24/07/2014

“You have to type ‘Straße” instead of ‘Str.’.”

“Ok.”

“And if they don’t give their birth date, you just type in 01/01/1900.”

“Got it.”

“Christ, there are so many little details to bear in mind, aren’t there?”

“Yes, so many – how will he ever get the hang of it?”

There were no further little details. And I put it down to my widely celebrated talent for online form completion that getting the hang of it lasted all of about five minutes.

This week, I have entered the world of forms. That is, an intensely bureaucratic, non-platonic world of forms. There are so many forms. There are forms as far as the eye can see. Almost everything you can see is a form, and some of the things you can’t see are also forms. The unseen forms are usually only out of sight because they’re behind other forms.

There are forms for booking train tickets, forms for acquiring cheaper lunch in the canteen, forms for declaring cash levels in the store’s counters, and many, many more. For a diehard bureaucrat, I imagine there’d be nothing like a day of work behind the Customer Service desk to get the blood pumping. But it’s not all forms. Often the forms are contained within folders. In fact, it’s work environments like this which have given rise to the popular German phrase: “Where there are forms, there are also folders*.”

The form I’ve come to specialise in is a very particular and exotic form, used to gather details of applications for Alsterhaus loyalty cards. Learning to enter the contents of these forms onto the Alsterhaus’ online system gave rise to the conversation related above, and it is now my most useful skill, as I spend about three or four hours per day in the pursuit.

The form in question has slowly become the object of my admiration. It is beautifully crafted, quietly serving its purpose without trying to be anything more than it needs to be. It is sly, even cheeky at times, with the section titled “opt in to promotional material” featuring a box which must be ticked to opt out. The form punishes the hasty while rewarding the meticulous, and I like that about it. It’s also in a blue colour scheme, which is always a plus.

This one is pretty close to being platonic.

There are two facets of form processing which have managed to keep my mind distracted from the monotony of the task (I do not fall into the afore mentioned diehard bureaucrat category). One is my development of a rather brilliant game. The other is poor handwriting. Prepare yourself for rollercoaster articles on each when I find the time to write them.

*This phrase is a little like the English “where there’s smoke there’s fire”, with the main difference being that it doesn’t actually exist and I made it up.

18/07/2014

There have been some very different flavours to my week in Warenannahme, the delivery warehouse. Below I attempt to elaborate on three of my most salient impressions.

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If at some point in my life, following a profound turn for the worse in my personal fortunes I resolve to become a highwayman, I know where I’ll set up shop. Namely, on a short stretch of the B4 between Hammerbrook and the old fish market. There, at a little before 6am on weekdays, two trucks drive westwards from Pinkertweg in the North Elbe marshes to the Alsterhaus on the Binnernalster. The wares they carry are diverse, and vary from day to day, with expense and luxury their only shared characteristics.

In the last week, I have seen ranks of Hugo Boss suits, stacks of La Prairie skin cream and crates of Veuve Clicquot champagne pass into the department store stockrooms. It was a little overwhelming initially – but you get accustomed surprisingly quickly to transporting cartons worth a solid chunk of the average German’s yearly salary.

I think that’s partly because some things lose their essential characteristics when taken outside their context. In a store, you are inclined to view every item with a critical eye in judging whether it corresponds with your taste, your lifestyle, your image of yourself. Working with the same items in a warehouse requires the opposite response – unthinking, uncritical dispassion. As my co-workers kept reinforcing, it’s better not to ask too many questions.

This philosophy kind of dissolves the prestige of the objects we deal with – they’re not objects of desire, as they are when placed in a shop window, but rather they become synonymous with a set of tasks to be undertaken and completed. If anyone needs weaning off the excessive fetishisation of goods in our consumerist society, send them to work in a luxury store warehouse. It’ll do them the power of good.

To return to my initial comment, I think that if I had to become a criminal, highway robbery is one of the cleverer picks. Not because it’s any less reprehensible than the others, but rather because it’s so strikingly anachronistic. In the same way we can’t think of pirates today without initially picturing a wooden leg and a parrot on the shoulder, “highwayman” conjures images of daring and bravado. And like pirates, our perception of them isn’t an unambiguously negative one; figures like Robin Hood and Ned Kelly for instance are at worst morally complex, and at best national heroes! When you add to this the expression “highway robbery”, used in contemporary language to refer to normal purchases made at an unfairly high price, it seems that everything today is conspiring to trivialise and romanticise what is basically a worse form of mugging.

I'm sold.

So if job-hunting after university turns sour, look out for me in the streets of downtown Hamburg – homeless, but clad in a Belstaff leather jacket and eating a tin of Beluga caviar.

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The goods aren’t brought in by barges through the canals, as they once were. And the early morning arguments over misplaced goods are in Turkish and Ibo, rather than Gutnish and Frisian. The hours are shorter, the warehouse lighting more incandescent, and the rat I watched scamper between the crates on Thursday morning, I hope, less plague-ridden.

But there is still something fundamentally Hanseatic about working at 6am in a Hamburg warehouse, with the soft light of the Baltic summer dawn flowing into the dusty loading bay. I know it’s a little fanciful, maybe even contrived, but it’s an aspect of the experience I could rarely keep from my mind for long.

The Bleichenfleet canal leads almost directly to the Alsterhaus back entrance

I should explain that the Hanseatic League and its influence on modern Germany is the object of my academic study for this year, in the form of my 8,000 word Year Abroad Project. If I ever get around to starting work on the reading list’s 88 titles (thanks again Dr Kant!), some more writing on it can be expected here.

You may never have heard of the Hanseatic League. There’s no shame in that – I’d never heard about it either, right up until the first time I did. When I came to learn a little more, I was struck by the significance of the league’s achievements, and was surprised it wasn’t better known.

The League was composed of a number of medieval trading posts, mostly lining or near to the Baltic Sea, and was the most powerful economic confederation of the Middle Ages. It formed what was, in the eyes of some, the first large common market, stretching from western Russia to the Netherlands and the British Isles, but with its core in the German cities of Lübeck, Bremen and Hamburg. The common pursuit of mercantile interests brought about a stable and relatively peaceful cooperative, which in many ways anticipated the structures and stated goals of the modern European Union (just as it prefigured many of the EU’s failures). For me, it is the relative political autonomy and primitive democratic institutions which are of the greatest interest, and I plan on researching how those traditions continue to influence Hamburg today, still officially styled as a “free and Hanseatic city”.

It doesn't take a degree in languages to translate the top line.

As suggested, I’m yet to start that research. Perhaps that’s what allowed my groundless, uninformed perception of a “Hanseatic” image or feel to take root in the last week of work. If so, then I’m glad for my relative ignorance on the subject just for the moment – it has given rise to that fantastical, idealistic and deeply personal conception of the past which is at once both stupid and sacred. That will be the sacrifice as I begin work on the project this year – I can only hope the fascinating reality of the Hanse’s long history will provide an equally compelling recompense.

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It’s very nice to talk about the pretty morning light on the warehouse floor. But those transporting moments were few in a week which for me felt overwhelmingly real. It was the first time I’d properly worked in manual labour, and I had expected it to be physically tough. In fact, it wasn’t really. Of course there was the odd strain heaving heavy boxes onto palettes or rollers, and the aromas of the on-site garbage compressor weren’t particularly pleasant, but it was all pretty bearable.

What was tough was the mental side. Not because it was intellectually challenging, but rather the opposite – it presented something of an intellectual vacuum. Procedure and orders dominated, meaning that there was rarely any stimulus for independent thought or problem-solving. This frustrated me, because I’m used to exercising my mind regularly, if only by virtue of being within some schooling context or other for the last fifteen years.

But it wasn’t just me it frustrated. I spent a lot of the time talking with a man who came originally from Nigeria (and hence spoke perfect English, along with Ibo and second-language German). While thankful for the opportunity to work, earning money for his family back home, he was just as conscious of the job’s mental void as I was. He told me about the ways he tried to deal with it, by joking with his co-workers, laughing more. That helped a little, but only as long as there was work to be done. In the warehouse, often that isn’t the case – the vapid pushing about of cartons is poorly complemented by the idle hours of waiting between the departure of the loading trucks and the arrival of the post, or after the post is gone and the palettes have been stacked.

Not much going on here.

It can’t feel very inspiring working in an environment like that, and I wouldn’t wish that mental stultification on anyone, least of all a hard-working, ambitious, trilingual immigrant. It’s essential work which people need to do – and of course, it requires a certain amount of skill and experience to do well, both of which I lacked. But I think being placed in the shoes of a warehouse worker for a week (literally, actually) has helped me begin to appreciate what is hardest about this line of work, and it’s not what I’d expected. People want to use their minds when at work, and that can be just as true for warehouse hands as it is for management consultants. I think that has been the lesson of the week, and it’s a thought I intend to hold onto.

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Now, with my week in the warehouse over, I’m moving into the relatively cushy department of customer service for the next three. Not sure exactly what it will entail, but I’ll no doubt find out soon. Wish me luck!

14/07/2014

Never have I wanted a pack of cigarettes more than the moment the LIDL checkout woman decided I couldn’t have one. She did this, after looking me up and down, by pressing a button to bring a kind of plastic shield up over the cigarette counter.

I wasn’t exactly sure how to interpret this. I had just joined the queue, with my new mobile Internet stick in hand (see below post), we made eye contact for about a millisecond, and up came the cigarette shield.

Initially I was shocked purely by the technology. I’d never seen anything like it, it was so smooth, so sleek, so German. A series of silver bars fell into rank over the cigarette pack bins beside the counter with devastating precision, and for a moment, I was impressed.

Who could fail to be?

But then the indignation set in. Why had she raised the shield against me? Did she take me for a puritan, and was worried the sight of the boxes might unsettle me? Did she think I was on the verge of becoming a smoker, and refused to bear witness to the first moment of weakness in a downward spiral? Was she worried that I was an addict, and wanted to curb my damaging habits? Was she worried that I was so addicted I wouldn’t be able to help myself from tearing upon a couple of packets then and there and cramming a hundred cigarettes into my mouth, before being rushed to hospital without getting a chance to pay for them?

All of these possibilities are equally (im)plausible, because as far as I can tell, nothing about me makes me look particularly like a smoker. Or, for that matter, a non-smoker. Nor do I look underage, overage, or pregnant. My attitude to smoking is probably the median attitude to smoking in the Western world: don’t do it myself, but know people who do and don’t begrudge them their right to do so.

Well today, my right to smoke was worse than begrudged – it was repealed. And the loss of that right feels every bit as suffocating as the act of smoking itself. I imagine.

So how do I exact my revenge on this autocratic LIDL employee? By taking up smoking? That might show her – but then again, it might play right into her hands. Maybe she thought the shield would give the cigarettes an alluring aura of exclusivity, which would draw me inexorably into smokerhood. Her mind games are unfathomable! How can I possibly win?

This isn’t over, LIDL lady. To be continued.

13/07/2014

Have a listen to this.

Is it the worst operator waiting music you’ve ever heard? Be honest. I know there's some bad stuff out there, but surely this has to top everything. To start with, most companies have a selection of songs which play one after another, so you’ll never end up overly bored or aurally offended for more than a few minutes. This company isn’t doing itself any favours by picking one section of one song, and looping it every 45 seconds. But given that they’ve gone with that baffling decision, they could at the very least pick a song which has some interesting chord variation, and is more or less comprehensible.

Nope. It’s the grinding country & western 1-2-3-1 progression which makes just about everyone (the exception being my grandmother, who loves this stuff) want to swear off music entirely. For one thing, there can never be any excuses for playing a harmonica in its upper range over a low quality phone line. But things get worse before they get better, as the harmonica intro gives way to twang-filled singing which proves even more unbearable, sometimes actively painful (see 00:13). The singer seems to be going after the basically-happy-but-a-bit-pathetic image, which is fine if you’re into that, but also slightly depressing to listen to non-stop on a Sunday afternoon while you’re waiting for someone to help you fix your malfunctioning Internet.

Did I mention that was the reason for my call? The ulterior motive of this post is to explain my lack of blog entries in the last few days – my Internet has been absolutely hopeless, and as I write I’m still unsure when I’ll next get it back. I think only something as crucial to life as Internet could have permitted me to put up with that bloody song for almost forty minutes, as I waited for a FONIC service operator to tell me what to do.

Though perhaps the song’s message is meant to help put things in perspective for ill-tempered callers like me. “All that I want, is I want, is my house”, the song’s opening words wail*. “A failed Internet connection isn’t going to lose you your house”, FONIC seems to be saying, “or at least, not directly. And plenty of people out there, like this singer guy, find that a house is all they really need to be happy. Maybe it’s all you need too! So why are you getting so bothered about our shit Internet?” “Oh yeah”, I say in response, “Internet isn’t everything, what a fool I’ve been. I’ll now be much more understanding with the service operator, or maybe I’ll hang up immediately and frolic in a nearby meadow for a bit.”

Well, no. That's not what we think. We just end up getting a bit annoyed at this happy-go-lucky yokel singing to us from his incomprehensible world of untainted Internet-less contentment (curse him). It’s an awful song, and I daresay the result of some FONIC office dare.

But I acknowledge that my opinions on this subject may not represent those of the average person. That’s because my idea of a good piece of telephone operator music is the following:

Preferably with the operator actually answering just as the drop approaches – that way the disappointment of missing it quickly dissipates with the realisation that you’ve finally got through to someone. Exquisite! But that’s just me.

*I think. Some of them resist comprehension, even after fifty listens.

12/07/2014

I’m a bit behind on these things, so here are some of my thoughts from the last week in summary:

• Winning the award for the most perplexing cosmetics company name is Troll Cosmetics, available in a dungeon near you.
• At a make-up company’s product launch (for their new liquid foundation), the American presenter made the fatal error of trying to say what foundation actually does, namely: “It helps us to cover up our natural flaws, or as I like to call them, ‘signs of life’”. Because signs of life are to be suppressed at any cost.
• At the same launch, he unveiled the company’s vision of the “Holy Grail of Foundation”, which lay at the centre of a tripartite Venn diagram, in which one circle represented cosmetic benefits, the second skincare benefits, and the third “being good for your skin”. At least one of those last two seems redundant. Other than that, the presentation was excellent.
• In order to maximise the anti-aging power of their new skincare product, a leading cosmetic brand claims to select only 3 new orchids in every 30,000. Three quick questions.
• 1.    Do you mean 1 in every 10,000?
• 2.   Do you grow literally millions of orchids for the purposes of acquiring a couple of hundred usable ones - and if so, isn’t that a reprehensible waste of global resources?
• 3.    It’s bullshit, yeah?
• I love the way so many shop assistants latch onto the frequency with which a product is sold as an argument for why you should buy it. Maybe the fact that a Boss Bottled is purchased “alle 6 Sekunden” makes people feel they ought to get one too, just to keep the average up.
• Other than the occasional moment of indignation at the falseness of the industry, it’s been a great opening two weeks at work, learning about both the business and the art of cosmetics. I’ve had my first skin analysis, seen my first catwalk, and made my first German friends. Now bring on week three, in which I move from the glamour of the Parfümerie to 6am starts transporting crates into and out of the loading bay!

Where the presenter thinks the Holy Grail of Foundation lies.

Where it would actually lie, if it weren’t a piece of overblown nonsense.

11/07/2014

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. 

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!

09/07/2014

Does anyone remember the first quarterfinal of the 2006 FIFA World Cup? I do. It was between the host nation, Germany, and my favourite team in the world at that time, Argentina. We watched the game together as a family, on holiday in a part of France which has since become like a second home for us.

My excitement for the game was as raw as it was uninformed (in fact, that’s not a bad description of my enthusiasm for competitive sport more broadly). I would’ve been hard put to visually identify a single player from the team, apart from those who had been around in the 1998 World Cup, and whose names I’d learnt religiously by insisting on playing every World Cup ‘98 game on our Nintendo 64 as Argentina. Even then, I only had about ten pixels to work from to figure out that Hernán Crespo had short, dark hair and at least one blue eye. And he’d grown his hair out that summer, providing me with a constant source of confusion.

Argentina played well for the first half, but Germany broke through a few times and the keeper, Roberto Abbondanzieri, was forced to make some impressive saves. In the second half, I was overjoyed to watch Robert Ayala score for Argentina, and was buzzing until around the 70 minute mark, when a kick in the chest from Miroslav Klose put Abbondanzieri out of the match. It was then Klose who put a header past Abbondanzieri’s substitute ten minutes later, and Germany went on to win in penalties (the substitute keeper didn’t save any).

I was livid. I really was. I raged to my siblings about how the Germans had planned the whole thing, that they’d identified Abbondanzieri as their stumbling block and had conceded a foul just to take him out. Also that his replacement was entirely incompetent and had lost Argentina the match. It was uninformed spectator opinion at its finest, with an energy that belied my twelve years of age. My younger siblings looked on gravely, feigning comprehension of the terrible injustice that had befallen Argentina and me, while the older ones laughed at how worked up I was getting, and rightly asked why I cared so much.

I don’t really know why. I just did. As an experience, that match has stayed with me more than any other game of sport I’d seen before, or have seen since (with the notable exception of the Round 19 Geelong/ Hawthorn game of 2012). I think this is partly because it acts as a bridge to an age where I could just jump around and shout nonsense about things, expecting all the while to be challenged about it by Edgar and Adelaide, but at the same time relishing those challenges and savouring the excitement of picking an argument on a whim and defending my opinion to the last (I usually lost). On another level, I just really liked Argentina, and was sad to see them knocked out, apparently unfairly.

On Sunday evening, Germany will face Argentina in the final of the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Judging by their blistering performance against Brazil, they’ll probably win – and for the sakes of the people I have already met and befriended here, I hope they do. But part of me will insist on seeing Sunday night as an opportunity for retribution and closure eight years after the most memorable sporting defeat I’ve ever witnessed. How’s that for a conflicted viewpoint? Germany 3 – 2.

You can't argue with that.

Word of the day: fallsüchtig