Day Labor

I’m on disability leave from the day job right now, for however long I can figure out how to still be paid ¹sometime in February. Which is great, to take a break for the first time since I was 14. I’ve had a lot of jobs over the years, often several at once, and didn’t get down to just one job until after I moved to Seattle.

But for a while least I’m going to do none. In some ways that’s not much change, since I’ve been doing very little work even without being on leave. In some ways that’s a big change because I don’t know that I’ve ever imagined more than a week or two between now and my next TPS report.

I used to have a Person with Job ²This was maybe Person in School too, but I haven’t mapped it all out yet, and it’s been 10 almost years since I was in school. PWJ was pretty good a job, so long as PIC could get them there each day in tolerable condition. PWJ was not up for depression or all of the other fights for survival my life presented, but they could be excited enough about day job projects. If PIC could get some sleep and some calm and get PWJ on-task at a reasonable time, PWJ could motivate their own work, at least for many technical topics.

PWJ though is not willing to come out on days when our life is too hard. This means PIC has to fake it until conditions improve, or do a lot of work to improve conditions (or at least the perception of conditions). Sometimes this tradeoff is mutually beneficial – PIC can cope with transient stress, can fake the work that PWJ is missing for a while, and buy some time for recovery.

But as I’ve let PIC stand down from that high level of self-management I’ve lost the ability to keep depression and other challenges from PWJ. Which is think is why I’ve had such a hard time working even as other parts of my life have improved. I think I’ve been partly successful at integration and have lost the willingness to recreate it at the intensity required to be PWJ.

I could reframe some of my feels about homelessness under a similar framework. Being able to be Person Experiencing Homelessness ³The dehumanizing aspect of person-first language become more apparent as the whiteness of the euphemism increases and still show up as PWJ for requires very high levels of isolation, and lots of passive support in the form of universal clothing and demeanor and protection. For a long time I was afraid to give up the ability to maintain that space. For a time I needed the ability to be PEH and PWJ, and to be able to switch. How else could I cope with shift labor and my real life? How can I ever be safe if I am not prepared to be PEH.

One of the places PWJ came from, besides Pete’s lifelong fear that I would become a “welfare person” ⁴Knowing Pete I assume that’s a racist identifier but they were never clear on the meaning, is the god damned human trafficking Pete subjected me to. I was sent away from my cage for many reasons at all ages, but when I was 10 or 11 I started getting sent out for day labor. I’d be told to be up early, driven somewhere that required manual labor, and then abandoned there after Pete clearly communicated that I should be put to work.

Sometimes the people I was working for were uncomfortable, but they rarely refused to put me to work. I tried hard to me sure they weren’t too uncomfortable, because if they refused I would be hurt for my failure. So mostly they did work me, at least for a day or two. And when I was done Pete would come back and collect money from them.

I didn’t negotiate jobs or even know in advance what I’d be doing. I couldn’t know what sort of clothing to wear, couldn’t count on the availability of food or water, and definitely wouldn’t have axxsss to protectice equipment. I didn’t get paid except as Pete decided to cut me in. I couldn’t even get fired because it wasn’t my job to lose.

Mostly these were household tasks. Sometimes just yard work but sometimes construction jobs or hauling trash or changing oil. I got the impression that maybe Pete implied he’d be doing the work – volunteered to help – but then sent me instead. I’m not sure though, because no one ever talked to me about it. They knew it was a problem but decided it wasn’t going to be their problem, and so they left it with me. They took my labor and surrendered me back to Pete later and paid him so they could feel like it was capitalism instead of child trafficking.

It’s easy for me to be ashamed it went on for so long. Until after I had a car and real job and wasn’t living with Pete. I got good enough at being PWJ that it didn’t even feel like abuse to me. I got good enough at letting PIC hold all the hard parts that I could lose myself in work, one shift at a time, and just not care about eating or being safe or knowing when I would be done.

I currently don’t have any plans for how to be PWJ. Maybe I don’t want any. It’s not clear to me that the person I developed to be hurt at work is someone I need to be. But I also know they’re full of skills and consumed a large part of my life, so I should probably find some way to be connected. I should at least find some way to do capitalism with some of their ease, and less of our pain.

So we’re starting with some of the tools I used before to build PWJ. I learned to like computer programming as an art form, as a method of expression, as a tool to make my life better. I’m a ways from code as art these days, but I’m going to start rebuilding the tools I used for that pursuit in the past.

I’m finally moving to a modern cloud infrastructure. For lots of reasons, including having 100T of local storage, I’ve never really made the move. But I am now. I’ve been working on scripts to get a storage host up as the backbone of a modern container cluster. I’m kicking everyone off my mail server so I can play with it again. Maybe I’ll finally get a chat server up and interfaced to MMS, so I can have modern phone service without being restricted to a carrier and handset.

Even longer ago, before I had access to microprocessors, I did electronics too. For a while as a job I did controls engineering, and I have been known to do robots. But I’ve never actually had a circuit board printed and it’s time to change that. I have plans for manufacturing LED modules, so I can have fancy lights around my house without hand-wiring 25,000 individual bulbs, and so I can swap out pieces when some of those bulbs fails. Step 1 is just to get all the components I want onto a board with pins so I can do testing and prototyping, and it finally feels like I can get that done.

I don’t know what PWJ will bring to the party, but let’s start with some play in the areas they used to inhabit and see if I can find some parts of PWJ that I want to keep. Or at least remind myself that I have liked these things, before I built my survival around them.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

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