101 ways to enjoy your career - #1: the Epicurean trident

Epicurus

The post room of Ajacen Plc was the flabby stomach of Ajacen House, the place where hard work died and in its place a phoenix of idleness and loafing stirred in the ashes, peered up at you and yawned.  It was a semi-subterranean vault where little was done to better the fortunes of Ajacen (now defunct), a reseller of risk-management software located on an industrial estate on the outskirts of Silicon Valley, Berkshire.  The room was dominated by a centrally-placed wire-mesh construction, greyish yellow, housing 20 boxes, one for each letter of the alphabet (including the letters JK, PQ, UVW and XYZ); the bottom of the large window was flush with the pavement outside, so all you could see all day were the happy legs of the free, scissoring past.

    In one corner of the post room was a grey filing cabinet, crucial to a game Gary and I invented during my first week there, a game called Firing Squad, in which you placed an inverted polystyrene cup on top of the cabinet, attached to it a small blindfold made of black tape, then shot it from the other side of the room with elastic bands.  After a while we injected fresh thrills into the game by changing its name to Gangster Drug Bust.  On the other side of the room was a draughtsman’s desk, covered in paper-clipped bundles of invoices and notelets, coffee-rings, photocopied lists of internal telephone numbers.  Outside the door, in the corridor, was a machine that sold coffee (no tea), soups and hot chocolate that you had to stir yourself with whatever was handy, a pen, a bulldog clip, a stapler, a rolled-up envelope, or else you ended up with hot murk with a sea-bed.

    Our hours were nine till five-thirty, three pounds an hour, not too bad a wage considering that a day’s work entailed just three mail-drops and collections covering three office floors, some flinging of outgoing post into the yellow wire boxes, the loading of Royal Mail bags, a bit of franking, a bit of re-franking the post that had been franked wrong or had been cowering behind other post on its way through the franking machine, all made endurable by an unofficial hour-and-a-half lunch break in a local pub with an upstairs terrace, smoking comical conical roll-ups made with Gary’s liquorice papers, leaving us rested and drunk enough to face an afternoon of lugging around GPO bags, some trying to affix the zip-locks to the GPO bags before plonking them into red trolleys, an occasional stroll to the bank to deposit something important, a final winner-takes-all game of Gangster Drug Bust, later renamed Operation Hard Justice and involving a brief inquisition and some slow-motion leaping and shouting Freeze! and calling the cup a jive-ass honky, some riding up and down in the lifts collecting boxes from the lobby and occasionally helping people unload vans out front, some further riding up and down in the lifts standing behind executives spraying them surreptitiously with a pheromone spray called Seduct that Gary had ordered from a magazine: about an hour’s genuine work in all.

    When I first came to Ajacen, fresh from university, otherwise unemployable, I dressed to impress.  I arrived wearing the one tie I owned and my pair of black school trousers, and Gary, whose shirt was never tucked in and sometimes had hot chocolate on it, didn’t pass judgement.  But soon he began to think it funny to back away from me after every conversational exchange, bowing, on account of my being smartly turned-out.  He took to fanning me with a ring-binder like a punkah-wallah and calling me massah and asking me if I cared for some watermelon.  I had assumed that in today’s modern office, people in lower wage brackets didn’t necessarily have to mark themselves out with food-stains, but Gary made me feel ridiculous so I abandoned the tie without dispute.  Within two weeks I was arriving at work up to hour late, wearing shirts plucked off my bedroom floor that morning, shirts that looked like origami, and there were no ill consequences, so I carried on dressing that way and eventually became proud of my gypsy-like appearance.

   I could see why Gary thought the job of post-room worker incommensurate with dressing like an executive: unlike executives, we had nothing much to do.  There wasn’t enough for Gary to do, so it was a mystery to us both why Ajacen hired someone to help him do it.  Apparently our superiors thought that the job involved much more than it did.  Once, as an experiment, Gary pretended to Chris, the post officer, that he and I were too exhausted to go on.  ‘We’re stretched beyond our mortal limits down here,’ he said.  ‘I don’t know what’s been going on in the world of post these last few days, but Nick and I are going under.’

    ‘Well, I had no idea!’ said Chris, horrified.

    ‘We might need an extra temp with us for a few days,’ I gasped, wiping my brow, playing along.  ‘Who could authorise that?’

    ‘Well, I might just go and authorise it myself,’ Chris said fiercely.  ‘You workers are my responsibility.’

    ‘You tell ‘em, boss,’ said Gary, slapping Chris’ arm.  ‘Let’s show those fat-cat bureaucrats up at City Hall that they can’t call all the shots.’

    Chris looked confused, but he humoured Gary and said, ‘Well, exactly!’  And the very next day a new temp appeared, a chubby guy named Andy.  The three of us pushed one red trolley containing four envelopes around the building, our shirts untucked, stopping occasionally for a rest, complaining in loud regional accents about the excess of work and our aching backs, other employees avoiding eye-contact, and every so often we’d look at the four envelopes shuffling in the trolley cage and the madness of the situation would hit the three of us at once, and we would laugh so hard we had to lean against a wall, crying.  The same thing happened later, back in the post room, after we’d stood around for almost two and a half hours playing a game with a tea bag and an empty tin box in which you had to get the tea bag in the box by flinging it against the ceiling.  We became hysterical and got stomach cramps.  It was the kind of fun I had expected to find at university but hadn’t.  I had never imagined that the most enjoyable thing you could do at my age was nothing, and that the best place to do it was in front of an old Pitney Bowes franking machine.  Meanwhile my plans of discovering a purpose in life sat dawdling in my mind, as idle as the rest of me.

* * *

We moderns use the term epicure (or epicurean) to describe someone with a Bacchic love of fine food and wine.  But as any philosophy student will tell you, the Greek philosopher Epicurus was no hedonist.  He thought that the purpose of life was not wanton indulgence but happiness – or, rather, aponia, or freedom from worry, and ataraxia, tranquillity.  For Epicurus, simplification was key.  A tranquil life is an uncomplicated life.  That meant, for Epicurus, no spouse, no kids, no great ambitions, no great financial commitments, and doing something pleasant and untaxing for a living (if you have to do anything at all, that is.  Epicurus ran a commune/school in his garden.)

    Apart from simplicity, the key to happiness for Epicurus lay in friendship.  Surround yourself with people with whom you get along.  Make yourself easy to get along with.  If you can spend all your time amongst friends, who cares what work activities you’re engaged in?

    Back at Ajacen I was an epicurean.  Work was somewhere I went to have fun.  The work itself, what little work there was, was tedious, and the financial rewards were wretched.  But I remember my time at Ajacen as an unalloyed joy.  I shared a house at the time, had no car, lived on pasta, and I was happy in a way that I could not afford to be happy now.

    It is true that I had no work ethic whatsoever.  But that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  For every exciting job out there, you’ll find fifty jobs that are as dull as dogmeat but which need doing nonetheless.  Easy jobs that leave ample time for lofty conversations and games of Firing Squad.  Why let all the school dropouts snag these vacancies?  As long as the people with exciting jobs need post, the world will need post-room clerks. 

    Generally speaking, the epicurean path to career happiness is to view the people you work with as more important than your work.  Epicurean job-hunters seek out work that doesn’t raise their blood-pressure, where they get to be around people who are fun, and if that means maintaining simple, perhaps even frugal lifestyles, then so be it. It also means being trying to be really easy to get along with, and doing your bit to make work a nice place to be, which is impossible as long as you view your co-workers as rivals or obstacles rather than (at least potential) friends.

    Obviously a completely stress-free epicurean career is easier if you’re single and mortgage-free, so it’s not for everyone.  But many people contemplating changing careers should consider jabbing their job-search with the epicurean trident:

Prong one: Make an effort to simplify your lifestyle, even a little.  That way you’re free to take a pay-drop to secure a job you love.

Prong two: Make it a career priority to work with people you like.  Working with people you hate is a kind of slow death.  Look for companies staffed - and run by - people you click with.  Research the senior staff online (increasingly easy to do in these days of company blogs) – you’ll be amazed how many potential bosses you can find who share your love of hang-gliding, horse-whispering or Viking reconstructionism.  That’s the person you should approach, CV/Viking drinking-horn in hand.

Prong three: Think twice about killing yourself for the sake of career progression.  It’s well-known that people in an organisation rise to their level of incompetence.  But we also tend to rise above our stress-threshold.  If a big fat heart attack is waiting for you at the top of the career ladder, stop climbing.  Switch ladders if necessary.  Epicurus died at the age of 72, a good innings in the 3^rd century BC.

Personally, I would love to see a recruitment agency that specialises in putting happy, underachieving modern epicureans into menial jobs.  I would start the agency myself, but it sounds like hard work.

Any thoughts on the merits / demerits of the epicurean approach to work?  Are you, or have you ever been, an epicurean?  Or do you thrive on stress?  Comments most welcome, as ever.