The Unseen Costs of America’s “Makey Uppy Jobs”
(Originally published in the Western People on 2024-06-18)
Glendale Public Library - Casa Verdugo Branch © Liam A. Heffron
"They don’t pay your holidays…imagine… don’t work, don’t get paid, just like Ukraine!" My wife, more bewildered than angry, couldn’t believe it. In the United States, businesses aren't required to pay employees for time they don't work, including public holidays, annual leave, or (until recently) sick pay. While some companies offer holiday pay as a perk, many, especially those with low-paid workers, do not. Coming from Ireland, with four weeks paid annual leave and ten public holidays, this policy takes some getting used to.
With fewer staffing costs, maybe this part-explains why so many people seem to be employed in what my Irishtown granny would have called, “makey uppy work”. It also brings to mind the book by the late anthropologist David Graber, Bullshit Jobs, describing the types and characteristics of pointless jobs and why they've become so widespread. He further explored the psychological impact of working a pointless job.
Take the Glendale public car park attendants, for instance. They stand by exit barriers, take my ticket, insert it into a machine, mutter about a receipt as we both watch the barrier rise, and wish me a nice day. Why? I can insert the ticket myself and it’s not as if the car park needs to put on a show to get me to return, especially since the first three hours are free with library use.
At my local library (a different one – it’s the adventurer in me), an airy space about the size of a primary school classroom, the same security guard sits inside the glass door every day. He’s pleasant, wishing me a good day as I enter and thanking me as I leave from his awkward perch on a plastic chair. I guess sitting is his only option; a walk around would disturb children playing with toys and the old men perpetually asleep by the printer. What’s his purpose? If an armed terrorist broke in, what could he do besides become a target himself? Sometimes I’m fairly sure he is asleep himself.
This might sound pedantic, but shops, cafes, and restaurants all seem to have more staff than I’m used to seeing in Ballina. I didn’t notice it when I lived in West Hollywood before, but today’s installation of my internet reminded me.
The self-install AT&T unit arrived within a couple of days of ordering it. So far, so good. Unlike the Irish routers, the service came with a dedicated app to guide me through the process of plugging it into the AT&T wall socket (literally just that). The deluge of emails welcomed me to my new experience of high-speed fibre internet and offered services such as credit monitoring and identity protection. However, there was just one small, tiny problem. It didn’t work.
Straight out of the box, I scanned the QR code on the router, and my smartphone app silently screamed that there was a fatal error and I had to call support. Curious how my internet died before I even took it out of its box, I made the fatal mistake. I called support.
After some time had passed and small organisms had lived out their entire life cycles of birth, reproduction, and death in distant pools of swamp water, I finally spoke to an AT&T representative. We were only separated by an accent and comprehension barrier, which we both attempted to resolve in different ways—she by repeating the exact same question multiple times and me by shouting vague answers. Eventually, through comprehension exhaustion, we both realized that the internet was not working. She then tried to upsell me a combined internet and mobile package with a free iPhone 14 (“of course much better than an iPhone 15”) for an amazing offer that was about to lapse that minute. I replied I would take my chances, especially as my internet was still not working and which was the point of the whole call. With disappointment dripping in her voice, she eventually agreed to pass my case to her supervisor, who would call me in half an hour. He/she/they didn’t.
The following day, I called support again and am still not convinced that an AI is not answering AT&T customer calls. Another voice ordered me to go through the same procedure as before, as this was the only way it could be escalated to ordering a technician callout. There are only so many ways a router can be turned on and off, yet we managed to stretch the attempts to 27 minutes before apparently Skynet got bored and allowed my representative to order technical support to visit me. She didn’t attempt to offer another ‘amazing offer.’ Maybe it had indeed expired, but I think she just wanted to get off the phone with the man displaying the demeanour of a hungover junior-B fullback on a miserable Sunday morning.
The next day, two AT&T technicians duly arrived, each with their large vans and larger boots, and stood in my living room as I plugged the router in and out of the wall in what felt like a crime scene reenactment. Eventually, seeming to accept my alibi and that I would now rather cycle to Belmullet to collect my internet, they decided to plug something into the router, and we all waited. The light flickered from green to a steady white, and the room filled with invisible high-speed internet. With a puzzled decline of my offer of a cup of tea, the technicians left but were soon replaced by a suited and perfumed AT&T rep whose job it was ‘to follow the technicians and welcome new clients’. After going through the smartphone app in person (a unique experience for me), he also tried to upsell me the amazing iPhone 14 offer but quickly gave in when I said I already had a phone—the one we were using to navigate the app. In fairness, I also mentioned the offer was way more expensive than what I was currently using.
This all felt so pointless. In Ireland, a new router would likely be posted before any human support appeared. I’ve yet to see a security guard in an Irish library, and the only time I met an attendant manning a Mayo car park barrier was during a wet, sleety November evening at Knock airport when ‘eejits were sticking their damp cards upside down into the machines’. What is the social and economic cost of this? I used to think the USA led in replacing workers with technology, but maybe Ireland is further along this path and ….I would say more but I think my internet just died.