Last week I had to register my truck. We had tried earlier in the week to do that, but ran up against the ruling that we couldn't until we had produced our resident tax receipts from the town we had just moved from, even though now we were living in a new town. They couldn't make a phone call to verify - we had to send away and wait a week for the pieces of paper to come in. So we did. And so we waited.
The pieces of paper came and I planned to go and register the truck. One must plan such a thing. When we had gone down before, we had popped our head into the auto registration office and saw a line snaking around the room that smelled of a two-hour wait, at least. (This room was approximately 15 feet square, with at least 35 people in it, 6 chairs. That's a little over 6 square feet per person to stand in for 2 hours.) I have an aversion to waiting, something I'll talk about in a moment, so we decided that I would come back another day when it wasn't so crowded.
One of the annoying things about this whole venture was that much of the waiting we had to go through could have been avoided by some decent information willingly given by the people who work in these agencies. Christine had first called the DMV and asked about registering the truck. They simply said, Come on down. So we did. And when we got there the clerk told us that we had to have our residence tax verified at city hall. This after waiting fifteen minutes in line. So we trotted on down to city hall and waited another fifteen minutes in line to be told that we couldn't register our truck that day because we didn't have little slips of paper from the other town hall, even though we were standing right there, willing to pay the city money. It seems that we had moved at the wrong time - the city could not officially indicate us as residents until a little later, when the tax rolls were ready to be sent out. Thus the economics of the place determined our legal status. Our desire to help ourselves out by paying money that in a sense we did not have to pay (our truck was still legally registered with the other tow hall), just to buy a little smooth sailing, paled in front of the bureaucracy of motion. We retreated and waited.
So, as I said, we got our pieces of paper, and it became time to plan our strategy. I was going to have to take time off work in order to get there early enough to not have to wait. This wasn't really a problem because my schedule was flexible and being a half-hour late to work would cause no flak. In fact, I was the first in line, getting there at 8:15. By 8:20, about twenty people were strung out behind me. I had brought a magazine with me to read, but the man behind me felt like talking, so we talked. He was a mechanic who normally started work at 7:00 a.m. and who had had to take time off to register his new motorcycle. The man behind him had just arrived from Florida and was taking time off work (losing pay, of course) to go through the rigmarole of transferring title to this state. Various people floated out behind him, like a string of styrofoam bobbers, and as the three of us talked, I looked at the all the people, wondering who they might be and what they had to give up to stand here in line.
Several things struck me as I stood in line. First, like the two men I was talking with, most of the people probably had to take time off to stand in line to get this done. Since everyone in the world has lunch breaks at pretty much the same time, a person can't do many errands that require waiting in line. So they had to find a time that would not make them wait long (and which probably meant most of them would have to work through their lunch to make it up). So here they were at 8:20.
In contrast to this were the city hall employees. As we stood in line the employees began filtering into the hall, and the immediate thing I noticed was how differently the people in the line and the people coming to worked dressed. My mechanic wore a grungy sweatshirt over a torn flannel shirt mottled with grease and whatnot, complete with cap, eight-day growth of beard, dirty fingernails, heavy workman-green pants, and boots crusted with oil and dirt and cracked with dryness. The guy from Florida was more simply dressed: jeans, a western shirt with that inevitably dull cross-hatch pattern, a denim jacket, a Fu Manchu moustache and hair that needed a slight trim. His wife was dressed pretty much the same, and they smoked long slim cigarettes with some floral design near the filter end. They looked like ordinary people, people who would feel uncomfortable dressing in suits, and who would, in any case, expose their origins by the lack of easiness with which the suit would ride on them. It's a funny thing in that regard, but one can tell a lot about a person by the ease with which that person wears the official costume of the middle class.
The employees, to a person, were dressed far more nicely than one would assume necessary for a desk job. In a sense they were dressed for work, and how they were dressed said much about the kind of work they did, or thought they did. The women were by far the most overdressed, swaddled in dresses that hissed as they moved, with hair coiffed in neat layers or patterns, often with fingernails done in some glistering color of red, carrying purses that were either really underblown knapsacks or small kit bags capable of carrying nothing more than a handful of change and a driver's license.
The men usually had suits on (that is, the men who went upstairs to their desks; the workers who were doing some reconstruction work in the auto registration office wore jeans and a simple shirt and had drill shavings in their hair). Some wore the suits casually, their little-bit-too-large bellies pressing against the minor restraint of their belts. These generally were the older men, ones who had been in city hall from the day it had been erected and would be the cholesterol in the veins of any attempt to change the way things were done. The younger men also had suits on, but they were much more natty about it. Generally they were also thinner, with pale moustaches (if any facial hair at all) or faces neatly scraped, but who also looked underfed or at least too much deprived of sun.
These people breezed in, more and more of them as it got closer to 9 a.m., and walked by our increasing crowd without so much as a glance. One had the feeling that they in fact did not notice we were there, or, if they noticed, it was only to say to themselves that they were lucky not to have to wait in lines like that. One of the privileges of working for the city (which, presumably, would mean working for the people of the city) is not to have put up with the services the city offers, or doesn't offer, its people. Someone "downstairs" will get your registration done, and on your lunch hour you can go to DMV and get the whole thing validated. No time lost at all. While we were all workers, all of us, it was clear that there were workers, and then there were themselves, and one of the measures of status was whether one had to wait in line or not and lose time.
Then there were the workers in the office, whom I could see as I stood pressed against the door. I was told by the mechanic that the office used to be open 8 to 6, and on Thursday evenings as well, and that the hours had been steadily cut back over the years until it was now 9 to 4:15. That interested me. In the interest of saving money, the city had cut back on a service that was a service to most, if not all, people. I wondered how many top salaries they had cut back, how much they had spread the burden of saving money. And I knew the answer, of course: none. As usual, the people who had to take the brunt of the changes, had to suffer an increasing number of little annoyances and inconveniences, were the people who had little power to argue with the rulings. Now people (and here I have to say working people) have to lose doubly, both time from work and from shortened hours which makes life just a little more crowded and hurried.
And the workers in the office, of course, couldn't care less about that. They worked for the city - they believed they were different from the working class people they were really no different from. Just another little gradation, another little ersatz way to make a sense of difference, a feeling of minor superiority. "The public" was something they had to endure, not be part of. Their loyalty was vague, primarily to themselves. They did not see the suited people going upstairs as an enemy, and they saw those most like themselves as, at best, a nuisance, a way for them to get their paycheck, and, at worst, a lesser kind than themselves.
I was struck, though not necessarily surprised, by these divisions. It is not uncommon to have working class people suffer from decisions not taken with them in mind - look at the recent recession. They were the shock troops for that recession, the cannon fodder. They were sacrificed so that people who had, and now have, more money could keep it. And if workers now think that the economy is getting better and that Reagan is responsible for that, that only shows that the media have not done their job in educating the public and that workers still have yet to create a consciousness of themselves as a class of people fundamentally different from their bosses. They want too much to be like their bosses and have been convinced that the proper consciousness to have is to be patriotic and believe that they are above all Americans rooting for America. (This kind of patriotism is a nice way to distract them from building their own sense of patriotism as loyalty to the people who actually produce the wealth of the nation.)
Other things struck me as well about these divisions, most strongly about the difference in expectations between working class people and the middle-class suited people who went upstairs (among whom I must classify myself - my magazine gave me away, and I was the only one in the line who had brought something to read - what is it that a person thinks about for two hours as he or she stands empty-handed in line?). The people in line, even though they were losing pay and having to waste time, never thought that anything was particularly wrong with that. Yes, they were inconvenienced, but that was just the way things were. Working class people wait - one of the Newtonian laws of the universe. They never thought that it might pay to complain in an organized fashion, collectively use their voice. They would suffer the inconveniences as one would suffer bad weather.
My middle-class sensibilities were very different. I resented having to wait in line. I did not, and people of my class did not, expect to wait in line. We were used to getting things quickly and without too much fuss. We are used to privilege of a kind, and think nothing of demanding that that privilege be recognized. I didn't have to worry about losing money from work - I was on salary. And when I got to work and told people about the wait I had, I would find sympathy, not a foreman thinking I was lying so as to have a little time to myself outside the job.
Orwell points out just this kind of sensibility in The Road To Wigan Pier. He speaks at length about being middle-class and the set of assumptions about the world that that entails, one of which is, as he says, that one can demands things from the world and expect to be heard:
It is very different for a member of the bourgeoisie, even such a down-at-heel member as I am. Even when I am on the verge of starvation I have certain rights attaching to my bourgeois status. I do not earn much more than a miner earns, but I do at least get it paid into my bank in a gentlemanly manner and can draw it out when I choose. And even when my account is exhausted the bank people are still passably polite.
This business of petty inconvenience and indignity, of being kept waiting about, of having to do everything at other people's convenience, is inherent in working-class life. A thousand influences constantly press a working man down into a passive role....A person of bourgeois origin goes through life with some expectation of getting what he wants, within reasonable limits....[They] are accustomed to a certain amount of deference and consequently have the cheek necessary to a commander. (49)
Such was my "day" waiting in line. I was the first to get my business done, and was back at work at 9:30. Such a small amount of time, but it showed me a lot, not only about how those who have the least power get the least service, but also about my own class prejudices and expectations. I do not want to give up my middle-classness -- yet its power should be shared.