Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Hourly And Have Had It With Your Behavior
First, a brief disclaimer: I wrote this piece being unaware of the fact that apparently neo-nazis on 4chan use the term “NPC” or “non-player character” to refer to people they don’t like. I do use the term heavily throughout the piece, so if this terminology is troublesome, it may be best to stop now. I am not — I should hope obviously, but I want to be very clear — using the term in the way these sorry excuses for human meat have been.
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Over the last several years, on multiple occasions, I’ve had younger coworkers come to me, complaining about treatment ranging from dismissiveness to downright vile displays of entitlement.
“Why would they do that?” my coworkers ask. “Like just… why?”
Which is when I explain to them, “They don’t think we’re people.”
Real image of me and my coworkers having a meeting.
In my post-college career, most of my jobs — with a disastrous exception here and there — have been public-facing and, until recently, in the service industry. I’m now a security guard at an art museum. My jobs typically involve extremely predictable dialog options (“Up to 40% off regular-priced items!” “The nearest bathroom in just through here and then on your left,” et cetera), lengthy periods of almost continuous standing and walking, and not having to check a fucking work email in the middle of the goddamn night. It’s a test of endurance — and all of these jobs are ubiquitous and invisible.
I’m a professional NPC, is what I’m saying.
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To take a moment, in case someone who is not much of a nerd at all is reading: “NPC” stands for “non-player character.” Depending on the type of game you’re playing, these characters can be carefully-wrought engines of a GM’s plot, given full backstories and lives of their own to further the tale you and your friends are building around the table, or they can be poorly-rendered villagers and like, I don’t know, skeletons or some shit in a video game, who are usually there to obstruct your path or be killed in some epic way by you, the player character.
Fundamentally, NPCs serve to add depth and texture to imagined worlds, and, in one way or another, serve to advance the player characters’ quest, whether that’s by purveying wares or granting experience points at their deaths.
It’s worth noting, too, that video games are more widely-played than tabletop roleplaying games — for better or for worse.
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I was posted at a door of the art museum I work at. An older couple came to me; having roamed the galleries for quite some time, they were ready to explore the sculpture garden. We got to talking, and they seemed pretty taken with me.
“Are you a student?” one of them finally asked me.
“Oh, no, I graduated a while back,” I said, with a little bit of a laugh.
“Oh, what’d you study?” they asked, seeming slightly taken aback.
“Classical languages,” I said.
“So that’s why you’re working here!” they said, clearly pleased with themselves.
If nothing else, humanities majors generally know how to proofread — an essential service.
Leaving aside the dismissal of humanities as fundamentally useless and unemployable — as if that should fucking matter — this is pretty indicative of conversations that I’ve personally had about the jobs I work, as well as the broader cultural conversation surrounding these kinds of jobs. We refer to “grown-up jobs” as somehow… not the jobs I’m talking about, despite the fact that the majority of people in public-facing jobs, especially in the service industry but here I include workers in call centers, museum security (there’s more museum guards than coal miners out there — just saying), and anything else where the worker has to wrangle the general public into some kind of socially-acceptable behavior, are “grown-ups.” I’m a grown-up, and this is my job — but it’s not about observable reality; it’s about social status. The less you have to actually do, the more you get paid.
This view, that not actually doing stuff is somehow more worthy of remuneration and respect than not being able to work remotely because a major part of a job is having a body in a place, is pervasive in contemporary American culture. But this not just about the jobs others have; I’m ranting about it now because it’s the job I have — a job that is fundamentally about facilitating someone else having an experience. I guarantee you that the women who yelled at me for quite some time about expired coupons, and the guys who think they’re being fucking cute by trying to do pull-ups on sculptures, believe I am somehow invested in their adventures. My role in those situations is to grant them experience points by being an obstacle to them getting their way, which they ultimately intend to get at my expense.
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This all sounds very angry. I am not saying that everyone I encounter treats me and my coworkers like garbage. That’s not the case at all: I’ve had many extremely pleasant interactions with people who seemed genuinely invested in my personhood interacting with their own in a reasonable way.
I’ve also had encounters with people who thought they were doing that, but were not good enough at the game to convince me: guys who are clearly feeling out of place at some fancy party, and think they can hang with security; people who self-consciously ask me about my hobbies when I’m trying to ring them up and get them out of my store because it’s fucking 8:55 and we are locking that door at 9pm.
The problem with these latter interactions is in their intent. It’s not a human engagement; it’s someone else being a player character, to whose adventure I am yet another NPC, there to facilitate their sense of themself as the kind of person who makes time to talk to the guards and the cashiers. But in their search for self-actualization, they still cast me and my coworkers as props to set the scene of their self-image.
I’m not paid enough for that. Give me another $90 an hour, though, and I’ll play along — ‘cause that’s what therapy costs in this town.
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It’s not just the people I directly encounter who are guilty of positioning public-facing workers as a kind of Rosencranz-and-Guildenstern to some imagined Hamlet. The dialog that surrounds these jobs does it over and over again. A recent article in Jacobin — which, for clarity, I otherwise liked — points to what I mean. In the article, which is about automation in the workplace and specifically about self-checkout machines, the author says:
I’ve worked at grocery stores. There’s a reason I went back to school. Like most people who’ve actually experienced those jobs, I pretty much think they suck.
There’s some things to unpack in this throw-away line. For one thing, going back to school won’t fucking save you; I know too many proud Masters of Arts and even a Doctor of Philosophy or two working in “those jobs” to buy that shit. But that’s veering from the topic.
It’s entirely possible that most of what people know about service industry jobs was shaped by Kevin Smith’s Clerks (1994).
The assumption at work in this brief remark is that of course “those jobs” suck. Of course they do. Everyone knows that: I once had a customer grumble something about how I should be more Tyler Durden-like in my comportment while on the clock at the Gap, and — again, I am a throw-away character in someone else’s story — I’ve had people try to get buddy-buddy with me about how, “Oh, [I] must be excited to get out of here!” I mean, I am, but it’s because I have things to do at my house, and not because the job sucks.
Or rather, the suckiness is not an inherent quality of the job. The suckiness of the job is a societal expectation, one born out of classism and a number of other biases — but it does not inhere in the tasks at hand.
Look, the assumption that public-facing jobs inherently suck is an outgrowth of the idea that your job should be the locus of personal fulfillment in your life. Americans don’t have hobbies; they have jobs — call it a “calling,” call it a “passion,” call it what the fuck you want, but at the end of the day, it’s just a fucking job. And the flip side of it being actually impossible to work remotely at the jobs I’m talking about is that there’s no pretense about that. I mean yeah, obviously, we had “GapSwag” as rewards for sales and credit card sign-ups (a whole level of hot bullshit that is somewhat beyond the scope of this piece); we were expected to dress in a certain way while we were at the store; at the museum, we have conversations about how we should or should not engage with and address visitors, as well as a really ungodly number of trivia nights and related phenomena — but a lot of those strictures can be pulled off like a company-mandated polo at the end of the day. You don’t have to keep caring because it doesn’t have to be your life.
I don’t have to think about my job 24/7 because it’s a job. I mean, I do think about it 24/7 sometimes, but that’s the anxiety, not a part of having the job.
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Recently, a coworker of mine joked about a shift in my specific responsibilities meaning that I won’t be in line for any kind of advancement.
I said, “I’ve never had an ambition that could be fulfilled through a day job.”
“Fair enough,” he said.
And that’s how I want it. I don’t want to have my hopes and dreams tied up in my job. There are jobs that would make realizing my ambitions easier, sure — but I don’t want to do those jobs.
Those jobs would mean answering work emails while I’m at home, and I am not about to do that.
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By this point, it would be fair to wonder whether all this isn’t pretty alienating. And I mean, sure, it can be: as mentioned above, they don’t think we’re people.
But even leaving aside no-future jobs as a kind of escape from the cultish striving that inheres in “having a career,” a different type of alienation which I feel is salutary, I get to interact with broad swathes of people every day. If I do my job, something actually changes in the world: whether it’s facilitating the safety of the museum’s collection so that it can be enjoyed in perpetuity, or just folding a bunch of jeans so they look nice, something happened. Something was affected on the material fucking plane, which cannot be said of a lot of “grown-up jobs.” Half those jobs are bullshit anyway.
When I worked briefly at a publishing house — like actually at the publishing house, instead of freelancing — I left every day completely exhausted. I had no mental energy left; I was tired and sluggish and didn’t want to do anything. I didn’t read much for pleasure, partially because it was college, but also because I had to read so much stuff every day, and not wanting to read stuff at all is not great when you’re doing a languages degree. Whereas in the job I have now and the jobs I’ve worked previously, my body may be fucking broken on the wheel and I may not be thrilled to talk to people, but I have mental energy to work on other things that are important to me, like this blog, and I’ve had plenty of time to think about those projects while I was at the job.
If anything, I feel less alienated from my real self — the person writing this blog post, the person who does read for fun, the person who engages with art and culture because it’s fucking exciting — than I did when I had a “grown-up job.”
I never want to feel like that again.
Besides that, it is my firm belief that public-facing jobs, although stereotyped as unskilled, are very much not. I can stand around in a place and be polite to people for eight or more hours at a go, and a lot of people can’t manage five whole minutes — and I am in a position to know. Furthermore, by being made invisible, an obstacle or a signpost in someone else’s adventure, the people I interact with aren’t necessarily paying attention to what I’m saying or doing, and this gives us power. We are in position to normalize things that need to be normalized: things like gender-neutral language and climates of consent. At the Gap, I regularly had people respond with mild surprise when I asked before cuffing their trousers or adjusting garments they were trying on. At the museum, I am in a position to make gender-neutral language something people expect to hear. These are just two examples, which I cite because they are the ones I have implemented, but public-facing jobs provide the workers with the power to move public perceptions of normal behavior. That’s a hell of a lot of power for someone in an “unskilled” position.
Nobody cares about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern — so they can do whatever they want.
Retail workers wear these same facial expressions on Black Friday and Tax Free Weekend, just before the store opens, as they see patrons milling around the doors, waiting for the “click” of the lock being opened.
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How then should you, the main character, the Hamlet in this situation, interact with characters like mine? Frankly, just be aware of the circumstances. No one wants to make small talk when it’s 9:06pm and we are closed now, folks. In my experience, most museum guards are not looking to ruin your day. The key is to remember that everyone else is also a player character in their own game — played by different rules, and running parallel to yours.
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