The StuSie

The Toiler's Papers

Having taking some inspiration from Mistfink's piece regaling us with a week in the life of an American assistant in Austria I felt compelled to respond with a day in the life of an Englishman in Vienna. The following recounts the toils and tribulations of the said Englishman. Any comments would be greatly appreciated however cruel and critical they might be.


TP
The toilet roll in my bag as I pull out this notebook gives me something to write about at least as the tram slews round one curve, then another and a computerised voice is telling me to umsteigen. It is the voice of Stephen Hawking’s Austrian cousin so familiar to all of us now as the voice of faceless, soulless and perhaps powerless authority. We arrive at Oper, the sun no longer spreading itself across the pedestrianised pavement plain, the smell of Wiener Würstl and hunks of chicken sweating on a spit lingering in the air. The door closes. I am still on the tram…

…and the toilet roll is still in my bag, alongside 8 packets of Mayfair cigarettes; another tea-soaked Madeleine which draws my thoughts like goatskin on a drum across the cloud-scudded sky of day…

…I change trams, another whiff of kebab, the D to the 49, not that numbers matter, briefly checking the timetable. A blue uniform with an embossed hat and badge waits for the same tram – but no, my paranoia is unfounded, I’m not carrying anything and they wouldn’t check me anyway: aside from the jacket I look British not Slavic…

…I have decided to write only while the tram is moving: Robert Louis Stephenson said travelling is better than arriving; I say writing while travelling keeps the ink flowing thick and fast as my thoughts coagulate onto the page…

…I’ve missed my stop…

…And I’m waiting again, the jazz guitarist’s wry grin fading, the clarinet’s tones reverberating and I write as I step onto the 14A heading homewards now. I write to the lull and sway of the bus as it pulls in to stops, ticks over at traffic lights, accelerates out of junctions. A small girl, her large face nuzzling at a book, mp3 player blocking out the public around her, wants to get off the bus. I let her out and glance at the book wondering what the average Austrian is reading nowadays. It is still the fucking Da Vinci Code…

The day began with a coffee, naturally, no milk – we had run out – and bleary eyed I had drunk down the mud: surely my first act of exploitation of the day. Somebody somewhere was making me feel guilty about stimulating my central nervous system on a daily basis in this way so I added another sugar to get the bitter taste of having what many have not out of my mouth – sugar from the Caribbean no doubt – but it says Viennese Sugar on the bag and I think it probably originates from sugar beets grown in the subsidy rich EU. The guilt dissolves like the sugar into the mud of the modern metropolis.

The coffee has me in my usual jittery, tense state and I’m heading for my first ever video-conference. At TelekomAustria a bespectacled man awaits me, burly and stout. He warms to me when I tell him I am a video-conference virgin. ‘Your first time eh?’

I look at myself on the screen: this unsettling doppelganger effect, my pixellated image reflected back at me on the left, an artificial eye in the centre, a blank screen – the space reserved for my interviewers – on the right. I shuffle uneasily and tell my aide to have the camera focus on my upper body, not my hands: I fidget too much.

The job interview goes well and I stroll out of the 21st century working space, functional and plush, the industrial feel part style, part economy, a post-post modernism, no longer playful or Jencksian, merely vast loping spaces and beglassed surfaces like a well thought out hive of the Corporation of the Now, the coca-colonised world gone incredibly, unbearably sane and ordered. But I look at my environment and I realise that I could fit if I wanted to and it could fit to me. I do not swagger, but feel that if I did, I could pull it off. In the bowels of the Corporation – the cafeteria – I drink my special reduced rate but full flavour coffee and stare at the glass that houses the autonomous automaton. In all of this and more I am complicit, but I have my own problems.

The interview was for a job in Singapore. The problem of employment one we all hope to solve on our terms, not on the terms meted out to us by most employers. Singapore, an island state the size of Washington D.C. with a standard of living equal to what we have to come to expect in Western Europe. Dominated by shrewd, Chinese businessmen; this little nation was still going places. Voting was compulsory and capital and corporal punishments were accepted as necessary adjuncts to the rather extreme brand of democracy practised there. Providing one did not smuggle drugs it seemed like a nice place to build a future for the money was good and the climate always warm.

I am applying for a new passport as the old one will be no good if I get the job in Singapore so I go to a booth to get my pictures taken against a ‘white background.’

It takes me 45 minutes trapsing up and down the streets of Vienna to find a working booth that hasn’t been used as a public toilet. It is in Matzleinsdorferplatz – a 70s subway station of the future. Amongst the glazed beige brick walls echoing the hollow rattle of the trams I come across a booth and sit down inside it. Cigarette burns cover the operating board and screen but it still functions. The chair doesn’t swivel as it should so I have to stoop with my head to one side in order to fit my profile within the oval outline on the screen. The booth lacks a curtain to protect me from the scrutinising gazes of the commuters who pass me by, so I wear my privacy publicly. Humiliation: to cringingly smile, feigning the kind of bored contentment which would hopefully bypass comparisons of my image with mugshots of IRA paramilitaries or moors murderers, my dim-witted expression laid bare for all onlookers to see. I cannot look content: my face won’t allow itself to be portayed in such a way in such circumstances. ‘Your pictures will be ready in 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3...’ you get the idea.

I claim the photos and realise the white background is grey and the face is blurred. The top of my head is cut off. Dissappointing. I wait for my change but the booth is uncooperative – I become its next victim, its intermittent vibrating its victory lambada. It has robbed me of 1€ and probably also the 5€ I paid for these sloppy pixellated copies of myself.

I look at mediated images of myself for the second time today, my face a whore to the lens of circumspection, my public image a blurred, chopped, swarthy impression of my features obtained from a curtainless, fusty smelling but smarmy booth. The machine has won again. I walk, clutching the photos in my hand, dejected.

Somewhere, in another kind of booth, I drank coffee. Somewhere I slowed my stride to listen to street-jazz. Somewhere I rode the tram. Somewhere I missed my stop because somewhere I was writing. I continue writing now. I regret not giving money to the jazz musician who had coyly smiled at me as I unwound to the sound of a warbling clarinet in the city’s underground. Instead I gave money to an ungrateful grumpy machine that stole my soul and charged me for it and deep down inside somewhere it wrankles. It’s all wrong this way of living and I haven’t seen the sun in at least a week. Nowhere.

Everywhere I need to go in Vienna today, the tram goes – or the bus – so I’m back on the tram riding to the British embassy but the sun shining for the first time in a week makes me want to walk the last stretch. Enjoying the shadows makes me late: the embassy is only open two hours a day so I break into a run but I need to piss. No toilet to be seen anywhere.

I finally enter the embassy grounds, five minutes before closing, a nondescript concrete barrier – the kind one finds separating autobahn lanes – blocking my path.
‘No groups’ says a sign. I am addressed in German. I reply in English, pointing to the edifice in front of me, ‘This is open for passport renewal isn’t it?’

My bag is checked, I am frisked; my mobile phone must be switched off. I am guided through a metal detector. The guard is amiable, understanding, an ex-squaddie for sure but it doesn’t immediately show. His mousy red hair and freckles undermine his status as an authority figure.

I pass onto British soil and immediately the atmosphere changes, time seems to distort. Pamphlets are laid out neatly explaining various aspects of the British passport process, British nationals abroad, what your embassy can and can’t do, right of abode, FAQ’s, and everything seems spiffingly civil. I immediately feel that I should queue even though I am the only person here but I resolve never to use the phrase, ‘if it’s not too much trouble’ during my sojourn on British soil however many doors such a phrase might open. I am a British subject but I will not subordinate myself to the state to which I am an equal member. The class system – according to those in the know – the middle classes that is – has been abolished by new legislation introduced into the British educational system in 2002.

The pictures are no good. The background is apparently ‘off-white’ rather than white. I protest, ‘I paid 5€ for that – 6 actually.’ Deaf ears, ‘Look you can still tell it’s me,’ although she can read my lips. ‘Sorry, the machine won’t be able to read it.’

At some point you begin to wonder whether we are still controlling the machines or whether they are controlling us, running it all for us, but not for our benefit. The experience of being back on British soil, confronted with the same people, controlled only by more up-to-date machines – like seeing an image of myself talking into a video camera – is an uncanny one. The prickly authoritative air that this woman before me carries betrays a life of pent-up disappointment which seeks expression through the reinforced glass in the words,

‘I’m sorry, but you’ll have to come back tomorrow.’

But it’s my time and not hers: she gets paid to sit there and I and all other British subjects pay her to do it.

‘And be sure to have all the forms filled out correctly next time.’

Like I am wasting her time, keeping her from the next chapter of the Da Vinci Code. I tell her what she wants to hear:

‘Okay, okay, so if this is about you proving that you are better than me in every way, then I can tell you now; you’re better than me in every way. Satisfied? Now, can we continue with my application?’

She smiles, a cracked smile, sweet in its own way as if someone has just flicked a peanut at her clitoris.

‘Do you have the money?’
‘What money?’
‘I can’t process it without the 107€ handling fee.’
‘Don’t handle it then: I can give it to the machine – you don’t have to do anything.’

(In the end I go back the next day but I have given my landline number and not my mobile number on the application form and this proves another major stumbling block. She asks me for the number. I don’t know it. She looks at me incredulously and says she can’t believe I don’t know my own mobile number. I tell her that I don’t know about her but I am never so lonely that I need to call myself. So I am forced to go outside – as I can’t turn on my mobile phone on British soil – through the metal detector and into the carless street and I sit on the concrete barrier with a pen in one hand accessing my number while being watched by at least three surveillance cameras and thinking about why power feels it needs to protect itself so heavily with so many new-fangled devices and safety precautions because if power really were power then the protection wouldn’t be necessary. A power that is so paranoid is insecure and unstable and therefore maybe should not be in power at all, especially when that power seems to suspect every one of its citizens: citizens who gave that power permission to be in the first place. The security guard sees I am getting distressed and is apologetic, telling me, ‘rules are rules’…and death is death, ink is ink and democracy is words. I go back in with the number scrawled onto my palm but when I hand over the money – the ‘handling fee’ – I am told that I need to bring the correct amount – a 100€ and a 50€ note are too much. My mistake, I obviously did not read the small print carefully enough. Good ‘ol Britain – or was this a newer Britain? This was a Britain that wanted to chain you to the bed but punish you if you fell asleep. I return finally for a third day and her wry smile says it all – she has made her point, she and her government have won but I will, in at least four weeks, get a new passport with my own biometric information in it for every border guard to verify at his will.)

After the embassy my bladder is about to explode but with the high security I dare not go in a nearby bush or tree and so I walk through the faceless streets, the facades looming.

After half an hour walking, the sun is going down but there is a toilet. I pay the 50cents to the machine which guards the door grudgingly as my visit is brief. And so I pick up the toilet roll – if only to get my money’s worth – and now I sit on the 14A, my hand holding the pen that writes these words, my eye focussing, my mind absent, stunned, stymied.

I get off the 14a and tape the cigarette packets I had bought together into one bundle and place them in an A4 envelope. They are for my mother who is loathe to buy cigarettes in the U.K. especially when her son in Vienna can buy them for a third of the price and post them onto her every couple of weeks.

posted by pfarrad @ 10:27