In 1996 Joaquin Garcia, an environmental engineer with the municipal council of Cadiz in south west Spain, was sent to oversee the operation of one of the city’s wastewater treatment plants. Arriving in his new position Garcia found that the plant had not yet been constructed. So he took an executive decision. He went home.
Fast forward to 2010, and Garcia’s boss realised that his engineer was coming up to 20 years of public service, a milestone to be celebrated with the presentation of a long service medal. But as that thought occurred to him, so did another thought. When had he last seen Garcia? When had anybody seen Garcia? After locating Garcia at his home, the boss called him into the office and asked him what he had done yesterday? Last week? Last month? Garcia had no answer.
He had no answer because he hadn’t been into the office for fourteen years, and, despite his office being directly opposite his manager’s office, nobody had realised. Garcia had continued to collect his salary. I am not sure if Joaquin ever got the long service medal, but I think he deserves a statue, a monument to a man who refused to participate in the vacuity of office work.
It has been six weeks since I received my last salary. Thursday mornings now feel like walking past the street where a girl you once loved told you it was all over. There’s a nostalgia and a melancholic feeling knowing that the salary, like the girl, won’t be back.
Theoretically, the salary is a direct measurement of the employee’s value to the organisation. A tangible manifestation of the statement “This is how much we value your labour.” Of course, the organisation can signal your value in many other ways; your treatment by managers and colleagues, career development opportunities, a full fruit bowl and free Tim Tams in the kitchen. But in the end the only value that matters, is the value that you place on your own work.
“Nothing to add.”
“You can find the link on the intranet.”
“Just confirming we are still on for 2pm.”
Emails. The lifeblood of meaningless work. There is never anything to add (and this one is always sent ‘reply all’). Just send me the link and save me the trip to the intranet. And there is a 98% chance that the 2pm will be cancelled at 155pm (and only a 2% chance that you will be informed).
A friend once gave me advice about dealing with the inevitable backlog of emails that clog inboxes following any extended holiday period. I think it has wider applications.
“First day back in the office, I delete them all,” he told me. “Anything important will be resent.” The genius of this approach is that very few emails are resent because very few are ever important.
I once conducted an experiment on the value of emails. As my job largely involved the sending of, and replying to, emails, it was also an experiment on the value of my work. For a period of one week I stopped replying to emails. Just to see what would happen. What happened? Nothing happened.
I decided to step it up. The following week, not only did I stop replying to emails, I stopped sending emails. And what happened? Nothing, nada, zilch.
As I was preparing to conclude my experiment, confident that I could drop from the face of corporate life with little to no effect, my manager informed me that they were going on leave. Would I be able to act in their position? I jumped at the chance to continue the experiment.
For the following week, not only did I not send or respond to my emails, I also did not send or respond to emails on behalf of my manager. And what happened? Well, you know the answer to that. I was effectively not doing two jobs and not a ripple on the pond of employment. I realised then that my real value to the organisation, independent of the salary I received or the free teabags in the kitchen, was effectively zero.
The value that we place upon our own work and the value that the organisation or others place upon it can sometimes be unaligned. You can be engaged in work that is richly rewarded and valued by others but that has no meaning for yourself. Those are the jobs we need to be wary of. Thankfully, the opposite is also true, you can find pleasure and meaning in work that is valued only by you.
I recently spent a few days working for a winemaker friend. There is something magical about being involved in the grape harvest, a closeness to and a reliance on nature.
My first task though was far from magical. The floors of winery cellars tend to turn black, layered with the sticky juice of last year’s vintage, the rubber of forklift tires and the various residues generated from the making of wines. My task was to restore the floor to cleanliness.
I found a corner in which to start and aimed a shot of water at the floor, swinging the high-pressure hose in a wide arc. Before me a long clean, stretch of concrete revealed itself as the water cut through the blackness. I stopped and admired that slice of cleanness. It felt good to have achieved something, to look down and see the results of my actions. In that moment I felt something I had not felt for a very long time; Job Satisfaction.
Staring down at the clean slice of concrete punching through the grime, I felt that what I had done there that morning had more value than all of the emails I had ever sent combined. I had made a mark. I had changed the world, ever so slightly. And I reflected that that is what every person who values their work must feel. That when they work, they have left a mark, a brush stroke, a fold in the clay, a word on the page, they have created something that wasn’t there before, their action has changed the world.
Back in Spain, Joaquin Garcia, who came to be known as the Phantom Official, was fined the equivalent of a year’s salary for taking fourteen years of unofficial paid leave. But he didn’t waste those fourteen years out of office. He spent the time reading philosophy and became an expert on the writings of the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, one of the leading thinkers of the enlightenment period. Spinoza is remembered for his contributions to the modern conceptions of self and the universe. Garcia should be remembered for his refusal to participate in work that held no value for him.
So this morning, yes, I spare a thought for the salary that won’t be coming but I know that the salary was always just a number, that would come and go, be spent or saved. I also think about Joaquin Garcia and about how we spend our time. And regardless of how big or how small the salary ever was, I am certain that it could never equal the value of feeling satisfied that your time has been well spent, that it hasn’t been wasted, that at the end of the day you have made a difference, that no matter what you do, you have left a mark.
This weekend I will be at the Lost Trades Fair in Bendigo meeting people who do things that don’t make you want to abscond from work for fourteen years. I will be at the Galah Press stand if you are around and would like to drop by and say hello.
Share this post