Fifty years ago, Studs Terkel’s book Working described work as “a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread.” Since then, work has changed—and I’m trying to write an update. I’m interviewing people about what they do all day and how they feel about it. If you’d like to talk about your work (anonymous or not), please DM me!
I met Matt (not his real name) on Reddit. What isn’t captured in the piece below is his calm energy, his interest in Buddhism, and his passion for reading. I hesitated for a long time before posting this piece because I didn’t feel like I did him justice. I’m still learning how to capture the full expansive human on the page. So read about Matt with that in mind.
I still remember the sound from the basement. Growing up, my father was an electrical engineer, and you could tell he loved it because he did it all day and then came home and did more. He had a workbench down there, electrical equipment, a couple of machines. A lot of what he built was ultrasonic devices for measuring blood flow. The sound I remember is his blood pulsing through the artery. He’d hold a probe up to his own carotid artery, and the sound would go through his skin, bounce off a blood cell, and come back. That was the backdrop of our house growing up.
So it isn’t surprising that I went to engineering. I studied mechanical engineering. My son’s in school right now for civil; he wants to design streets so cars and bikes and people can get along better. There’s continuity in the family.
My first engineering job in high school was making stage swords for Renaissance fairs. People go, and they pretend that it’s the Middle Ages. Sometimes they use them for stage combat or movies. Almost every step of making these swords throws sparks, which are little pieces of the steel abrading off, oxidizing, and falling on the floor as black slag that gets into everything. One of those sparks landed in my eyeball. It was more annoying than anything, but it sat in there a few days before the doctor pulled it out. That was long enough to rust. So for a couple of years afterward, you could see a little orange stain in my eye, until my body finally carried the rust away.
In school, I took most of my electives in aircraft design. I wanted to build fighter aircraft; that’s what I had in mind when I walked in. When you’re a boy, you want to be one of a few things. A firefighter, a policeman, a soldier, a pilot. And I was no different. And in a way I got close to it, because I ended up working at a couple of defense plants, inside the places where they build those things. From the outside, a fighter jet or a submarine captures the imagination. Then you remember what it’s for, and it’s grim. So I left.
For most of twenty years I was hired through the same agency in Buffalo. A couple of people acted as my broker. Wherever I worked would invoice them, and when it got paid, they’d take a third and give me the other two. When you’re the temporary person, you don’t quite belong. You get treated like one: no advancement, no benefits, first out the door. I want to be clear about one thing, though. I was rarely unhappy in the work itself. But the system that bought and sold me, I didn’t love that.
The jobs themselves were all over the place. I worked in technical support for dial-up internet, then in customer service for a bank. They all want you to do the same thing. They want you to spend less time with each customer. So you just look up a sort of library of things that we’ve tried before that worked and then walk somebody through what they do to fix it. And then you have to move quickly to the next problem.
Then I got a year at a medical device company that had been audited by the FDA. The FDA found a pile of problems and gave the company a year to fix them, so they brought in people like me to do it. I made a real friend there, a big Polish guy named Ed. Big Ed had worked the railroad and one of the big steel mills before, and he had a way with people I’ve never seen the likes of. The humor from the steel mills was crude, and you’d have to tell him, no, Ed, you’re not in the steel mill anymore; you can’t tell that joke here. That kind of thing doesn’t fly in an office. But he never got in trouble because he had that way with people. We’d go out for lunch. We saw each other outside of work. I haven’t been in touch with him in fifteen years now. It was really nice to work with him.
Another great person was Ken. We worked together at a tire factory. Ken had a steady, positive way of handling problems, and I learned from it. All of these were short stints, so I didn’t have long-term colleagues. I would’ve liked that, I think.
When I was young, I was arrogant about work. I thought work should just be something you are passionate about. I thought the whole point was to love it, that the world owed you that. But the longer you’re in the world, the more you see that it has to have a social use. It has to be good for someone outside yourself, too. Now I ask a simple question. Am I doing something good? What I do now is renewable energy, and I like it a lot more. It’s one of the things I always wanted to work on. And in this one, finally, I’m not a temporary man. I’m hired directly by the company itself. I started with them as a temp. Then I found an offer elsewhere and used it. I told them I’ll stay, but only if you hire me directly, with more money and benefits. They did. That was one rung up the ladder. It took me most of twenty years to get here.
Sometimes, when I’m working on my bench, I get what I call rock-and-roll face. You know, if you look at a guitar player who’s really into it, they make that contorted face, and you’re like, oh, my God, are they playing the guitar, or are they pooping? It’s been a while, but sometimes I get into it, and it’s really enjoyable. It happens when there’s a real engineering problem, and they let me try ten different ways at it until we find a solution. That’s the sweet spot. It’s neat when they let me.
People ask whether the machines are coming for work. Long-term, you can automate the work, but you can’t automate who’s responsible for the outcome, so you can’t automate that much. Do you remember the lawyers who tried using AI and got caught when it cited cases that never existed? We don’t want that to happen again.
The AI situation can unfold in two ways, depending on the mood of the country. Either it’s, yay, a robot does my job, or it’s, oh no, a robot does my job. Same robot. It depends on what kind of society you’re in and what work the machine takes. I would much rather it took the grunt work, but not the thinking.