The dirty side of Ethnography. That’s my take-away from my morning bus ride this morning.
It started as per normal, I got on and took a seat next to a fellow passenger. It soon became apparent that this passenger was a rather disheveled elderly gentleman (I estimate 80 years) who had evidently gone a while between washes. Too late, no other spare seats. Not a problem I thought, not long till my stop.
After a few minutes he decided to have a chat. Oh, he’s going to ask me what day it was or where the bus was going (my preconceptions now feel embarrassing). But no, out of the blue he hits me with “Why do you suppose that 60 to 70 percent of people going to work in the city resist shift work?”.
I was rather stunned, but that didn’t phase him as he recounted story after story of how corporations “just don’t care” and “don’t seem to be worried about doing the right thing”. And the people working for “the big commercials” inherit the same attitude. “Why do so many people live the rat race and trundle to work at 8am, wasting petrol and clogging up the roads, and then do the exact same thing at 5pm?” he thought out loud (and I mean loud). “There are thousands of cars with just one person in them” he correctly observed. “And these buses, they might be full now, but by ten o’clock they’re sitting in the depot rusting. Then they’re back out at 3.” If more people worked shift work there would be no peak hour and things would be more efficient, he insisted.
He worked for fifty years in the building maintenance trade—shift work of course—and the big corporations he worked for “didn’t care how much was on the invoice, as long as we didn’t disturb the [day-time] workers”. Several times he mentioned that “at night these big office towers are ablaze with lights, with nobody in there”.
Seeing as we were on a bus, it was a logical subject to discuss: “so much time is wasted by bus drivers dealing with tickets, money and passengers”…”if you use your watch you’ll see that they spend more time at each stop than they do getting to the next one” and “these guys work their guts out, with people breathing, blowing [sneezing?] and yelling on them all day, I wouldn’t do that job for 1000 bucks a day!”.
Then came his solution for Sydney’s public transport: “In America the bus drivers don’t sell tickets, there’s no change and no sections. There’s a tin at the front of the bus and you pay one dollar to get on the bus and can ride as far as the bus goes; it’s much faster. The security people who have trucks, that just sit there otherwise, go out to depots and collect the full tins and replace then with empty ones. The money is counted by machine and deposited into the bus company’s bank account and they get a computerised statement saying how much money came from each bus. The system actually makes a profit.”
Apparently he has tried to convince the Transport Minister that this is a better system than we have and that it would save money and time. But public servants are “only concerned with building it up bigger and bigger to keep they’re jobs and supervisors go up a grade because they have more people under them”.
From this he went back to those evil corporations. “If you go to a shareholders meeting, it’s like the Last Supper, you have the long table up the front with the Lord in the middle”…”what you’ll see is that the only people there are little old ladies, they go there because they’re made to feel important and they get a bickie and cup of tea. When it’s time for a vote, they look around and see if other people are voting and they put their hands up, they wouldn’t know what they’re voting for, they just go with the mob. The directors know this and they set it up that way to get what they want.” Fascinating.
The ideas kept on flowing right until I got off the bus, I’ve written as much as I can remember. The outside might be lagging, but his mind is in high gear.
