Jana Wendt - Nice Work

nice work

In the past my work has been built on unpredictable schedules, determined by events outside my control. Things happened in the world and, as a reporter on television, I followed the timetable dictated by these happenings. Sometimes I would swot, then sit in a studio to ask questions about the event attracting all the attention using what information I had gleaned. Sometimes I would fly to where a controversy/conflict/happening was unfolding and talk to people about it on the spot. The circumstances of such assignments were often perversely testing for only slight television returns. Moscow, deep snow and forty below, comes to mind, along with the discovery that my jaw had seized up as I opined on the ramifications of the fall of communism. Or the overnight trip through snowbound countryside with a trainload of Russian nationalist boors, addled to incomprehensibility by vodkafor the sake of a story. This was not, I supposed, the way that most people lived their orderly working lives. Surely jobs in general were more regular and dependable? Probably there were other unstructured and unpredictable jobs out in the wider world, but the particular oddness and driven focus of mine made it hard to get a grip on them.

This may sound nave coming from a journalist, but the truth is that many journalists, this one included, are employed as creatures capable of professional adaptationexpert in gene therapy, vul-canology and the politics of Central Asia in the morning, and in dust extraction by the afternoon. Yes, this is to admit that mainstream journalism breeds a form of advanced dilettantism. In my case, having spent a deal of time in the bubble of celebrity, there were additional pockets of impenetrability. Parachuted into everyday situations, celebrity journalists are often privileged to receive confidences of which less well-known reporters may be deprived. On the other hand, they are denied a sustained exposure to the everyday as unobserved observers. Their reputation precedes them, and certain embellishments to normality on the part of their subjects tend to accompany their arrival to cover a story. Many, of course, do their best to capitalise on the advantages celebrity confers and to penetrate the distorting veils it may throw up. But I knew I was in trouble when an acquaintance would not accept that I routinely travelled on public transport.

Several years out of television, it is easier to go about ones business. While I had spent time employed in television newsrooms and current affairs offices with their idiosyncratic hierarchies and styles of communication, the working world outside was obscured by fog. Interviewing a CEO on particular issues never much illuminated the day to day of the chief executive officers job. The title stood as a generic term for a vague concept. Apart from interviews, what did they do? I often join the tides of working commuters and wonder. The bored guy in the back of the train blocking out the tedious world with his iPod; the young exec hungrily scanning emails; the lawyerly type leafing through wads of documents; the sharply dressed woman reaching into her briefcase on the 8.30 to the suburbsthey all look as though they are ready for something, but what, exactly? We spend forty hours, on average, each week in a place that is not our home, in the company of strangers. Odd, then, that the details of what we do all that time often remain unknown, even to those closest to us. That may be because the job itself bores us to tearsdrudgery during which real life is suspended. For some, though, work is a critical defining endeavour, a barometer of true worth, into which one invests every last drop of ability and hope.

This book is an attempt to look into peoples working days. Each job naturally commands its own special bag of skills and I was allowed into a number of workplaces to watch how things were done. Inevitably, the job template was individually coloured in by each of my chosen workers. I did not go in search of famous people, but a number, as it turned out, were well known outside their immediate work circle. I considered that regularity in a working life might be represented by a highly valued respectable job like that of CEO. The moniker itself builds an expectation: chief, that is, above all others; executive, belonging to the upper echelon; and officer with its connotation of policing and enforced discipline. On the other hand, I also wanted to understand what many regard as the not so respectable hard graft of a professional boxer (a counterintuitive wish, since I had long found boxing mystifying). One of the cleaner aspects of the fight game is the unequivocal definition of success and failure; in boxing these are not matters for conjecturea bloody thrashing or a knockout are hard to refute (except, of course, if the fight is rigged, and thats another story). Nor is failure hard to discern in what might be (wrongly) seen as the passive job of weather observation. Brian Kittlers work is to monitor meteorological hazards so that planes stay in the sky. To fail is to see one fall down. As proof of failure goes, this is the gold standard.

For at least one of the workers I followed, satisfaction and success were elusive. A Catholic priest, Arthur Bridge, with whom I spent time just as he moved after years at the helm of one of the largest parishes in Sydney to one of the smallest, was distraught at what he saw as a demotion and therefore a career failure. So some men of God did care about such temporal matters, I learned, although others told me they did not give a fig. Either way, the religious calling made the option of changing jobs unthinkable. The work of priestcraft could mean promotions, demotions or sideways moves but also and always faith, which by way of an inconvenient truth taught humility and patience.

The fierce pull of a vocation makes up peoples minds almost without their consent. A sense of vocational destiny fixes a persons compass for good. I wouldnt do anything else, the circus acrobat told me. Boxing is such a big part of me, the fighter said. The artist Tom Bass defied his parents, rejecting their plan for him to be an accountant, and floated instead towards the siren call of sculpting. Hes ninety-three and loves it still despite a painful consequence: scant recognition from the cognoscenti. Artists, of course, have jobs that aim for something beyond the everyday beyond the earthly, even. But their shot at transcendence is the result of hard labour using lumps of stone or clay, and instruments that a dentist could use to fill teeth. Yet from unyielding materials can come something that spins the head and heart towards otherworldly truth and beauty.

At one point, I found myself staring into an open grave contemplating the skeleton of a young man. He was wearing distinctive shorts and at the end of his smooth leg bones, now clean of flesh, were the high-top sneakers he had worn the day that he was killed. His discovery was one of the successes scored by a forensic anthropologist and her team searching for missing people. Encountering a skeleton would not be a cause for celebration for most of us, but professional success comes in different shapes and sizes. Nor is the solemn labour of picking through fragments of skull and bones without its lighter moments. Humour, a feature of teamwork everywhere, surfaced even at the graveas an antidote, perhaps, to the saturnine.