My first job paid $7 an hour, and the adult working the till beside me was paid $12 an hour for the same shift. It was a stationery shop. I was at school. As far as I could see we did the same things: we cut open the same cartons, faced the same shelves, rang up the same pens for the same customers, and stood on the same floor for the same number of hours. I thought we did the same amount of work. I quit after 3 months.
A till is a small machine for agreeing on a price, and I spent three months standing next to one, watching what it would agree to. It didn’t care which of us had put the pen in the bag. The customer paid the same, the shop took the same, and the receipt came out identical whoever’s hands had been on the keys. The only place in that building where we were priced differently was the roster, and the roster wasn’t looking at the work either. Nobody had timed my shelves against the adult’s shelves, and nobody needed to, because the price of an hour of me had been set before I walked in, by what a teenager looked like to whoever set it, and the work the two of us did inside that hour never came into it.
Price is not connected to work. Perception is the connection. At the time I’d have told you the opposite: the whole point of a job, as I understood it, was that you did the work and the work was worth the money. The work does still have to happen. The shelf gets faced or the shop looks like a garage sale, and the shop has to open. But the work only sets a floor. What sits between that floor and the number on the payslip, or the number on the price tag, is whatever somebody believes about the work, and the money is attached to the belief. Two of us at one till showed me that before I’d finished school, and I didn’t have a word for it, so I quit instead.
My next job was in a phone shop, and it put me on the other side of the same piece of furniture. I remember trying to sell the old shit no one wanted to buy. It was a game. We’d find it out back and put it right on the till, then point it out to customers. That was the entire method. No discount, no new box, no sign, no fixing whatever had stopped it selling the first time. We carried it to the counter, and while someone was paying for the thing they had actually come in for, card already out, we asked. Stock nobody would have walked to the back of the shop for, or ordered in and waited for, got bought when it was already in front of them and the asking cost nothing. Nothing about the product moved. Its position moved, and what the customer could see of it moved, and money changed hands that would not have changed hands the day before, for a phone that had not changed at all.
Both jobs were the same lesson from two sides, though it took me years to read them as one. At the stationery shop the price was on me, and I couldn’t see the frame that set it, because I was standing inside it. At the phone shop I was building the frame, and I could see all of it, because it was a game and I was playing it, and the whole apparatus was a stock decision and a sentence. Nobody was lied to. Same phone, same price on the box, honestly described, and the only thing the customer had never had before was a look at it. The work of making the phone hadn’t changed. The work of selling it was the walk from the stockroom to the counter.
For a while after that somebody paid me by the hour to be the perception. Fake protests dressed as a giant cat mascot. The police came. A client had worked out that a teenager in a costume was the cheapest way to shift what a crowd believed, and I was the frame, and neither of us was the product.
By the time I stood at the first till I’d already had two educations, and neither of them was a job. The first was at home. We had dinner around the table every night and we talked, and a lot of what we talked about was business, because my dad was a businessman and his work came home with him: colleagues travelling through from America, clients, people he was meeting, all of them at our barbecues, with me expected to hold a conversation. When I was a teenager he started taking me with him to his meetings in restaurants in town. So I learned about the world of business from him, and one thing nobody had to teach me was what those meetings looked like. Nobody was stacking anything. Nobody was making anything. People were talking across a table, a long way from wherever the actual work was being done, and as far as I could see whatever numbers there were came out of the talking.
The second education was school: a small Christian school, academic, and short on anything you could hit with a hammer, no metal tech and no wood tech in the whole of my schooling. I wasn’t a particularly motivated kid. Cruised, ran around, went rollerblading, went to have sleepovers at friends most weekends during high school. I’ve always thought of systems. At school I would fail basic memorised questions while getting great marks for difficult nuanced conceptual questions. I think a mark gets set the way the roster was set. The exam can only pay for what the exam can see, and what it could see was recall, so the work of understanding something went unpriced and the work of memorising it got paid, and the school had a frame too, one built long before I sat down, by people who never saw my work and didn’t need to.
In 2010, a few years after the last of those jobs, my old school sent round a questionnaire about what happens after you leave, and I still have my answers. I wrote that I did business because I wanted to have money, my dad was a businessman and it seemed easy option because everyone kept asking me what I was going to do. Further down I wrote that the working world is interesting as it both is somewhat soul destroying slow and painful but also filled with opportunity - and in certain jobs it is great if your work is related to reward (commission, career advancement, bonuses or recognition). I’d been out of the stationery shop for years, I’d run the till from the other side, and I was still writing, in my own hand, that the good jobs were the ones where work and reward were related, as if that were a feature some jobs came with and others didn’t. The list in the brackets is the tell. Commission, career advancement, bonuses, recognition. Not one of those is the work. Every one of them is somebody’s perception of the work, converted into money by whoever holds the roster, and I was still hoping to find the job where the two lined up, instead of noticing that they never had, not at the till, not at school, not at the restaurant tables, and that when they did line up it was because somebody had lined them up on purpose.
The customer at the phone shop got a phone they wanted, at the price on the box, and the shop cleared a shelf, and I don’t think anyone in that was cheated. The adult on $12 was worth $12 to the person who wrote the roster, and I was worth $7, and the roster was probably right about what a school kid does in an hour compared with an adult, on average, across every school kid that shop had ever hired. Whether it was wrong about me nobody ever found out, because a frame is cheap to build and expensive to check, so nobody measures, and the price goes to whatever the frame can see.
Somebody built the frame that made the old stock sell. The roster that priced my hour at $7 and the adult’s at $12 was written by someone I never met, and so was the exam, and so was the brief that put a teenager in a cat suit. None of them were at the till when the money changed hands, none of them did the work, and every price I’ve named was theirs. Who builds the perception?