Imagining the future of work

A story and a costume change

Long ago there lived a small girl who befriended the mice that lived with her in a burrow beneath the tree factory. Her mother named her Iss. Now Iss’s mother worked in the tree factory and unlike her daughter was part automaton and part bear. Perhaps it’s best to imagine a rounded, mechanical figure covered in a brown bear suit. The two got by in the burrow, Iss playing with mice while her mother was away at work, and her mother climbing up into the light each day to do whatever it was that she did at the mysterious tree factory.

Some days the factory was loud and shook the burrow and Iss and her friends exchanged frightened looks and waited for the rumbling to pass. Other days, Iss’s mother would return from work holding her head under her arm and Iss would have to climb up on a chair and help her mother screw her head back on. Iss knew better than to ask what happened at the tree factory and her mother never explained. She was told never to leave the burrow and Iss obeyed. Of course, she didn’t want to leave the burrow. Why would she? It all sounded and seemed quite scary up there. She preferred having tiny tea parties with Jack and Squat and occasionally Miriam and Obediah. She made them tiny paper clothes and they sang her songs they’d heard from radios and birds in the above.

Until one day, Iss’s mother came home with her head in her hands and Iss climbed on the chair and somehow the threads in the screw and the hole didn’t line up. The two struggled and humphed. They tried mating the head and body in all directions, up and down, sideways and at angles. They tried to reposition, to lie on the ground, to readjust bolts and calibrate systems but to no avail. Iss’s mother could either have her head askew, as if about to ask a perennial question or she’d have to go back to work without a head. Those were the options. Unless… her mother wondered aloud, “unless you did it for me.”

Now it goes without saying that Iss was not the least bit interested in going to work at the tree factory yet she always knew it was going to be in her future. What else would she have possibly done? She talked to her friends and they devised a plan. The next day Iss tied Jack and Squat to one arm and Miriam and Obediah to the other. She took an old rake and tied it to her back and then tied old metal toolboxes to her feet to appear taller. Finally, she slipped into her mother’s empty bear suit which pooled at her feet and hung off her small frame in draping pelts. She turned to her mother’s mechanical head where it now sat atop the table, “how do I look?”

The first thing Iss noticed when she emerged from the burrow was the noise. It came in punishing waves that made the glaring light sharper and louder. Everywhere she looked there were machines and workers, conveyer belts and metal. She saw lines of trees being put together piece by piece. A white fox attached roots to a trunk with a screwdriver while a pair of shrews drilled leaves into branches and four identical bears nailed limbs, affixed bark, and sanded the canopy. Beyond the factory center, Iss spied a room lined with sewing machines where workers hunched over large swaths of brown and green fabric to the humming of thread. Obediah shouted above the noise, “let’s go there!”

The rake made it hard to walk but Iss moved toward the sewing room in small steps, the toolbox platforms scraping and clanging on the cement factory floor as she went. No one seemed to notice or stop her. As soon as Iss entered the sewing room she felt better. The room was smaller and quieter and no one raised their eyes to notice her arrival. Squat pointed in the direction of an open table and Iss untied the rake, set it in the corner and sat down. Maybe she can just sit here all day. She fumbled with the fabric leaves in front of her and picked up some scissors. A sharp faced manager entered from an adjacent room and began to circulate. Iss kept her head down and started cutting leaves from the pale green fabric and the manager passed. Then, a screech from a loudspeaker followed by the piped in sounds of birdsong.

Iss retracted her hands and arms from the bear suit and untied Jack, Squat, Miriam and Obediah. She propped the bear head atop her own so that it looked down at the table at her empty bear paws holding leaf and scissors. She untied the toolboxes from her feet and curled into a ball holding her friends in her lap. And then just like before in the burrow, they began to play. To sing and tell stories and pretend their only work was a tea party. And the trees were built and the birdsong radio played.

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I wrote that story in April

…for a speculative fiction writing work/shop I took with Mandy Brown. This was not a typical writing class but “a creative gathering to imagine the future of work” with five other writers. I can’t recommend it enough, especially if you are (and who isn’t?) grappling with the existential absurdity of working/finding/surviving a job during the collapse of capitalism.

Mandy asked for informal “fresh pages” each week and provided a framework for us to respond to one another’s work with open and playful inquiry that led to rich reflection. Weeks after I wrote this story I remembered that my first job was as a costume character at Marineland where I often wore a bear suit and sometimes walked around with my “head” off between shifts.

Peer responses were never “I liked this” or “work on that” (such responses were not allowed) but instead Mandy provided tools and context for asking mind-bending questions like the one she asked me about this story: What is it like to take your head off? which for no reason I can discern, brought me to tears. What is it like to take your head off? During a collapse? At a job? With your friends?

I share the story of Iss because I don’t really understand it yet find her ability to hide comforting and familiar. Also because somehow during Mandy’s five week class, a new job unexpectedly found me and I’ll be starting it next week.

I have no illusions that I will be saved by this new position. It’s still just a job. But it is an opportunity for change that feels right. An opportunity (maybe? hopefully?) to strengthen burrowed intuition, access retracted feelings, and become less head more bear.