I am a color and a number. Actually, I am three different numbers. One describes my relationship to the corporation, another to the room, and the third to a part of a standardized test. My color is goldenrod, which I like because it can be used as a pH indicator. Sometimes, when you work for a multinational testing conglomerate that may be a cause (symptom?) of the loss of the ideological meaning in education, it’s the little things that get you through the day (even if you only have a total of 8 to get through). But we don’t talk about that here. We don’t talk about much, though I try. My first day was stunning--the machine-like nature of this human enterprise. I have consumed a lot science fiction, and much of it centers on the future of work (how could it not given that it constitutes most of our waking hours?). My mind went to Metropolis, then Black Mirror and Her. I decided this felt like living in a dystopian work nightmare, so I tried to share that idea with other workers in my position (one color and three numbers). There were many chuckles, but no one really ran with it, you know? I treat it like a litmus test. My people would have loved to run with it. I guess that is to say that I haven’t found my people here. They’re usually hard for me to find, and probably only a handful come to mind (Rose, Katy, Paulina, Natan, Rachel, Eric, Jesse, Jon). When I thought about this, I was sort of sad. I’m forty, and there are really only eight people who I’ve met who would have run with it? Who would commiserate with me about the dystopian nature of this place? Would they now anyway? We’re old and mellow. Maybe railing against capitalism is only for the young. Maybe making connections is only for the young?
But back to the basics. We start at 8, and are not to be one minute late. Breakfast officially closes at 7:45, to ensure your proper arrival in your seat. If you’re still getting your food at 7:50, they send other, different workers (colors, but no numbers) to the line to spoon out your oatmeal for you so that you can still be in your seat on time. I know this because they tell you so in a chipper voice. Being late is practically written into my DNA, so this part of the day is particularly challenging for me. I cannot get to breakfast any earlier than 7:42. I was turned away one day for arriving right at 7:45 (on the dot; to the second), but I didn’t really learn my lesson. A tiger can’t change its stripes, you know?
I eat breakfast really, really fast, because if I am to be in my seat at 8 sharp, then I need to leave the dining hall at 7:55. There’s always a line at the top of the escalator going down, which can make you late. Workers of another color get a two minute window, but not goldenrod. If we’re one minute late, the room leader sits in our chair to shame us and our table leader looks panicked. I know this because I am always 30 seconds late, but never one minute late. But always later than the rest of my table, which is not a pleasant way to start the day. They can’t fire us because it’s a temporary job and they need us more than we need them (let’s face it).
There are exactly 2 minutes of announcements at 8 am, including encouragement to “keep up our pace” and “make sure to balance speed with fair grading”. It’s at this point that I think of the The Circle. How nauseating that book made me, as I have developed a pretty healthy disgust of the tech world. In particular, the mad attempts to quantify a human…a living breathing carbon-based lifeform with a soul (I think. Or a spirit as Theo calls it). The future of work: where people have no autonomy and their every external decision is recorded (as a proxy for their mind? For their worth as a worker? For their worth as a human? If mind-reading were real, would multinational corporation want to do it? Dave Eggers thinks so.) One of my numbers generates lots of data every day: my speed, accuracy, reliability. It doesn’t capture the moments when I think about something that makes me happy. They’d probably have to develop eye motion detectors to do that. Maybe someday they will. Today I thought about walking across a river with Theo and Charlie. I could feel the cold water and see the cute little knobby legs of cute little boys. It was brief, but a break from the cog-like feeling of every other moment of the day.
At 8:02, we begin grading. The room is silent and it takes, on average, 35 minutes for me to need my sweater. We are to sit, or stand if we need. Bathroom breaks during this time are discouraged, because we have federally mandated 15 minute breaks every 2 hours. I’ve started taking additional breaks anyway. I know it’s frowned upon because there is a sign that helpfully lists our break schedule that’s taped to the door of the bathroom. I think it’s to help us plan better for the rest of the day, so that we don’t need additional breaks. I don’t care though, because I’m a super-fast reader, and I don’t think they’ll see anything suspicious in my data. I luxuriate in those breaks. It’s a time of autonomy. I walk past our helper-workers (red, no numbers) and get jealous of their homemade and whimsical chair signs (why do goldenrods have to have a computer generated sign? I would prefer to make my own. It would have a volcano with a slugma on it). I peek in to the other reading areas, and walk slowly past the lead reader’s office. All “rooms” are made with semitransparent curtains held up by interlocking metal poles, so walking slowly gives me a chance to decipher what’s happening in there. She stares at a computer. I assume it shows a stream of our data, automatically plotted in three different ways (speed, accuracy, precision), so that she can pick out anything unusual. Sometimes our table leaders get called away. Then they come back and have quiet conversations with one of us. Luckily, it’s never happened to me. I bet my r-squared is pretty high.
When I return, I know I can’t take another bathroom break until after the next scheduled break, so I usually hunker down and focus. Occasionally I think of something that makes me happy. Today I stretched and stared at the ceiling for approximately 5 seconds. We have circular fluorescent lights on the ceiling. I was reminded of the X-Files and those circular fluorescent lights that they have in various FBI warehouses and/or alien examination rooms.
There’s a break at ten, and we are served beverages and a snack. It’s only two hours after breakfast, so I’m not really hungry, but who can turn down a chocolate chip scone, you know? One of my table mates just puts her head down and sleeps, but I can’t do that. I need to walk in order to make it to lunch. I don’t walk far, and I walk slowly. It more the principle of the thing, I think. I check my phone to see if we’re in a war yet, or if he’s been impeached (at which point the future of work would start to look like Gilead, I think--with Pence at the helm? …our bodies as property of the state/corporation more than they are now. But perhaps our bodies as more important than our minds...the opposite of now?). A lot can happen in two hours, and we are not allowed to have our phones out, so the break is my only time to assess the current state of world affairs. There’s a group that plays hacky sack, but it just seems too complicit with things to me.
I’m all for making your own happiness wherever you are, but I’m also for revolt and the small ways you can express your discontent. I guess as a cog in the wheel of a for-profit company that may or may not be ruining education, I’m more for revolution. I don’t want to enjoy myself AT the job. I want to enjoy myself in spite of the job. I’m sure there’s a difference there and hacky sack is absolutely where I draw the line. The hacky sack makes me think of Katy, which in turn makes me mad at the hacky sackers. How could they?
I have to be inside the outside room door by 10:13 or I won’t make it to my seat in time, and you know what happens then. My question number is the first one inside the door. I bet the other question numbers have to be in even earlier. Suckers! Their break is probably technically only 13 minutes. Why don’t corporations account for small discrepancies like this? Is it because the binary can never really apply to the real world, with carbon-based soul-having lifeforms, no matter how hard we pretend it does? This mid-morning stretch is easier, since there’s only 1 hour and 45 minutes until lunch. When I am within five minutes of lunch, I feel my pace slowing down. I do things like bubble in the grades slowly, or write my name in the boxes. It’s my way or winding down while still performing work. At some jobs you can stare at the wall for a little bit, or do some stretching in your chair. At multinational educational grading company, you don’t have that luxury. Your body (hand, really) has to be in motion until the man on the microphone tells you to break.
At lunch, we ride two sets of escalators up to the third floor of the non-descript warehouse “conference center”, the likes of which resides in every major population center, but is, in fact, an unremarkable middle finger to the notion of architecture and beauty. It is efficiently scaled for thousands of people, not meant to make them happy, or bring out some deeper meaning in the universe. Corporate data analysts would probably see the beauty in that if they were to look at the cost/person to run the thing. I think of The Geography of Nowhere, and the travesty that is most of the US landscape (except for San Francisco, which is the most European, and therefore beautiful, city in the US. I also hear Minneapolis is nice).
Speaking of the travesty of the US landscape, the dining hall is approximately the size of a football stadium and has three movie theater screens projecting cable news all day long. Not Fox News (thank goddess), but it doesn’t really matter under our current political leadership, as all news kind of seems like Fox News now. Constant vapid analysis of the terrorist attack in London and screenshots of Trump’s tweets are on constant display. It reminds me of the Black Mirror episode, “Fifteen Million Merits”, except in that case, work allowed you to turn the constant noise off. There’s no way to turn it off in the dining hall. I choose to eat my lunch facing the doors. I don’t really know anyone here, so I usually pick a table that’s almost empty or has introverted people at it and just try to go with the conversation. One time, I talked to people who taught in rural Kentucky. I decided it was my duty to try to understand how the most desperate people in our country could vote for Trump. They told me that all their community members care about is guns, and they’ve been convinced that all Democrats want to take them away, so they will always vote Republican. That’s a different analysis than the other ones we hear, so I was mildly interested. They also told me their student’s plans after high school are to 1. Fight chickens and 2. Go on welfare. This plan made me very interested to learn more, but they weren’t able to offer much additional analysis except to say that the families are all (parents and students) addicted to heroin and hopeless. When I went home that night, I read this New Yorker article about heroin in West Virginia. The bay area is truly a different country.
One morning I talked to a teacher from Virginia, and told him about my summer fellowship to spend a week at Monticello with free reign over the historical site. He was an older white guy, and in fact, the fifth older white person this year who I have really educated in the ways of Thomas Jefferson. I like to disabuse them of the notion that he’s a constitutional purist (they never know that he wanted to rewrite the constitution every 27 years. I read his letter about it in Boston). I also like to play devil’s advocate about old TJ and his awesome philosophical beliefs, but horrible real-world decision making. They have all excused him of that, though I don’t. That’s the problem with John McCain, right? Words are meaningless until you do something on their behalf. Anyway, he seemed relatively bemused by me, and then I saw him later and he seemed downright enjoying the company of another group, which made me feel awkward. It’s a lifelong problem (except with my people, you know?).
After lunch, we head down the two escalators for the hardest stretch of the day, from 1-3:15. It’s longer than any other work period, and if you’re not careful, a real case of the food coma can set in. It’s during this period that I definitely take an unauthorized bathroom break. The thing about grading 500 tests/day is that you really start to see how humans have a sort of hive mind. I remember being shocked to learn that the three most common submissions to the New Yorker caption contest were the same themes that 95% of the contestants riffed on. It’s amazing that we all kind of come to the same conclusion/perspective given the same input. It’s definitely true in these test answers. What really separates them out seems to be their ease with the written word, not a difference in understanding the academic content. There are some that are funny—long essays on their prom date, or a cute drawing of an elephant. Out of the 2500 that I graded, there was one that was a manifesto on how the multinational testing corporation was ruining education and developing courses requiring teachers to teach to a test. I really liked that one, and I let myself sit there for a minute with a renewed hope that the kids really ARE going to be alright. But then I read a few about how global warming was a hoax perpetuated to vilify capitalism, or about how people should be given the death penalty for shooting elephants, or how we can control nature and fix extinction with gene therapy/elephant vaccines/selective breeding. Those kinds of answers are all so very American—the true pathos of our culture that I really don’t think would make any sense in someplace like France, say. Let’s just say it renewed my resolve to raise my children elsewhere.
We have a break at 3:15, but this time the snacks tend to be savory, which I like. Little cups of cheese cubes with individual packets of crackers, or Terra chips. I check my phone again to feel like I’m a part of the outside world, and I walk slowly to the front door to visually check the weather. I always fill my water bottle with ice, which I can retrieve from a large garbage can, an unappealing way to store it, to be sure. At this point, my mind is numb, my eyes hurt a little, and I feel like a zombie. I can usually feel my own presence in the world….my thoughts and feelings mingling with strangers, taking in the events around us and as a collection of carbon-based lifeforms with a soul. But after working for almost 8 hours at multinational testing corporation’s grading warehouse, I feel nothing. Every day I leave that place, go back to my hotel room, and take a 30 minute nap. I think it’s my brain resetting, making itself able to get dinner, join the world of my people (even if it is through google hangout), and prepare for the next day, when I am again a color and three numbers.
