Film at 11

adventures in carwashing

I got my car washed this morning at the Shell station in Redwood City. I was all set to go through the automatic washer (one of my favorite things to do since I was a kid) when a woman came up to me with a coupon. Apparently, this Shell station now has a fancy-schmancy soft cloth car wash, where the washing, drying, detailing, vacuuming, waxing, and air-freshening are all done by hand. Or, more accurately, about ten different pairs of hands. Anyway, after throwing a bunch of paper junk in the trunk (which is, incidentally, my favorite euphemism for people with large behinds), I propped myself up against the gas station wall and watched people take over my car.

Now, the Shell station is on El Camino, and since I was in Redwood City and not in Los Altos, there were about ten men, mostly Spanish-speaking, lined up on either side of the gas station hoping for day labor. It was about noon, and it was clear to me (and, I suspect, to most of them) that most people looking for gardeners and construction hands had long since come and gone. Deprived by this new car wash of my childhood joy of watching giant scrubbrushes try to soap me, I started to watch the day laborers. I imagined what it must be like for someone, instead of going to work every day, to walk down to the gas station and take his chances. Four or five men walked into the gas station, taking off their hats. I figured they were calling it a day, but they bought some Gatorade and went right back out to the corner, some squatting on tiptoe, some sitting down on the curb, others leaning up against a pay phone. I thought to myself, "It takes a lot of guts to do that every day."

At this point, a young woman (about my age) came striding across the part of the parking lot where people were washing cars. To get to the gas station, she had to walk past the day laborers. She walked straight up to me and whispered in my ear, "That was so weird, having them all watch me like that." She whipped a cell phone out of her Armani handbag, called her boyfriend, and talked to him about how many meetings she had had today, asked if he was still at work (this was noon), and told him how frightened she had felt by the day laborers' "harrassment."

Sigh. I have seen the best minds of my generation, warped by the materialism of life in Silicon Valley. This shouldn't surprise me anymore. But it does.

I got to thinking, after this incident, about work. I started off, watching people work (hard!) washing my car in the hot sun, but the real drama of my morning unfolded as I watched people who, by choice or by happenstance, weren't working. As a teacher, I'm not working this summer either. When I am working, it is only part-time, a choice I continue to question. The men at the Shell station weren't working, and I suspect it was not by choice. Armani chick wasn't working, although she made damn sure that everyone at the Shell station knew what an important person she was, anyway.
Why do people assume that their job defines who they are?

Two years ago, I was the musical director for an adaptation of Studs Terkel's book, "Working." In this book, Terkel interviews over a hundred people from all walks of life about their work. Do they like it? What do they do on a typical day? Why do they do what they do? And, most importantly, what does their work say about who they are?

I don't know what my work says about who I am. I worry sometimes that, by teaching only part-time, I am only a part-time human being. I also worry that, if I return to a full-time job that I hate, I will become a person that I hate. More and more, I am convinced that Terkel was right: working is more than just making a living. It's about making a human being.

Posted by Meredith at July 26, 2002 03:45 PM