043: Working Girl

Muriel Spark's "A Far Cry from Kensington," the pitfalls of competency, PowerPoint, Slack, Word & other terrors, the loyalty of friends and colleagues, and why this newsletter is three days late

My advice to any woman who earns the reputation of being capable, is to not demonstrate her ability too much. You give advice; you say, do this, do that, I think I’ve got you a job, don’t worry, leave it to me. All that, and in the end you feel spooky, empty, haunted. And if you then want to wriggle out of so much responsibility, the people around you are outraged. You have stepped out of your role. It makes them furious.

--Muriel Spark, from A Far Cry From Kensington

The Scottish novelist, Muriel Spark, isn’t always to my taste, and it’s surely reflective of my limitations as a reader, because she lived–and wrote about–one of those 20th century lives which can only be gaped at: she was married in Edinburgh in 1937 to a much older man at 20, packed off to what was then called Southern Rhodesia where she gave birth to a son and, kind of at the same time, realized her husband was violently mentally ill. When the war broke out she stored the son in a convent and went home to write propaganda for MI6, including advising the Germans that “the plot against Hitler had resulted in the Führer getting his trousers burnt off "(source).

After the war, she got her son back out of the convent and dropped him off with his grandparents, began to work seriously as a writer, got addicted to diet pills, believed that T.S. Eliot’s poems were secret messages, had a full blown nervous breakdown, and then got herself back together. As her fame increased, so did the intensity of a couple of stalker/hangers-on types, so she decamped to New York City where William Shawn made her famous on this side of the pond by publishing her most famous novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, in its entirety in one issue of the New Yorker. Spark then moved on to Rome, where she met a young sculptor ‘of means,’ as they say, eventually decamping with her to Tuscany, where as far as I can tell they lived happily ever after.

Along the way Spark leaned Labour, fell out with her son over his preference for Judaism over her Catholicism, developed, by all reports, spectacular taste in furniture, furs, couture, and, somewhat inexplicably, ended up anarchist.

The point is, I should probably love all of her novels, but for me there is just the one: A Far Cry from Kensington. I think it’s best described as a spy novel with more than the average amount of humor. It’s also a workplace satire: in characterization and in setting, Spark is occupying the same terrain as Dickens, delivering the same deadly wit and witness of The Pickwick Papers, Bleak House, and Dombey and Son, albeit in a much more concise package.

The MI6/spy novel qualities are what Kensington is known for, but for me, after the week I just had, it’s the workplace satire part of it that delivers the key learnings in today’s agenda.

Nancy Hawkins, the twenty-something, war-widowed protagonist of the story, like me, has a tendency to run through jobs.

At the beginning of the novel, she’s working as an editor/Girl Friday/therapist and confidante to her boss, Martin York, at a failing literary publisher called Ullswater Press. York, it turns out, is running the place into the ground by publishing all of his friends from boarding school and the war. Also, he’s forging checks to keep the place afloat. Nancy tells us that part of her job is to shoo the war comrades and schoolboy connections ,or “flocks of carrion crows,” who descend on York during his evening whiskey drinking hours.

When not at work, Nancy lives in one of those boarding houses in post-war London that serve so well as the settings for novels. This one is “semi-detached” (a house description that I will never not adore) and among its inhabitants are the requisite ‘quiet couple,’ in this case called the Carlins; a “Polish dressmaker whose capacity for suffering verged on rapacity,” called Wanda Podolak; a district nurse who “detested germs, the work of the Devil” and who spends her free evenings scrubbing her linoleum with Dettol, called Kate Parker; a young woman called Isobel who “had a telephone of her own in her room so that she could ring her Daddy in Sussex every evening;” and a medical student called William Todd who listens to the Third Programme on his wireless, because of course he does.

From the jump it’s clear that Nancy is at the social and operational center of the house in the same way she is at work. She forges a close friendship with Milly, its owner, consoles and helps Wanda when she is terrorized by a mysterious group called The Organisers, commiserates with Kate, looks in on Isobel and fends off Isobel’s father who wants Nancy to find his daughter a real job, and keeps things low key friendly with William.

Enter the villain of the novel, a pseudo-intellectual and would-be author called Hector Bartlett, who “vomited literary matter . . . inept words, fanciful repetitions, far-fetched verbosity and long, Latin-based words,” Hector will not take no for an answer at the publishers, persistently name-dropping his more successful connections and arguing his book’s merits and going so far as to follow Nancy to and from work. One day, fed up with his stalkery, she calls him a pisseur de copie, ie a writer who pisses out rubbish. Hector wastes no time in calling his better-connected friends, who call Martin York, and Nancy is, of course, sacked.

Nancy is unphased. She spruces up her rooms, dusts of whatever the equivalent of a 1940s resume is, and goes looking for work. There’s actually a whole delightful chapter about her philosophy of job searching, including:

When you are looking for a job the best thing to do is to tell everyone, high and humble, and keep reminding them please to look out for you. This advice is not guaranteed to find you a job, but it is remarkable how suitable jobs can be found through the most unlikely people . . . you should tell the postman, the mechanic in the garage, the waiter in the restaurant, the hotel porter, the grocer, the butcher, the daily domestic help; you should tell everyone, including people you meet on the train…People love coincidence, destiny, a lucky chance. It is worth telling everyone if you want a job.

To me, it holds up.

In due time, this strategy works and Nancy is re-employed, this time at substantially more well-resourced publisher. Once again she thrives, and once again the pisseur de copie pisses on her parade. This time he’s submitted his terrible book with a request that Nancy, in particular, be the one to edit it.

Nancy tries. She really does. When her boss asks her for her assessment, she says only, “I consider that it cannot be improved upon.” When he asks her why, she sticks to her talking point. The man is a pisseur de copie. There is a scene in a restaurant in which Bartlett splashes mustard on a dog. There is a scene with her boss and the well-connected friend in which she is told to consider Bartlett’s “good points” and that he “tries.” There is a final scene where she tells them that the book and its author, like a faulty appliance, should be sent back.

She loses her job for the second time.

As previously mentioned, I’ve had a lot of jobs, though I tend to leave because of my principles, not get sacked. My current role is the best of the lot, by far, but last week was rough.

Part of it is that things have just generally gotten busier. Last week was only a four day week, and in addition to daily video stand-ups, semi-weekly video 1:1s with my direct reports, weekly video 1:1s with my boss and a weekly “F2F” meeting with my boss and the rest of our leadership team (or LT), I also did the following:

• A “synch” meeting to work on the “global hand-off” of a project. At one point, the new manager, a delightful Polish woman who replies “no problem, dear” when I ask to reschedule, burst into tears and told the four of us on the call that she was completely overwhelmed. Trying to do a group reassurance on a video call is difficult, but the young Polish engineer, the young Belgian technical writer, and I all tried. Then, we went back to figuring out how to operationalize approvals for the replies that are written by a team of South Asian map editors when their edits–which are never wrong–are questioned by amateur map editors in African and Central American countries.

• A “check in” about the production schedule for a blog series with the company’s marketing team in which we talked about how long it was going to take us to “socialize” the “content” so that we could meet our deadline. Then, I met with the brilliant, acerbic, and witty guy who actually writes the blog posts to chuckle about the ratio of person-hours to words it takes to actually get them published. During our talk, he told me about how he is going to go to Jordan in a few weeks because it’s just dangerous enough, which filled me with longing.

• Getting very into using Slack, which I first encountered during my very brief time canvassing for Bernie Sanders and happen to like, probably because I associate it with Bernie, and also because I am addicted to shiny software objects. I tried to get others on my team excited about this by hosting a “watch party” for the company trainings. Yes. I did this.

All companies have cycles: there are what used to be annual, but now seem to be semi-annual power grabs that must be surfed, there are times when budgets are due, there are times when new strategies must be rolled out, and it is stressful. Something along these lines was clearly going on for my boss this week, as well, because the requests that came at our little LT were, functionally, twofold:

• Track the nature and progress of every person’s work in a multi-dimensional, easy-to-read, filterable format that couldn’t be the format that we already use because that one isn’t good for projecting the future and couldn’t be the format that we proposed last week because she didn’t like it.

• Tell every single story of our team’s success since last January in one PowerPoint deck, but also in three other client or project-specific decks, right away. To be fair, she did prioritize one of these, but which one it was changed all week depending on which meeting she had been in.

I was in charge of the latter, and at first I was undeterred. I like a challenge. I had a Word document listing the stories. I was going to Nancy Hawkins the shit out of that project and get everything sorted out.

I asked several colleagues for two sentences and a top line number to flesh out the material. One colleague delivered this exact thing to me, and I made the first new slide in short order. My boss was thrilled.

I was filled with still more zeal. Then, came the forwarded emails with the tables pasted from Excel. Then, came the same tables, only from someone else who used different titles and colors, so I didn’t know they were the same tables, pasted from Excel into my Word document. Then, came the paragraph-long summaries written in acronyms and task names--they came at me in droves, a shimmering infestation of glyphs, skittering their way into every corner of my computer screen.

I persevered. I worked late. I would be worth it, I told myself. Things would then be organized and thus easier in future. I tell myself stuff like this a lot.

Then, on Friday afternoon, my boss started making line-edits in the wrong PowerPoint and sending me messages about how it was the wrong information, which it was, because it was the wrong Powerpoint. I sent her a “better” link. I could still see her little avatar in the upper right hand corner of the wrong one, editing away while the hours ticked away. Then, the little avatar in the wrong PowerPoint went away and the little dots on all of her channels went dark.

I could have shut down for the weekend then, too. I don’t have much trouble walking away from the work product itself–the corporate capitalist hegemony can go fuck itself–but I don’t like letting my coworkers down, and one of them had something riding on the work that I was doing. So I stayed there with that locust-cloud of channels, slides, screenshots, and documents, hovering over my desktops just as surely as if it had been reams of paper on an actual wooden desk, eating up my precious minutes. I was there at least another hour, well into Friday evening, frantically solving questions on video with my British coworker, whose head was bobbing up and down because he was riding his desk bike. Bloody hell, he kept saying. Bloody hell.

This would have been the end of it if I had any mental self-discipline, but alas, for readers of Survival by Book on Sundays, I do not, and it was not.

This is because, I made the inexcusable mistake of checking email on the weekend. I did it rebelliously, in fits of pique, like pressing on a bruise, or sending one more angry text, on both Saturday and Sunday. The PowerPoint confusion had continued. And, then, on Sunday, came the emails with further requests, some of them new, and impossible in the time-space continuum as we know it, some of them contradicted previous requests, some of them had tone.

I texted our philosophical and ever-patient-with-me Scrum Master.

»Dude, I can’t keep up.

His reply was swift.

Dude, you’re the Usain Bolt of the team.

»Well, you’re the Naomi Osaka, then.

Ha.

»I have to stop caring so much.

You’ll never stop.

I hate it when he’s right. But, I don’t know how not to care, and I don’t know how not to go fast at work, because my operating belief is that if I work fast, then I can be finished with my day job more quickly and can get to the good stuff of life. That’s how it works. Right? My reward for working quickly is that my time will get returned to me? Yes? Sometime soon?

Then, I went outside and discovered that rage gardening is a thing and that is why I didn’t get my newsletter done as scheduled for the first time since I started it over a year ago.

It interests me that Nancy Hawkins’ venom is never aimed at her first two bosses, one of whom is a criminal and both of whom are imbeciles. She’s not impatient with the naivete of her housemates, nor the inefficiencies of secretaries, nor even the majority of the authors whom she counsels and encourages. Her ire is reserved only for Hector Bartlett–partly because he is a cheat, partly because he wastes her time with something that is ugly, and partly for reasons to do with the spy part of the novel that I don’t want to spoil for you.

I’m interested because Nancy, like me, is all about the stuff that happens around work and after work: the small kindnesses and principled victories that buoy the spirit; the shared cups of tea and community problem solving; the help given and received in big and small moments. In the second, more prestigious publisher, she even identifies that everyone has been hired because there is something wrong with them, including herself. Instead of this being a work horror, it’s part of the appeal. As with the cast of characters at the boarding house, it feeds her humanity, her sense of purpose, and her sense of humor.

But there’s one more plot twist.

As is so often the case with novels that I love, (remember Miss Mole?) it turns out that the strong silent type from the third floor is secretly the romantic lead, and it’s more than just pro forma. William has a take that’s worth noting, as when, after one of the novel’s climactic turns, they sit together turning over the day’s events, and he points out that she could get by with doing less. “You take on too much. Leave something for the specialists,” he says, and then:

‘We should do something about ourselves before Milly returns.’

‘What should we do?’

‘Take a flat. A small flat, and share.’

It seemed to me the clear and obvious thing to do, so evident that I was surprised there were no complications. I was accustomed to obstacles. I said, ‘aren’t we being a bit precipitate?’

‘Nancy, do you think so, yourself?’

‘Not if I find a job.”

‘Then look for a flat. . . You’re a capable woman, Mrs. Hawkins.’

I’m getting a bit tired of being capable.’

‘I know, he said. ‘don’t take on unnecessary responsibilities and simply abandon anything you’ve taken on, except me. That’s my advice. You’re looking lovely.’

Nancy knows what’s good. She goes looking for the flat.

And when she finds her third job, this time at a small, leftist publisher who need an editor, not a Girl Friday/boss’s confidante, we can all heave a sigh of relief.

As for me, I went in to work on Monday morning wrapped in my most elaborate cloak of existential discontent and logged wearily in to all the channels and apps and documents.

There was a reply to the links I’d shared with my boss on Friday.

I edited the wrong deck--apologies--all good now!

I wrote back without hesitation:

»Jesus what a cluster fuck

No laughing emoji, no conspiratorial exclamation point, just one last riposte from the bowels of the ash and plume rage fit that I had been in all weekend.

I waited for a zinger of a reply--who among us would fault her?

But there was nothing. I waited a few minutes longer.

Then, I asked for a week off.

And here I am.

---

Lunch Break

Doodle Dispatches is SBB’s resident artist and saves us all, every week, from the dreaded Wall of Text. You can see her work on Twitter and Instagram, as well as order all kinds of fun prints and gifts at DoodleDispatches.com

---

Good Things

Producer/musician/songwriter/Bleachers frontman Jack Antonoff lighting up the interwebs with his beautifully edited, hearteningly earnest, delightfully talented, behind-the-scenes talks about how he creates his songs. The one below is on “91,” but I like the one about “Stop Making This Hurt” equally well.

My friend Michele Smart’s beautiful essay on reading Dante for the Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC). It’s got everything:

• A banger of a title, “Go, and become beautiful”: How I learned to read Dante’s Divine Comedy.”

• A delightfully sly, rhetorically adept opening line that shifts a pop culture reference into ultra-literary high gear before you know what hits you.

  It may or may not be the case that Kanye West, in the process of releasing his tenth album, Donda, staged a re-enactment of Dante’s three-part epic poem, The Divine Comedy (Commedia), moving from Inferno, to Purgatorio, to Paradiso.

• And sentences that made me remember what it’s like to have a mind occupied by the sublime instead of the scroll.

  For Dante, everything comes down to desire: how easy it is to love the wrong thing, or to love the right thing too little, or too much. 

---

That’s it for this week. Sunday is just four days away and will feature the 3rd installment of Socially Distanced, which is my paywalled, serialized memoir series, which means that now is a great moment to 👇🏻

Here are some other things you can do:

Follow  | Get the t-shirt  | Buy Books  | Read the Archive | Share

---