A couple rarely ever means only two things. Bringing a couple of things to a picnic entitles a little charcuterie. And showing up with a couple of friends to the afters usually means showing up with half a dozen friends.

I have a couple of talents, half of them unknown and most of them hidden, but there is this one I am proud of: I am very good at connecting ideas. Now that I have written it, it sounds stupid and dumb, but remember, the most exceptional talents sound dumb when you boil them down and recite them out loud.

I am great at seeing what’s behind the curtain and connecting it with that other thing I read on the internet the other day.

 Am going to go on a tangent now.

I love the lack of specificity of language when telling a story. Particularly orally. ‘the other day’ can be anything. Can be that same week, a month ago or six months ago. I feel like ‘the other day’ can almost be anything that has happened a year backwards from the moment the conversation is happening. Maybe even a year and a half. ‘the other day’ can be a moment before last Christmas, sure, but I feel like it cannot be two Christmas ago, that would be craziness.

End of the tangent.

I am great at splitting hairs on reality and weaving it together. Is my skill, my little thing, the thing I love, and am high-key obsessed with. Writers that are not philosophers at their core usually write terrible things. To be a writer, you must have a story to tell. And good stories always try to explain the world.  

A couple of things happened.

The first thing, I read the newspaper today. I always do, because where I work, they write the newspaper, therefore I can get one anywhere at any time and for free. Today, Monday 22nd of July, 2024, the supplement contained a long article about how corporate people on holidays cannot switch off. At first, I thought it was satire. But it was not.

The article opens like this:

‘Emails, work calls, admin: are you a holiday denier, ruining it for others?’ While I sat reading the article chewing on some yoghurt and granola, I couldn’t help but wonder if it was satire. But again, I realised that it was not. I am not going to go into the sloppy overuse of clarifications in brackets as self-inserts (oops I did), but I am going to get into the main point the article is trying to make which is: ‘guys, there’s this new microtrend of people not disconnecting on holidays’. The article is a white-collar washed dissertation on how hard is to disconnect on holidays and even goes into the in-depth classification of different types of ‘holiday betrayers’ such as ‘The Can’t Let Gos’, people who are scared that they won’t be missed at work (?), the ‘Smartphone Neurotics’, AKA anyone born after 1994 or ‘The person who has a really serious job’ – self-explanatory.

Well bitches, I have some news. It’s not that you don’t know how to relax or disconnect. Also, has nothing to do with the lack of salt baths or aromatic candles in your life. Your therapist probably tells you that you should put yourself first when you are already a selfish wimperer, the same way that you have been gaslit into thinking that answering some emails and picking up a call is ‘working’.

Dear white-collar workers: You don’t find it difficult to unwind on vacation because you are too much of a business hun, you find it difficult because working a white-collar job is too similar to doing nothing.

This is why all of us want a white-collar job. We want a predictable schedule; we want a job that’s not physically exhausting or emotionally taxing. We want to work a 9 to 5 YES, EVEN IF ITS FRAMED WITHIN THE HORRIBLE OFFICE CULTURE. We want to get paid for emailing people and attending meetings.

No one wants to be commanded with disdain or earn a paycheck by cleaning what other people leave behind. But here we are, writing full articles in mainstream media on how unlucky white-collar workers are because they don’t know how to relax.  

The other day, a thing happened to me.

I was serving coffee downstairs, in the lobby. This guy came around. He doesn’t like me, and I don’t care about him either. He asked me how I was, and I nodded silently as a response. His Britishness was not able to handle the silence, and he didn’t want to repeat himself again, so he tried to change the question.

‘Less busy here, huh?’

The little coffee shop in the lobby is indeed a little bit less busy than the canteen (this is a lot of information no one cares about, but is necessary lore), and people love to feel smart by analysing the crowd flow of a coffee shop within a corporate building. They also use ‘busy’ as a feeling, which always pisses me off. He has the imperative need of making small talk, even though I have nodded in silence a couple of times already.

‘So… less busy here?’ he asks with an awkward half smile.

‘What do you mean?’ I reply; and obviously, he blanks. They always do. ‘I like to try my best at my job, but I hate my job, if that makes sense.’ He stares at me. ‘Do you like your job?’

‘Yes’, he says while I pass him his coffee.

‘Well, I hate mine’.

He smirks while lifting the little flat white cup, ‘Have you done anything about it?’

‘I finished my degree last summer and I have been looking for a job and being rejected for a year.’

He starts walking away, sipping his coffee. The dead wind in the lobby brings me the whisper of the last words abandoning his lips: ‘Don’t give up’.

And the truth is, that when they say that they say it as a curse. Because they don’t see me as a threat. They don’t see me as someone who wants to build a career and bring something new and interesting. They see me as the goofy gay guy, I guess. They just want to read about how hard their white-collar lives are, and how they need to focus on taking it easy on holidays (not sarcastically). They don’t care about us, and they won’t help. They will keep asking if it’s busy or not when we cannot care less because we are getting paid the same, and they will treat us as the service because that is what we are.

I will always be a class-conscious service industry worker, no matter how far I get into my dream of becoming a star.

And I will always remember a couple of things. One of those things being all the assholes that have treated me like shit when I was not having the best moment of my life.

And the other thing being that when I get to have my moment, I shall always remember a couple of things.