Marooned at Work and Other Tales

For the past two weeks I've been too busy working to write about work much, although somehow I found the time for the first two episodes of the latest Great British Bake Off season, and a prolonged work-related session of trying to find out whether Romanian citizens are on the whole taller, shorter, or rounder than the citizens of neighboring countries. The answer was, that such statistics are complicated by a great deal of methodological and ideological factors, like the time of day at which people are measured, and perhaps also how people who are measured or the people who measure them are inclined to interpret or nudge the results. Or the statistics are difficult to find without a knowledge of Romanian. That was last night, at any rate, so the memory is fresh.

Unwisely I've gotten very little sleep, compared to how long I work, although some six hours per night is nothing to sneeze at. I get home late, bolt down a square meal, then try to stay awake two hours so I will sleep well and not have horrifying dreams based on little more than what a certain Charles Dickens character referred to as a speck of mustard. Then I sleep, get up, bathe, maybe eat or drink something, pick up my tote bag and my handbag, bid my parents goodbye, and go out into the still-daylit streets and the still fairly empty sidewalks to catch the U-Bahn. There I have been reading more Jan Morris and particularly a lot of Voltaire's fictional writings. Voltaire has turned out to be as easy to 'get into' as putting one's feet into a supple slipper, and stimulating to the thought. But I think it's a pity for my purposes that it's abstracted thought; with teeming human nature and human fortunes and different places and different cultures interpreted through 18th century French lenses as Voltaire's novels are, Jan Morris's travel writings are more inclined to make me observe things and (by observing) in a way engage with the places I pass through and the people whom I pass, in the concrete world.

Today I read her writings about New York in the 1970s, for instance, and it has rekindled the ardent interest I had for it before I went there in 2008. (The simile that came to mind is that being there is like drinking a huge, hyperconcentrated cup of coffee that can either be deadly or vitally invigorating.) But I also like being more aware of people right here in Berlin, because the U-Bahn is of course a 'travel' too. Above ground, to me Neukölln and Kreuzberg are experiences diametrically divergent from ones I have closer to home. Although it's hard to put a finger on why I think it has these qualities, the Bohemian, artistic, undernourished, itinerant, mixed modern and almost reactionary elements of the neighbourhood around the workplace is absolutely fascinating because it's foreign to my experience and to a degree to my ideals. The neighbourhood around our apartment seems more settled, middle class, more entirely post-Second-World-War in terms of its businesses and modern conveniences and outlook, and even the hippiedom seems more happily comfortable hippiedom that has survived wild years and come out the other side in triumphant middle age that still embraces some of its old associations and ideals, than the precarious hippiedom in Neukölln.

Whereas I imagine that Neukölln — our corner of it, specifically — is more like Paris: the absolutely antique and archaic in terms of its upward striving cutesy architecture, enormous trees that have survived the 20th century to tower above the street and all four or five stories of the buildings to either side, and a blackened looking building that seems to have been left untended since the Wall fell, all of these useless and impractical and half-failed decorations adding artistic inspiration, alongside the cafes and the Indian bangle and scarf shops and the bookshop; and the Italian osteria on the corner where the waiter speaks in Italian to a customer, wearing a tight and long red wine dark apron that looks like the right thing to wear. A French flag hangs from a balcony nearby; and in a grocery store the front wall has been folded or pushed back and pillows have been set up on crates outside as men gossip on them, in a stubborn attempt to recreate the atmosphere of a kiosk in Turkish or Arabic-speaking countries where the weather permits this kind of open-air living. From more recent years there is a boxy long car from the 1960s or 70s, parked in one of the smallish streets; and a stubbier dented blue car from the 90s or even 80s with a sign offering it for under €3000 on the undented side recently appeared at the curb in front of the bank with the smashed window.

Less pleasantly, I sometimes catalogue the scene on the sidewalks: stubs of cigarettes, a lottery ticket, the garbage apparently only if an itinerant person has been rummaging in the typical Berliner orange trash can possibly in search for bottles to return for their deposit, and a scrawl in black letters across the steely wheelchair access ramp railing at the bank: Die ganze Welt hasst die Polizei. I thought it was a nonsensical piece of graffito, since at least police officers presumably like themselves, and even if they happen to be self-hating, their mothers are likely to like them. 'The whole world hates the police' is clearly a gross exaggeration of the facts.

Speaking of appearances on sidewalks, the city elections for Berlin will take place on September 18th: placards for the left-of-centrist SPD, business-minded FDP, environmentalist Greens, liberal/libertarian Pirates, maybe-still-kind-of-communist Linke and centrist CDU, are peopling the lampposts and other prominent positions on the streets. (Not in Neukölln, but in our neighbourhood at home, they have been joined by a placard for a political party that earnestly recommends meditation as a solution to the refugee crisis.) The crisis is, by the way, a topic that most parties seem to be using as a lever for votes in this election. 'We need more do-gooders,' ('Wir brauchen mehr Gutmenschen') for example, the Linke asserts self-righteously.

As for work. Lunch today was a red or brown lentil curry with spinach, gold cubed potatoes, a chicken curry, and rice. Then we ate the chocolate covered peanuts that are on the table outside the kitchen as snacks throughout the rest of the day; as brightly coloured as Fisher Price toys for infants, they are addictive apparently to most of us, and every now and then the silence is broken by the sound of a hand dipping into a bowl and swirling around the peanuts, and then a loud crunching.

As for the atmosphere in general, I also vaguely heard motor noises, of two-or-four-seater airplanes or loud motorcycles, from the sky over the courtyard, a very summery sort of sound except that I now associate them with drones and war zones and World War II films. Much nicer was the vast silent furrow of white condensation trail that a passenger airplane recently spread across the sky as I was taking a five- or ten-minute walk outside the office. Flies have been buzzing around the office the past few days but, tired and plunged in work as I am, I even barely registered the two of them that often sat on my computer screens yesterday and today.

I was so tired yesterday morning that the feelings of stress — not as great as on past occasions, from an 'objective' point of view — nearly made me burst into weak tears. By way of a 'pep talk,' I reminded myself of the decision to throw tantrums at work if it's absolutely necessary, but by no means to cry. That (pessimistically viewed) would be a sign of incompetence less permissible than simply making myself disagreeable upon occasion, and I think it would unfairly influence the feelings of my colleagues toward not holding me up to a solid enough standard of work, endurance, or both.

But there have been small Adventures. Yesterday I was left last — abandoned, as it were — at work. In the past I had declined the offer to have a key to the office because it might lead me to work disastrously long hours, and therefore I thought yesterday that I had no way of locking things up. So I thought I was potentially doomed to remain until the next day. It was difficult to believe at first that I had been Left, and even I hurried to the window of the next room to look out at the courtyard that leads to the street.

There, under the starkly lit arch between the street and the courtyard, I just saw the contented-looking back and legs of the last remaining colleague, who was pedalling right out of view on a bicycle. So, after recuperating from the natural flutters of anxiety, deciding that I certainly was not 'profiting' by the mishap to 'pull an all-nighter,' wondering if this was all my fault, and trying to ignore the conviction that the vague rollings and cluckings of the dishwasher in the kitchen were creepy, I exhausted all of my avenues of online communication to ask my brother or my sister for help.

Of course it all ended quite well. Gi. kindly went to T.'s place, fetched her key, and brought it to the office. When I got home I drowned my sorrows in fusilli and bolognese sauce with chorizo, and heaping servings of creamy quark with jarred dark cherries. Coming home to a square meal has been a nice regular thing this week, and I will enjoy it while it's possible given all our diverse schedules.

Even there, accidents can occur, making the pleasant routine of dinner less than grandly restful. The night before I also reached home after 9 o'clock (having worked for eleven hours at least, on six-to-sevenish hours of sleep) and gratefully ate dinner. Everyone else had eaten, I think; still, Gi. was keeping me company. But after nibbling almost all the way along my corn cob, I finally saw that there was a dead grub that had halfway emerged from the tip — as intact as a stuffed museum owl (despite its boiling), and grey and with beady black eyes — all the time. Despite philosophical rumination about the consumption of insects in other countries and at other times, that really unsettled me. And that, at least, was far more perturbing even than being left alone at work, after nightfall.