards their objectives. Sensing my interest, he bent down and pulled out of his oversized accountant’s briefcase a brochure showing three grey warehouses with red stripes across their rooflines, located on an industrial estate near Dallas–Fort Worth airport. ‘No other company can equal our track record of providing horizontal, integrated fuel solutions’, the document declared – though the sales director’s choice of hotel seemed proof that not every potential client had been prepared to second this buoyant assessment.

  Despite the fact that the occasion marked the end of a few days of hard work, many of the partygoers were feeling anxious, whether about orders, stock levels, Civil Aviation Authority regulations or the skittish exchange rate of the dollar. There was particular distress at the news that Northrop Grumman was planning to revamp its procurement process. A man whose business specialised in corrosion checks shared with me his suspicion that he and his wife had chosen the very worst time to renovate their home near Cheyenne, Wyoming, a place name that inanely evoked for me an image of an archetypal log cabin, like the one I had once recently seen in an outsize canvas by the nineteenth-century American landscape painter Thomas Cole.

  Troublingly, there was no substantial food to be had, so that as we talked, my interlocutor and I were forced to rely to an unwise degree on crisps and salted nuts. We also made some inroads on the cocktail menu, being conscious that we were not going to be able to solve all our problems that night and surmising that we might, therefore, be better off attempting to lose track of them for a few hours with chemical assistance.

  On my way back to our table from the bar, carrying a third round, I was struck by what seemed like a profound realisation that the air show was only one of hundreds of industry-specific events taking place at that moment around the world, filling airport concourses with delegates, providing custom for the makers of rolling suitcases, giving life to motorway-side motels and supporting careers in the pornographic film industry. There were conventions devoted to seaside condos and dental equipment, waste management and pharmaceuticals, weddings and caravans. And behind these fairs, there were confirmation faxes being sent to Sheratons and Best Westerns, and room-service trays, some decorated with sliced pickles, wending their way from kitchens to guest rooms down the lugubrious passageways of Crowne Plazas and Fairfield Inns & Suites.

  A disco ball started spinning, and along with it ABBA. Because it had been a long day and it was unlikely that any of us would ever meet again, it did not seem inappropriate to dance, especially when the speakers began throbbing to ‘Super Trouper’, a song whose obscure lyrics hinted at an international liaison facilitated by the very planes that had inspired our gathering.

  The delegates danced to forget the anxieties of salesmanship and to shake off the nervous anticipation generated by industry gossip. They danced to stop thinking about the dynamic future of aviation, with its next generation of afterburners and electromechanical flight decks, its promises of low-fuel-burning engines and nanotechnological wings. With the help of the disco ball, we managed to restore ourselves to the imperfect present, as constituted by a dimly lit bar next to a motorway somewhere in the midst of an industrial cityscape of factories and convention centres. We held one another’s moist palms and swayed across the tiled floor, gaining relief through our shared humanity – our stomachs bloated from too many nuts, our waistlines expanding, our digestions unhealthy, our sleep interrupted, our expenses fiddled – creatures who occasionally looked up at the stars but remained essentially and defiantly earthbound.

  2.

  The experience of the air show stayed with me. I began to think differently about planes. When airborne, I assessed the seat upholstery, the ailerons and the light fittings and dwelt on what their inclusion on board presupposed: exchanges of business cards, grey warehouses, salesmen’s suitcases and cubes of cheese arranged on plates at convention stands. I no longer regarded the plastic casing around the windows as either inevitable or natural, but as the patiently refined result of a manufacturing process once agreed upon by two men on a podium with flags in front of them, captured by a photographer from Flight Daily News.

  Half a year later, I was invited to give a lecture at California State University in Bakersfield, a two-hour drive north of where I was staying in Los Angeles. It was my intention to complete the round trip in a day, but as I headed out of Bakersfield in the middle of the afternoon – after a lecture notable for its near-unanimous absence of attendees – I took a wrong exit, onto a divided motorway which funnelled me irrevocably in a south-easterly direction, into the Mojave Desert.

  Signs of civilisation rapidly disappeared, ceding the field to a ceaseless repetition of barren lunar valleys – though to suggest that this landscape looked like the moon was unfairly to deflect responsibility for a bleakness which was patently not our neighbouring planet’s alone. Vultures circled overhead. Occasionally, after a few miles of terrain unaltered since the end of the last ice age, there would be renewed evidence of man’s presence, and hence a fresh opportunity to wonder at our species’ strangeness, especially our inclination to put up billboards even in the most desolate areas that read, ‘Great Fahitas, Low Prices’. There were scattered ruins, too: stone cabins missing their roofs and windows, crumbling slowly back into the desert, looking so ancient that it seemed inconceivable they could have been put up by gold prospectors only in the 1880s, rather than by a group of itinerant Roman legionnaires some centuries before the birth of Christ.

  After an hour or two of driving in circles, f
urious at my own ineptitude, I surrendered hope of making it back to Los Angeles that day and pulled in at a motel in the small town of Mojave. In a sombre hallway, following a few introductory remarks about the weather, Kimberly offered me a choice of a deluxe room overlooking the swimming pool or a cheaper, regular room over the car park, adding that I might prefer the latter – on account of the train.

  There was no time for elaboration before, with melodramatic suddenness, a roar presently engulfed the hotel, negating all possibility of speech for the next four minutes. The sound reverberated around the valley, echoing off the cliff faces of the Tehachapi Mountains and making manifest the vastness of the sandy bowl in which the town lay. Mojave was positioned across one of the country’s most congested rail junctions. Freight trains, many of them a hundred cars long, came through day and night bearing chemicals and aggregates, canned fruits and television sets, cattle carcasses and corn flour. The trains were on their way north and east, from the port at Long Beach to depots in Denver and Chicago, and were so heavily loaded that despite being pushed along by as many as eight separate locomotives apiece, rarely achieved speeds of more than fifty kilometres an hour. On cloudy nights, in the canyons between Mojave and Bakersfield, gangs of Mexican thieves often succeeded in jumping onto these ponderous trains and cutting open containers of valuable cargo. Every month, one or two of their number would be found dead on the desert floor, surrounded by bin bags full of running shoes from Vietnam, having lost their way among the rocks and crevasses. Kimberly showed me an account of just such a misadventure which had been published in the local paper. Decidedly unmoved and vengeful in tone, it appeared to be squarely on the side of the shoes.

  The experience of the train made it hard to leave. Learning of it was akin to having seduced someone in a bar only to discover, when she stood up to dance or go to the bathroom, that she had only one leg. I secured a key from Kimberly and headed to my room, from which I almost immediately realised I would have to escape until the instant when I felt ready to go to sleep. I headed back downstairs to take advantage of the swimming pool. A teenaged girl was sitting next to it on a sun lounger and cutting her toenails, which ricocheted remarkable distances across a turquoise-coloured concrete floor. Unfortunately, most of the budget for the pool had apparently been squandered on proclaiming – in an enormous illuminated display by the roadside – that it existed, leaving few resources for it actually to do so. It was the minimum size to qualify as a pool before it would have to be recategorised as a bath.

  I went back to the car for a drive around Mojave. However, like many small towns in the American west, it seemed not to have a centre where citizens could gather for fellowship, javelin contests and philosophical debate, as they had done, according to most historical accounts, in Athens in the age of Pericles. There was not even a Wal-Mart. Judging by the number of signs devoted to it, the main attraction was the airport, which ran diagonally across the town and comprised a few huts, a hangar, two Cessnas and a landing strip. In the pale late-afternoon sky, an ultralight aircraft was advancing slowly over the valley, making no discernible progress. But as I continued around the airfield, a more arresting spectacle came into view: on the horizon at the far end of the runway, the entire aeronautical population of a sizeable international airport appeared to have touched down and been parked in close formation, wing tip to wing tip, as if a calamity I had not yet heard about had prompted a mass migration by aircraft from every continent to this particular corner of southern California. There were representatives from the Netherlands, Australia, South Korea, Zimbabwe and Switzerland; there were short-haul Airbuses and giant 747s. Adding to the eeriness of the scene, the planes had none of their usual supporting equipment – no jetties, buses, baggage carts or refuelling trucks. They sat unattended in the desert shrub, their passengers seemingly still waiting inside for the doors to be opened.

  Only when I got nearer to them did I apprehend that each of the planes had suffered a particular injury. Several were missing their noses; others had their intakes and sensor probes wrapped in silver foil; a few had lost their undercarriages and were being held up off the ground by packing crates. An Air India 737 had been sliced in half and dug into the sand, so that its cockpit pointed up towards the sky, with no sign of its rear fuselage.

  The aircraft were cordoned off by a barbed-wire fence, to one side of which was a rudimentary single-storey administrative building. Hoping to secure permission to take a closer look, I pushed open a corrugated steel door and found myself in the middle of an office. The occupant was squatting beneath his desk, dealing with a printer problem which had sunk him into the sort of cataclysmically sour mood that typically accompanies such a predicament. ‘No,’ he shouted at me, without even raising his head. I explained that I had been driving by the airfield and had been captivated by the peculiar and desolate beauty of the gigantic machines which lay abandoned, and slowly decomposing, in the desert.

  ‘Fuck off, we don’t give tours,’ he responded decisively.

  Certain that his logic would benefit from being exposed to the deeper wellspring of my curiosity, I proceeded to deliver a soliloquy, a polished but approximate version of which it seems unfair to deprive the reader:

  ‘My desire further to investigate these semi-ruined objects, though personal in nature, nevertheless fits into a long Western tradition of preoccupation with the remnants of collapsing civilisations, which can be traced at least as far back as the eighteenth century. It was then that large numbers of ruin-gazers, Goethe among them, travelled to the Italian peninsula to admire the remains of ancient Rome, often by moonlight, deriving solace from the sight of once-grand palaces and theatres now covered in weeds and sheltering wolves and wild dogs. The Germans, always a proficient people in the coining of compound words, invented the term Ruinenlust to describe this new passion. It seems, in fact, that the more advanced a society is, the greater will be its interest in ruined things, for it will see in them a redemptively sobering reminder of the fragility of its own achievements. Ruins pose a direct challenge to our concern with power and rank, with bustle and fame. They puncture the inflated folly of our exhaustive and frenetic pursuit of wealth. It stands to reason, therefore, that a visitor to the United States, this most technologically developed of all modern societies, should take a particular interest in the flip side of the nation’s progress. The disintegrating Continental Airlines 747 visible outside of your window seems the equivalent, for myself, of what the Colosseum in Rome must have been for the young Edward Gibbon’.

  There was a silence as my companion took in the eloquence, cultural range and sheer profundity of what I had just said. The buzz of the ultralight could still be heard high overhead. But the man was evidently disinclined by nature to pay extravagant compliments, for when he finally spoke, it was to say ‘Fuck off’ again with a resolve which his previous riposte had perhaps lacked – to which sentiment he then added, lest there remain any ambiguity, ‘Get the hell out of here before I shoot you in the ass’.

  Fortunately, the man was not as unreasonable as this might have implied. He had a fine understanding of the value of money and a few twenty-dollar bills later, we had agreed that I would be free to wander around the site until he closed it at nightfall, though I would first have to sign a lengthy legal document guaranteeing that I (or in the event of my death, my relatives) would never attempt to sue him or his heirs for any injuries that I might incur due to the many dangers outside, which included but were not limited to razor-sharp pieces of severed aircraft wings, unstable fuselages and the triangular-headed Mojave rattlesnakes who made their homes amidst the planes’ galleys, engines and seats. My mentor saw me off with a surprisingly gentle word of warning about the desert tortoises who also roamed amongst the wreckage. Many were over a hundred years old, he said – putting them well into their twenties or thirties by the time the Spirit of Saint Louis conquered the Atlantic – but were wary of strangers and apt to release their bladders if surprised, thereby losing th
eir whole season’s water supply, on which their survival depended.

  Out on the airfield, the damage was greater than I had imagined. While a few of the planes were still whole, most had already been so extensively gutted and filleted for spare parts that only their rib cages were left intact. The ground was strewn with undercarriages and engines, seats and cargo boxes, ailerons and elevators. Machines which had spent the better part of their working lives being cosseted by engineers and highly trained mechanics had in death been hacked at with chain saws and diggers.

  It was surprisingly noisy too. Food-trolley doors, seat belts and upended toilet seats clacked in the wind, making the place sound like a marina in a storm. Many of the planes wore liveries testifying to corporate hubris: Midway, Braniff, Novair, African Air Express, TWA, Swissair. Most had started out in the fleets of well-funded flag carriers and then over time had slipped down the rungs of the aviation ladder until, in their final employment, they were reduced to doing midnight cargo runs from Miami to San Juan and back or shuttling between Addis Ababa and Harare, their once-immaculate first-class seats patched up with silver duct tape.