Saturday in 1970: A Cashless Bank

It's been an exhausting day at the end of an exhausting week.

It's a bit indiscreet, but no real secret to say that almost any company that relies on online advertising for revenue is not doing well in the current economic climate. The top managers of our parent company have been swinging in wide pendulum curves between profound gloom and peppy optimism ('we've been through this before in 2018, and our fundamentals are strong'); but even when you can metaphorically see the thought bubble 'Oh. My. God.' over their heads in video calls, I will say I've rather admired how our upper echelons have dealt with it. One thing that's certain is that we can't hire new colleagues for the foreseeable future, which badly sucks for my team as the pressure of clients builds and builds.

Fortunately, my direct manager is hugely helpful. He listens to my fears and gives blunt but optimistic answers. He 'manages expectations' in the beautiful jargon of our business, and makes it absolutely clear that if we have fewer people in the team, everyone knows to expect less work from us. He's also showing me here and there where my team can put new emphases in our work that don't impinge on quality but do help us achieve the most effect we can given our resources. To be honest I think that he's supplying 60% or more of my competence.

What he couldn't help with (because I didn't think it was appropriate for me to fish for personal information about a colleague) is that I was slightly shocked that a fellow team lead suddenly went on sick leave for two weeks. We're also friends, so I'm quite worried for her. The former product owner for my team is still out sick after months, and I miss her very much; so I've become a little more paranoid when this happens. (Also, one of my teammates has been in and out of hospital for weeks, a gruelling experience for her and obviously a situation where I've tried to think through how best to offer support.)

There's no Great Resignation at the company, and no mass firing. (Shopify just fired 10% of its staff, for example, and it does feel a bit like guillotines are being set up all around us for other companies and we're all wondering who's next.)

But still, for the last six or so months I feel as if, to use a German phrase 'Da ist ein Wurm drin.' It feels like we're seeing sick day statuses in Slack everywhere and we can't assume they're all purely medical. The merging together of work stress and personal stress is just overwhelming. And while the past week or so has been beautifully harmonious at work, I think that conflict and misunderstandings between colleagues have been thriving. It's pandemic-related and not company-specific, but I really believe that it is in our control: we need to purposely start lots of communication and give more proof of goodwill than would otherwise be necessary, to achieve the same harmony that we would have taken for granted two and a half years ago.

The top managers in my part of the company are however focusing on the idea that luring everyone back into the office will achieve this sense of harmony. It may be true-ish; but I was annoyed when I heard it, because we do pay a personal price for that. The time spent commuting is time lost for family, fitness, and hobbies outside of work; and that time is often lengthened by transit delays due to medical emergencies, railway repairs, etc. And the nasty experiences I've had in the U-Bahn and S-Bahn, and had apparently systematically repressed, recurred to mind — people passed out, violent, drunk, in need of medical attention; the stranger who smushed his hands all over mine and seemed proud of his molestation, ... If I take the bicycle, I do become physically exhausted. And my colleagues seem too comfortable with and fond of each other to take Covid safety regulations seriously, which is in one way a nice problem to have — in another way, just a problem. At least we're not facing an Elon-Musk-esque dictum that we should return to work if we don't want our CEO to pompously assume that we're not getting anything done. (A notion that has struck a nerve with many people I've spoken with since then!)

I've been listening to a lot of rock and dance-pop etc. music to keep up my energy. I'd had no idea that David Bowie released "Space Oddity" in 1969, having associated him with the 1980s. But it's The Kinks' "Waterloo Sunset" and "Sunny Afternoon" that I've been playing over and over again (although despite my enthusiasm, digging further into their catalogue also reveals musical self-recycling and a few songs that I don't admire as much), as well as The Beatles. Besides I listened to colleagues' recommendations. On Friday I dialled back and forth between radio channels and ended up snuffling with laughter through Right Said Fred's "I'm Too Sexy." Which is a little unusual after 35 years of listening to classical music, but I think that at this point I don't see as much of a difference between genres: you know the real thing when you hear it, no matter what the instrumentalization and tone and topic are.

***

Yesterday night my mother, who's on her annual summer pilgrimage far away from home, spent another night al fresco. So when I woke up at 5:30ish this morning anyway, I stayed awake for a bit over an hour, just in case she wanted to chat with someone. To pass the time I perhaps unwisely did work, for one of our company's biggest clients. (But my mindset around overtime is changing; I did track the minutes I worked so that, if I feel exhausted next week, I can take a longer lunch to compensate.) And I also did a little light reading in between.

Then I went back to sleep, woke up after ten, and began cancelling the plans I'd had one by one, as my brothers slept in. It turns out that the house key was in the bowl in the hallway all that time, so I could have gone on all the excursions I wanted and I was just being silly. The feeling persisted throughout the day that I wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed.

Either way, it was relaxing to have a morning shower for pure enjoyment and not out of professional etiquette. And I dressed up, wearing a striped t-shirt and short skirt in tribute to the year 1970.

Fast forward through housecleaning. Once the brothers woke up, I heated kidney beans and boiled eggs as a semi-British breakfast, using the haybox again to finish heating the eggs in order to save gas.

In terms of my plans outside the house. ... It turns out that trying to run errands past 4 p.m. on a Saturday is unwise, especially on a day that was only 24°C or thereabouts but was cursed with high humidity. The dry cleaner's was closed, the bulk food store was closed, the little organic store was closing, and in the end I relied on the chain organic food store across the street to buy food. Cauliflower, Persian cucumbers, red beets, apricots, and blueberries, as well as chocolate-covered popsicles and a jar of plain yoghurt, were what I ended up buying.

Despite the worry that I'll be landing myself with orthorexia, I've been even more careful lately to buy regional or low-carbon-footprint produce without (much) plastic packaging, due to the energy crisis and global warming. I know that weather is cyclical; but the 36-38°C temperatures in Berlin earlier this month and the fires near London have acted as acute warnings. And I'm also starting to avoid wheat products because of the shortages in the Middle East. One of my former bosses, who's well versed in macroeconomics, did explain however that it's not good for the wheat industry if demand in countries like Germany dries up in the longer term. Besides I've advanced further in reducing the use of gas, because the political games surrounding Nordstream 1 make me angry.

The trip to the bank was another wild goose chase. Most of the proper ATMs have suddenly been replaced by black machines that are twice as big, look like props from a Sylvester Stallone science fiction movie, and perform half the operations of the previous ATMs. None of these operations seems to be cash withdrawal — which in Berlin is madness, as many small businesses only accept cash. And one of the two proper ATMs would only pay out 50 Euros.

I can imagine the reasons for the ATM switcheroo — the environmental friendliness of cashless payment, the wish to prevent robberies, and likely the remaining trauma of bank personnel who were affected by a hold-up around 2020 and might want less money on the premises as a result. But I was still disgruntled. A few other customers just left.

Back at home, I sliced the cucumbers for a salad and washed the apricots; and then my youngest brothers and I dined just on those, the ice cream popsicles, and later on a bowl of cereal.

My grandmother seems to have bought an Olympia typewriter in the 1970s, and I used this machine today to practice touch-typing. It was a rather lovely form of time-travel, although from an ergonomic perspective, the modern computer keyboards of Linux laptops and Apple desktops are sheer luxury by comparison (quiet and gentle, requiring no pounding, and having keys that never stick except if you spill Coke on them). We have a manual that has a labelled diagram of the most common levers and other features of typewriters, as well as touch-typing exercises, and it was incredibly helpful.

I've been working away at preliminary outline of the plots and characters for a modern retelling of Jane Austen's Persuasion, since the Netflix film with Dakota Johnson seems to have been such a disappointment to those who watched it, and have also used the typewriter for that.

I'd also wanted to create a shopping bag using macramé techniques to celebrate the 70s, but we don't have a pattern in the book that I'd thought would have one. Also, the twine reels that we have are rather rough-looking.

One of my other historical experiment regrets is not actually reading Doris Lessing short stories, Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice, or more of Black Rage.

But I've made progress in mending and darning, as well. And found an old package of carbon paper to use with the typewriter. And watered the houseplants that needed it. And my mother ate a good breakfast and found a comfortable-looking lodging to stay tonight. And I really enjoyed the conversations with my brothers. So altogether it felt like a Saturday well spent.

Saturday in 1968: Curried Rice from a Package, and other excessive detail

It was 1968 in my historical experiment today, and I've been struggling with figuring out how to capture the wilder aspects of the Sixties.

Two of my brothers left for a train journey to the Netherlands in the middle of the night (for scheduling and not for dramatic reasons, of course), so this morning was a little quieter. We ate croissants and drank coffee for breakfast, as always.

Then I set off into the sunny weather to the travel bookshop where one of my aunts works. It turns out that pedalling around a still-busy epicentre of post-war Berlin was an excellent idea. The modernist, geometric tower beside the war ruin of the Gedächtniskirche, the old-fashioned splendour of KaDeWe and the fancy entrance to the U-Bahn station Wittenbergplatz, and the tower blocks around Zoologischer Garten with the broad streets very much designed to appeal to car traffic, were all in their own way a bristingly prosperous 1960s-esque backdrop.

I also spotted a street party in honour of Berlin's LGBTQIA+ community, with an orange contingent of medical vehicles, a light police presence and white-and-red plastic street barriers, a massive flower stand, and a flurry of white pavilions like a brightly bristling medieval tournament along the side streets. It turns out that at least three of my colleagues were there today, so I slightly regret not passing through. Either way, I felt proud that 1960s movements like Stonewall had helped pave the way for this.

Then I popped into a toy store to buy donations for refugees, and right afterward walked on to the travel bookshop. After my aunt gave me a hug, she helped me find gifts amongst the ceiling-height bookshelves, Earth globe lamps, vitrines of old-fashioned sextants and other measurement equipment, maps, and travel guides. Then I bought a coffee table book for myself: a TeNeues hardcover about the 'golden age of travel' illustrated with everything from 18th century paintings (one of them was unfortunately of my literary nemesis, Goethe) through colourized Edwardian scenes to photographs of skiing glamour from the 1960s.

Then I dropped off the donations at Tempelhof Airport. (Altogether far fewer Ukrainian refugees are seeking help in Berlin now. I think ~200 to 300 arrive at the Hauptbahnhof daily compared to a peak of ~10,000, so the tent there is going to be replaced with a smaller construction; Südkreuz also isn't seeing much activity, so the volunteers there declined my last offer to donate; and one of the other refugee support places that I donate to, is closed for repairs until August.) There was construction at the Platz der Luftbrücke that detoured me through the small park with the 'Hunger Claw' sculptures. But altogether I didn't find the bicycle ride entirely fun, because having a heavy load on a windy day is rather dangerous, glass splinters littered the pavement at times, and I didn't like carrying the bicycle plus baggage down the steps of the park. These were small peas, however.

I was briefly perturbed when catching a glimpse of a materfamilias's bicycle: she had adorned her baby's seat with a round, yellow 'Forced vaccinations? No thank you' sticker on it.

For lunch, I set off again. In the organic food store I found dehydrated packs of pasta with tomato sauce, curried rice with peas, and sweet potato mash, which felt like a good approximation of Sixties food to me. Only the quinoa pack I didn't buy, as it seemed to me that quinoa was exported outside of South America predominantly in the early 2000s.

Next: a music store. I was tempted to buy an album by The Cream. In the end I went for a 1963 jazz studio recording by Oscar Peterson and Nelson Riddle, on a compact disc. Yes, CDs weren't invented in the 1960s, but I can't listen to LPs at home without hearing thumping noises, due to a newly temperamental amplifier.

Next: Turkish street market. The sellers were stacking green plastic crates and packing merchandise being back into cardboard boxes at the emptier stalls; it was already well into the afternoon and as usual some vendors either just wanted to leave or had already sold their stock. Pineapples and pears are big this week, but of course cucumbers, potatoes, dill, cabbages, kohlrabi, etc. were also there — also passionfruit. Then there were kilogram bags of pistachios and raisins, plastic drums of olives green and purple, preserved lemons, two little schools of fish that were stranded in the ice at the fishmonger's stall, and a long, colourful table of bras.

In the end, I popped home again without buying anything from the market; we already had enough food at home. But I did purchase pink biscuits from a French shop on the way; I had hoped that they were pink marshmallows with rose flavouring, but instead they were pink ladyfinger biscuits that tasted authentically but disappointingly of egg.

At home, I read the manufacturer's instructions and 'cooked' the dehydrated foods from the organic food store in 5 minutes by pouring boiled water on top. The curried rice was especially good. I also made additional rice, using the haybox from the 1920s phase of my historical experiment again to save on gas. (For any reader not in Germany: Right now I think Germany isn't importing gas from Russia, at least not through the Nordstream 1 pipeline, due to 10 days' scheduled maintenance. We're not sure if the gas will go back online afterward, due to political reasons i.e. the war in Ukraine.) We had fresh berries — red currants, blueberries — and mint-infused water and the pink biscuits with it. Ge. also made himself green tea.

Then I lit lavender incense, and read a few pages of a fashion magazine and of the 1960s American book Black Rage. I'd be curious to hear what anti-racism experts think of it in 2022.

Aside from housekeeping while listening to the radio and playing 2 or 3 Russian pieces on the piano and researching 1969 in preparation for next week, there's nothing else to talk about. So I'll just end by saying that I wore dark blue jeans and a turtleneck sweater this Saturday, which admittedly was a low-effort approach to period-appropriate attire.

I've taken a day off of work on Monday because I was feeling a little fragile again. But I was also pleasantly startled to hear on Thursday that my manager thinks I deserve a promotion by next year. As I was convinced that I was coming across as a flighty dilettante unworthy to helm any ships in our complex technical environment, I have been metaphorically floating on a cloud since they told me.

A Glimpse of Greek Orthodoxy in Summer; and Perfidious Leggings

This morning I cycled to the southwest of the city, to attend a colleague's father's memorial service at a Greek Orthodox church. Passing through the almost deserted streets, alternately asphalt and cobblestone and a shadowy green footpath, I finally reached a cobbled street sheltered by sunlit plane trees, that was alive with the murmur of voices and children's shrieks. A 19th century brick building with pointed façade and a round decoration looked the likeliest for the church, and a cluster of people speaking German and Greek were sitting there chatting happily. Then I spotted the colleague speaking with her friend at the sidewalk further down.

After their cigarette break was over, we entered not the old brick building but a modern, squared building. Congregants (of all ages: children, teenagers, middle-aged, elderly; in a wheelchair or on their own two feet; a few wearing summery dresses) were overspilling into the lobby, in two queues. We passed through them to enter the church room itself.

Three officiants in robes were standing on a Persian carpet in front of the entrance to an ornate rear room, in the centre of a whitewashed atrium that made me think of stone buildings on a genuine Greek seaside cliff, the sun pouring in and illumining the aisles at the left and right. Nicely carved dark blond chairs were placed singly in rows in the centre — no long pews with kneeling benches, which I felt was a great improvement on the Catholic and Protestant churches I've frequented — and a line of pew chairs that just seated one person was tucked along the wall on each side. Beneath the pillars at one side of the room, the colleague, her friend, and I joined the loose assembly of congregants who were standing.

The sermon was already pronounced — the colleague said it had been about the fate of Berlin to suffer shortages of fuel and food during the winter. The communion had quickly wrapped up. And now there were the services to commemorate the dead, followed by community announcements.

It turned out that we'd come in late. The bearded priest at the microphone (a gilt chandelier encircling the air in front of him, and a delicate inlaid wood table standing nearby) was just wrapping it up in Greek where I caught a few words. He mentioned the name of the colleague's father, as well as one or two others.

People generally crossed themselves, touching the knuckles of one hand to the air near their foreheads, then down, then gesturing either left to right or right to left (I don't remember). Although following the colleague's lead I didn't imitate the gesture, I felt quite at home and wouldn't have minded doing so. Then there was a song that the congregation knew, which I couldn't sing along with because I didn't know it; aside from medical reasons I now had another reason to feel wise for wearing an FPP2 mask (anonymity!). Besides people queued up in the centre of the church to receive bread that had been blessed from the hands of the priest.

As the service ended and the worshippers were saying goodbye to the priest at the top of the centre aisle, my colleague picked up her bowl of koliva: a mixture of plump wheat grains that have been soaked in water a long time, flour, raisins, cinnamon, halved walnuts, pomegranate seeds, and sugar. (Also parsley, but she'd forgotten it when she was preparing it the night before. And she'd set out a cross in almonds on the surface.) With its roots in ancient Greek tradition, it is served at any memorial church service. During the service itself, it was standing near the priest on a prominent table.

She led us out into the beautifully gloomily-lit lobby. There was a dark wood refreshments table where two ladies presided at the rear entrance to the courtyard; a gold-lit staircase that promisingly led up to another part of the building; then a wooden counter that also looked a bit like part of a beautiful Wild West hotel, where a man was selling long golden beeswax tapers in different thicknesses. Right at the doorway through which people could leave the church in front, the colleague served the koliva in paper cups to a line of people. Another worshipper who was marking the death of a relative offered me a plastic cup of koliva, made this time with granulated sugar instead of powdered sugar, and with raisins chopped instead of whole. And an American internet friend of the colleague joined us.

After the koliva was distributed and we left the church, the colleague invited us to eat with her at a café, where another of her friends joined to turn us into a group of four. We had an enjoyable conversation at little blond wood varnished tables over plates of crusty brown bread, leafy greens, bacon, eggs, avocado; cups of coffee; and glasses of water. Instead of savoury food I had a perfectly executed chocolate cake with a thin layer of white frosting, a raspberry coulis that was very raspberry-tasting and not too sweet, and a raspberry on top for garnish. The plane trees at the café — which I thought weren't above fifty years old, but already tall and mighty — dropped seeds on the table, and an insect made its way onto my arm. A little black poodle — my colleague adores little dogs — strolled by, stopping short when it saw another dog.

It feels a little intrusive to describe the topics we discussed; but long story short I felt that this whole outing was an excellent way to spend a Sunday.

In the evening, the last deep yellow sunlight resting on the tops of buildings and trees, I cycled off to allotment gardens to admire the pink sweet peas, hollyhocks, late midsummer roses, dusky Oregon grapes, and intense purple butterfly bush blossom spires; and note that the traditional grapes that drape along a few of the fences are still green and totally unripe, but now larger than green peas. But generally speaking the programme had already ended.

***

As for the historical experiment, small things can have a great effect. On Saturday I'd decided to wear a boldly coloured tunic with leggings as my period costume; the leggings were compression leggings and they were so annoying and uncomfortable and I was so grumpy about them that it ruined my day. In retrospect, I should have picked a stereotypical beatnik outfit of dark trousers, dark turtleneck top, some kind of oversized necklace, loose hair, and intense black mascara around the eyes instead; I think I was too exhausted from the work week to practice common sense.

Next week - 1967 - the Summer of Love. Aside from my puritanism, I'd tend to agree with the assessment that the Sixties were partly very 'every man for himself.' There was genuine commitment and love in the Civil Rights Movement, and compassionate legislation like (as far as I can tell) Medicaid for the elderly. But the Vietnam War was as far as I can tell twice as deadly as the current War in Ukraine, the Six Days' War is also not fun to read about; the Human Be-In in San Francisco no longer  appealing if it's 100,000 people overwhelming a neighbourhood and becoming a dangerous space for the underage teens who joined it; and the fact that Charles Manson was released from prison is not a harbinger of 'peace and love.'

I tried reading a chapter or two of John Steinbeck's Wayward Bus, written in the late 40s but reprinted in the early 60s. At first I found it wonderfully written. But when the narrator began arguing that there were few real men I began to highly question Steinbeck's point of view, when he began describing the flight of a fly I began to highly doubt the writer's literary judgment even if it's no doubt a metaphor, and when a woman character began reminiscing about her husband's domestic violence and finding being brutally hit exciting, I closed the book and returned it to the shelf.

There's also a teenage character who's routinely taunted for his acne etc. by other characters in the book. Steinbeck seems to criticize this behaviour in a notably holier-than-thou manner, but he has no moral high ground: his narration of that character is also snide and humiliating, in my opinion. So he also has poor ethical judgment outside of his toxic opinions of men's and women's roles and his poor literary judgment. Sometimes books are forgotten for good reason.

That book is at least better from a literary standpoint than the passages I endured from The Winter of Our Discontent, which is prefaced by lots of glowing reviews from reputable newspapers and magazines, but which I found unreadable. Next up: The Red Pony.

And at least I ended up having an interesting conversation with my youngest brother about critical interpretations of domestic violence in A Streetcar Named Desire, as a result of mentioning the Wayward Bus.

*

As for work, it's all right-ish, but one night last week I was so anxious due to a personnel development that I wasn't able to go to sleep for a while.