Buddhism and the Nature of Work
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Work and the Problem of Consequence pg 19
When I was about fifteen, I had a summer job at Simpson’s in Toronto. I pushed a cart through from the mail room through a large office area, delivering envelopes – envelope after envelope to desks, most of them occupied by people I didn’t know. The work was clear enough. Pick up, sort, deliver. But it felt oddly empty, as though I was moving things without quite knowing why.
In retrospect, it should have been obvious what I had been carrying. Most of those envelopes held cheques sent in by customers to pay their accounts. But at the time, none of that was visible. It was just paper moving from one place to another.
After a few weeks, I asked to be moved to the machine room. There, a long mechanical line took printed statements, folded them, slipped them into window envelopes, added a self-addressed stamped envelope, a coupon or a special offer, sealed everything, and ran it through a postage meter. You could see the entire process from start to finish. You could hold the finished stack in your hands.
It was just the two of us running a forty-foot machine with more moving parts than anyone could keep track of. It was the only room where you could take off your jacket and tie and roll up your sleeves.
The room had its own sound – quiet clicking, thumping, rustling, and a steady whir. It was warm, though not uncomfortably so. The windows opened onto Queen Street, but we rarely noticed.
My supervisor had something of J. Jonah Jameson about him – cigar, impatience, and a way of making everything sound urgent. I don’t think he knew my name. I was always “kid.”
“Hey kid, get me the purchase order from my office – this invoice says twenty-thousand, I ordered thirty!”
Or, “Kid – lunch! Get moving. Here’s two bucks. Get me a coffee ’n a tuna sandwich—keep the change.” It was almost always tuna and a coffee.
He kept things moving as though the whole operation depended on it, which I suppose it did really. I fetched, adjusted, stacked, watched, and tried not to fall behind.
For all that, the work made sense. You could see it take shape. Statements went in one end, envelopes came out the other – sealed, stamped, ready to go.
Nothing about the purpose of the work had changed from the mailroom. The same accounts, the same payments, the same system. But here, the links were visible. The work didn’t feel abstract. It had weight.
When the link between an action and its result is visible, even ordinary work can feel settled. When that link is hidden, the same work can feel abstract or incomplete. It’s not always the task that changes, but how clearly we can see what it leads to.