Sarah Connor
Monday mornings are long for me as I take a two and a half hour commute to work. Not unusual in the pandemic that we are so dislocated from our workplaces but now into biblical proportions. Sitting on my bed early morning with a rising crescendo of anxiety I check the contents of my bag again and again unsure how to prepare myself. Bulging with the essential (cash & caffeine) and the too heavy and unnecessary (books).
In a feral state I wake my child early, to be nudged singing about wheels on buses into ‘breakfast club’ so that I might drive in a car, to a train, to a bus, to go to work. So long without having to go to actual work I struggle to find a coordinated outfit and leave the house looking like a dream-reader from Topanga valley. Armed with charms, essential oils and my son’s favourite car. I witness the red-faced ladies in the loos of my journey trying to digest their separation from their lockdown babies. We watch each other patch over our anxiety with makeup and face-masks. Putting on a performance of performance.
I’ve always been a packed bag kind of girl. A residual trauma and accompanying vigilance means that my eyes are fixed on the horizon. This makes me of the dystopian persuasion, aware of endings before they have begun. Add to this single parenthood and this easily slips into Sarah Connor territory, the legendary mother of the fictional saviour John Connor, in the Terminator franchise. I already find myself buying canned food and batteries, stockpiling bleach and matches preparing for the era of the machines. Boot-camping my son for a time when the world will not value his humanity or safety enough to steward his generation into control. Guiding him through the dehumanised landscape he will live in when we have outsourced our duty of care to a psychic wall of chatbots, apps and Employee Assistance Programme call-centres. I have to remind myself to look away at my son’s future and save my energy for a day on hold trying to get onto Ramipril and maintaining a resilient front against the brushing-off-blame-n-shame this involves.
As I tip toe my way through the bodies of a public sector this Monday, I realise that it is exactly 10 years to the day that I started this blog about how to survive work. Clearly dear reader I don’t actually know anything about that, which was the reason why I started up this conversation. In 2011 I was put in a compulsory redundancy pool for the first time in my life. This was as a result of the sustained strike action carried out to protect the Teachers’ Pension, the long forgotten fight for pensions in the politely-put-post-92 universities. Yes, we’ve been in the #UCUstrike movie before with the same hard-balling and vicitimisation of activists in the academy. Despite being a trade unionist I didn’t even see it coming. And as often happens to experts, there are traumatic events that remind you that you know nothing at all.
The other thing that I learned from this trauma is that help doesn’t always come from the usual suspects and often when we’re in a workplace crisis people can come into our lives as if from nowhere.
So let me tell you about Dave. Dave is an old beardy bloke scientist who was on my redundancy panel and stood up for me apparently telling the other members that I made his entire department look like they didn’t have a pulse and they had no grounds to fire me. Despite my putting on quite a show, quoting Durkheim’s On Suicide like a bad panto, he took a stand at precisely the moment when it mattered.
A few weeks later I see Dave walking towards me all soft focus Monet landscape. Completely without foresight, I find myself mouthing the words “I love you”, with hand movements. I repeat, with hand movements. In that brilliant academic way, eyes were averted and he kept walking. Despite a momentary foot stumble which threatened to end in an embrace, we managed to retain our splendid isolation and carry on as if nothing had happened. I don’t think he even recognised me.
In the pre-pandemic days of Surviving Work I used to do workshops and events involving activities and discussions about whatever the participants wanted to bring. Now this is going to shock you but the most common themes involved bullying, victimisation, loneliness, burnout, anxiety and despair. One technique taken from the world of mental health is to think ahead about who you can enlist to help you. You can do this on your own, or (better) with another person or within a group.
The aim of this activity is to work out what is likely to happen when you’re in distress at work, what kind of help you need and who could give it to you. First, spend 3 minutes thinking about (or telling someone about) a time when you were in distress at work. Think about what triggered it, how you felt and what happened. Then think about who helped you and how. If the answer is ‘nobody’ think about who you wish had been there for you. Try to take the full three minutes to do this. If you’re doing this with another person listen to their experiences and then fill in your crisis cards:
My Crisis Card
What to call me/my contact details
What you must not do....
What you can do to help....
Who to call: name and number