Yesterday, I spent much of my day putting
things in boxes. It has become clear to me that putting things in boxes (along
with its sometimes neglected counterpart, taking things out of boxes) provides
a more or less crucial cog in the department store money-making machine. Of
course, I’ve always had an inkling that that might be the case, but it’s been
good to spend seven or eight hours confirming that fact.
Actually I quite enjoyed it. Probably
because I tend to find satisfaction in the completion of any mechanical,
procedure-driven task, like Latin scansion, or drinking tea. Regardless of how
mundane it may be, there is comfort in having defined beginning and end points,
and knowing that you’re somewhere between the two – it feels like progress is
being made.
Except that today, I spent several hours
putting the same things I’d yesterday put into boxes, into new boxes. Granted,
I had to do some slightly different commands on the barcode scanner, and it was
a welcome change-up packing into boxes made from cardboard rather than plastic.
But neither of these alterations helped assuage the niggling feeling of
redundancy that preyed on my mind throughout the exercise.
As a student of French literature, I feel
obliged at this point to mention absurdism and give Camus a quick shout-out. Maybe
Beckett’s already written a play in which the main character does nothing but
move objects back and forth between two boxes. I wouldn’t know, because I’ve
never seen or read a Beckett play*.
But I didn’t really feel as though I was
stuck inside an absurdist trope – rather, it was clear that a bit of
administration had gone awry, as it occasionally does in every company, and
that I was the weight being jolted around at the end of the chain. Fortunately
my co-worker was immoderately cheerful, and I managed to clock up some good
conversational minutes of German. And that
felt like progress – if only on the terrifyingly non-linear, often uncomfortable
journey of foreign language acquisition.
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| A rock? Try 200mL bottles of Italian perfume. |
*If anyone can confirm that he hasn’t, please let me know so that I can
get started on my masterpiece!
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