7

Busy Work

What do adults really do? Mostly, they work. Work is adult business. Work is hard to get and hard to keep. Work always means more than what work is: the jobs in which we spend an average 90,000 hours a lifetime. The conference calls. The cash registers. The projects. The products. MYOB and Powerpoint and power tools and boots and clearing tables. The bosses. The office or worksite gossip. The absorbing or unabsorbing tasks that are endless. Work. The thing we say when, as adults, we are asked once more what we do. We work. We make our contribution. We know that work is code for our economic capital. We think that work should be interesting, worth talking about, fulfilling, but often it’s just work.

My first ‘real job’ was after my undergraduate degree, as an online content producer in talkback radio. Three days a week I listened to notorious local haters rail against the inconvenience of sharing the road with cyclists, the deviousness of single mothers, the idiocy of environmentalists, and the vapidity and entitlement of people under thirty. I snipped the most inflammatory audio from each polemic and uploaded it to the web alongside some incendiary statements of my own composition. Something like, ‘Youth unemployment levels at an all-time high — should lazy youngsters be forced into military service?’ I located a stock image of some dreadlocked reprobate stuffed into sloppy fatigues and uploaded the whole package. Periodically, I also moderated the responses of listeners, carefully dividing popular hatred from defamation, and taking down the essayistic single-issue posts of someone named NevilleTheGreat.

The job, equal parts depressing and thrilling, was at least interesting. Fun, even. It was a lark to generate more of this bad noise, this ‘content’. On good days, I imagined myself as a writer of flash fiction somewhere between dada and negative-zen. I thought that I could neutralise the sledging machine from within by rendering it absurd. But the wall between satire and sincerity crumbled, and on bad days I felt like a scoundrel. I started coming to work hung-over. I sat sentinel in the empty office on weekends, head thumping, catching each spit-flecked monologue by its tendril. I began to sing along to the various theme songs of presenters: ‘El Presidente’, ‘Less of Me’, and ‘My Way’. I began to laugh out loud, to talk back to the talkback — a kind of madness, chortling and tsk-tsking along with the long-time-listener-first-time-callers. The bad days soon outnumbered the good. To stave off the building sense of isolation, I smuggled Cassady in, and, at moments when I felt as if my brain would break, I threw a pen across the empty office. Cassady’s brown body would spring up from beneath my desk, lithe and zealous, unconcerned with human acrimony and employment.

On paper I’d made it, and I wasn’t even twenty-five. This was one of the jobs listed in the course handbook for my degree under ‘outcomes’. This was The Media, though it bore little resemblance to the newsrooms my father had taken me to as a child. I knew very few of my colleagues beyond our office interaction. We had no long lunches, big leads to follow, or important stories to tell. We communicated with one another via sarcastic instant messages, thick with ASCII emoji. The radio stations we worked alongside viewed us with suspicion. Radio, they insisted, did not need the internet and its totalising, obliterating future. Everyone I worked with was hostile or confused. I was both. Was this the beginning of my career, my adult life? Was I a journalist or a writer? I felt like neither.

One morning I sent a pen skittering across the office floor and leaned back into the aural embrace of a broadcaster they called the Golden Tonsils.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘I understand that Chinese drivers are probably the worst drivers on the face of the Earth.’

I clipped the audio, and typed a caption: ‘Can Asians drive? Lawsy says no.’

Then I put my head on my desk and pictured returning to the sea.

Unable to afford inner-city rent, I commuted an hour and a half to work and slept in the back of my panel van, or at a friend’s. Three months into my contract, I jumped at the chance to move stations, south to the colder and more affordable Melbourne, and its ever-so-slightly-more-moderate talkback culture.

At that time, moving to Melbourne was a popular thing to do. All my friends were making the transition. It felt like another new start to my adult life.

Within six months of moving, the radio network was bought by one of Australia’s two big broadcasting corporations. I was retrenched and on welfare again. I put my false start behind me and fell back into the underemployment I had dwelled in when I first left home. It felt good to be doing something I understood. Drawing unemployment benefits without seeing your life become submerged in bureaucracy, in unpaid labour or spurious skills-training courses, requires particular aptitude. You need to be patient, and impervious to humiliation. You need to keep your cool, speak impeccable English, make your arguments succinctly using deductive logic, be digitally literate, be firm but not pushy, be sober (or sober-passing), and know how to present yourself across multiple contexts. This, perhaps, was the true outcome of my humanities degree, the very thing I had been training for all along.

After a few months on welfare, the state allocated me a personal arse-whipper, a kind of professional nagging mum to badger me into a job, any job. In order to bank my $20 or so a day and prove my worth to the nation, every Tuesday I sat in Anja’s tiny, pilling cubicle. Anja was a small Eastern European ex-goth with a sharp black bob and heavy eyeliner. As far as arse-whippers went, I liked her.

‘I think it is time you got a job, no?’ she said, one afternoon after a few easy months.

I cringed under her gaze. She drew me out with her Slavic silence. ‘I’m writing.’

‘Be practical,’ she said. ‘The time is up. You need to get a job. Think of something that you want to do, or I will choose for you.’

Up until now she had been patient with me, but I could see the threat burning in her heavily kohled eyes. I was one wrong move away from getting put on one of those jobseeker buses to the local shopping centre, forced by pain of cancellation to march from store to store canvassing for employment, chest bestickered: ‘Hi, I’m Briohny and I want to WORK!’

I needed to think fast.

‘I’d like to work with animals,’ I said.

Anja sighed. She turned to her computer and scrolled through the columns of bold type. The mouse ball groaned beneath her black lacquered fingernails. Above her desk, a laser-printed smiley face was captioned with ‘GET JOBACTIVE!’ Another flyer showed a pleased-looking bald man with a plate of cupcakes he’d presumably baked, a thirty-something woman smiling patiently with a broom, and the owner of the job network herself, hair a plume of feathered lowlights, earrings not dangling but rather stabbing at the air. Framed from below, she looked like a promo still for a sequel to Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, in which the giant tames menopause and moves to the Gold Coast.

Anja’s expression began to lift, taking on ironic pleasure laced with cruelty. ‘You are in luck,’ she said. ‘You want to work with animals, you can work with animals.’

I was suspicious. ‘What kind of animals?’

‘Cats.’

I looked down at the puce carpet. She had me.

‘I’m really more of a dog person.’

‘It’s in your suburb,’ Anja said.

‘I’m allergic to cats.’

‘Take a pill.’

She dialled the number. The time for talent was over. The time for dreams had run out. It was time to empty the kitty litter.

The cattery was not the first so-called unskilled job I worked, and it would not be the last. Actually, scratches, allergies, and faeces notwithstanding, I liked the work. But as I pulled on the long rubber gloves and wrangled hissing felines from their cages, I found the occasion to meditate on the relationship between adult identity and work. The cattery was not a ‘real job’ in the eyes of my parents and many of my peers. My mother sighed when I told her about it. My father cracked a joke. I fought with a friend on a career track when I said that I didn’t believe having a job doing what you love was possible, or at least not for me. But working in the media had been depressing and shallow, and I’d been retrenched before the year was out. The only benefits had been the pay and the sense of satisfaction on the faces of older relatives.

For most of my twenties, when Dad and I talked about jobs and money, I felt as though we were from different planets. His success at carving out a career was, to him, proof positive that I could achieve the same. He found my patchy working life of cobbled-together jobs baffling. He wondered, perhaps, if I did not want to have a career and make some money.

‘Just call up The Age,’ he said, referring to the biggest newspaper in my city as though it were a heavily leisured relative, happy to do favours. ‘Tell them you will do a column for them at twenty-five cents a word. Something sassy. You know, a bit Sex and the City with Doc Martens on.’

He heard my embarrassed laughter as recalcitrance. A failure of imagination.

My dad’s career path looked like this: copy boy, conscripted soldier (non-combatant), court reporter, news reporter, TV reporter, editor, brief tree change and disastrous experiment with the restaurant business, magazine writer, editor, subeditor. It was, I think, a pretty typical middle-class baby boomer one-track path, with a little deviation for adventure/midlife crisis. Other than as a parent, Dad had never worked for free.

Perhaps because of this, his career advice over the years was infelicitous. Before the column, he had advised me to do a photography diploma focused on working with 35mm film.

‘It’s a skill that’s always in demand!’ he said.

He insisted that moonlighting in advertising was a fun, undemanding way to earn some pocket money. ‘Peter Carey wrote his first two books while working part-time in advertising,’ he explained.

He would not countenance discussion of the competitive degree programs and long unpaid internships in advertising. He watched, bemused, as I took on more study, moved from the cattery to a produce market, and worked my career track to be a greengrocer with a PhD.

If social change was the storm that swept my parents to new horizons, economic change is the version for the millennial generation. The neo-liberal agenda of casualisation and deregulation that began in the 1970s in Western democracies across the world has changed the workforce. Where once you advanced in a job by staying there long term, now you will earn more if you change jobs regularly. Where once employers trained their staff, and sought to keep them as a return on their investment, now workers typically pay to learn their skills through an institution and are expected to apply for jobs close to work-ready. People my age and younger will, on average, come to full-time work later, with higher expectations and, in many cases, lower prospects than our parents did. If we can afford to, we will complete internships, volunteer programs, industry-specific short courses, or launch our own projects related to our industry in order to get jobs, or we will work hard in casual, unskilled positions, while other people read this as evidence that we are immature and lacking in drive.

In 2015, amid the smeary neon of New York’s Times Square — where a suddenly thirty Tom Hanks stumbled, where posters of Rosie the Riveter once were pasted — a billboard depicted a kiddult à la mode: a young man, pallid, slack-jawed, lazy belly protruding beneath threadbare t-shirt, backwards baseball cap, one headphone lifted as if to hear the sweet news. ‘What, I get $30,000 a year with no experience or skills?’ ran the caption.

The retort: ‘Who needs an education or hard work when Gov. Cuomo is raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour?’

Higher wages for the slack, overprivileged workers drawn to the fast-food industry is, according to the billboard, an attack on American Values. (No surprise: it was paid for by a group financially supported by the restaurant industry.) High wages — though it should be noted that $30,000 is only a smidge over the minimum living expenses for the greater New York area, as calculated by MIT — are a sign of intelligence, a better work ethic, and a generally higher-quality individual. Stable, well-remunerated employment and financial assets are the markers of successful adulthood. In America, any baby can become president if they work hard enough. ANY BABY. If you squint, though, or don the magic sunglasses from John Carpenter’s They Live, you can see the real message of this billboard in bold black type: suck it up, loser.

Yet if decreasing opportunity for younger workers is occurring on a global scale, how can it be the fault of an individual, or even a cohort? In the United Kingdom, young-adult incomes are 20 per cent below the national average. Europe is currently experiencing what some commentators have called a ‘youth unemployment tragedy’. This is a time in which ‘young people are stuck with lower-paid, temporary contracts and get fired first in crisis times’, said Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, in 2016. ‘The crucial question is whether a person can participate fully in the economy over his or her lifetime — get a good education, find a job, buy a home for the family. What makes me worry is that increasing inequality might prevent people from doing that.’

In America, census data analysed by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce in 2014 showed that my millennial cohort comprise 40 per cent of the country’s unemployed, with a surge in the number of people from this demographic working for less than $25,000 a year. Many young people today grow up into the precariat regardless of their education or many other traditional measures of class. A big part of this is the increase in deregulated or casual employment. In Australia, ‘casual worker’ is a term that applies to employment agreements, which provide no access to benefits such as sick or holiday pay, no job security, and little chance for advancement. Casual work is typically low-income and often found in the so-called unskilled occupations such as labouring, sales, and hospitality, but increasingly also in education and health. In 2015, according to the Australian parliament, this workforce comprised 39.3 per cent under the age of twenty-five and 20 per cent twenty-five to thirty-four-year-olds. Despite this, in 2017 the government supported a proposed reduction in penalty rates for these workers, a move that privileges business owners over what is becoming a class of working poor who are also largely young and/or female. Think, then, how it must be to experience other kinds of disadvantage — discrimination due to race, gender, disability, mental health, or commitments such as caring for children, the ill, and the elderly.

By the time I reached thirty, I had worked in the media, hospitality, call centres, retail, and education. I was in a privileged position to have had so many jobs, but I’d never held a contract for longer than a year. I’d been made redundant, mostly without any severance pay, from more than 50 per cent of my jobs. I had less than $5,000 to my name, and far less than zero if you subtracted my deferred student debt. But at the greengrocer, penalty rates meant that I could work double shifts or pre-dawn opens for better money. I wasn’t killing myself for a career track that might not exist in a few years, as some of my friends were. I was working quietly on projects of my own, and in an unskilled job that kept me social, active, and engaged with different kinds of people. When the weather was right, I felt as though I had made the smartest choice. Was I missing something? Had I, as my friend suggested when we fought, sold myself short and been too cynical about the opportunities that exist for someone of my skills? When I began writing about these questions, I found I still did not have answers. I’d been working for more than a decade, but I still didn’t understand why my working life was so patchy and insecure. I decided to ask an expert.

Rod the careers coach is my dad’s age, but cut from a different cloth — a rich, starched cotton. His office, when he let me in, was minimally but tastefully furnished. A window with minor city views covered one whole wall. Both his shoes and his hair glimmered. When I told him my level of education and my job, he looked utterly unsurprised. Good, I thought, a realist. I remembered my high-school careers counsellors, their focus on aptitude and bright, Venn-diagrammed futures. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand how careers worked in an ideal world. It was the real that troubled me.

Rod’s appointment before me had been a thirty-two-year-old administrative officer in possession of two undergraduate qualifications and a masters degree. ‘Nothing that was going to lead to a job, really,’ Rod said. ‘When we are talking about the group called millennials, there are a lot of people with degrees, or multiple degrees, who want to use their skills and qualifications but end up in survival jobs.’

A survival job, Rod explained, is like the one I had at the produce market. It pays the bills, sort of. There’s no inbuilt security and few prospects for promotion, but it will do for now. The trouble is, ‘for now’ is a stretchy concept.

‘When I first started working, the question was “which job should I take?” not “will I get a job?” It’s been a buyer’s market for labour for twenty-plus years. People coming into the job market now, that’s all they’ve ever known.’

Rod’s facts were relentless and cool; his hustle, mercenary. He was expert in breaking people down into saleable parts. For jobs that have only existed for a few years, he recommended reverse-engineering LinkedIn profiles. He could also spin-doctor a résumé and play the numbers — not with the gay abandon of a gambler, but with the precision of a statistician. I wanted desperately to drag him out of his office, pack him up, and take him to talk to my dad, to serve it out cold. Rod’s pragmatic vision of a world in transition was antithetical to the insistence that life adheres to unwavering principles that an individual must learn and exploit.

‘People do various sorts of qualifications, but no one gives them a sense of how to access the job market. You go to secondary school, the deal is to get into the best possible tertiary qualification. Sometimes you have a sense of what that will be; other times, you are driven on marks. So high achievers are pushed down the law or medicine path. Then of course there are various arts and business degrees. But you don’t know what that means. You engage in a process of three to four years, and the goal is to get the qualification. It’s very easy to see that as an endpoint. But it’s not. It’s a transition point. All you really have is the capacity to go into a graduate or entry-level position, and those are highly contested.’

I told him about a voicemail message I woke up to one day when I was twenty-three. It was my supervisor from the call centre where I worked, inappropriately jolly for a Monday morning, explaining how the whole operation was moving offshore and ‘what that means for you is that you won’t need to come in for your Wednesday shift … Or any shift … here … again … ever. Anyway, sorry for the long message … I’m actually pretty drunk.’

Rod nodded without laughing. ‘I saw a shift in the late 1980s, early 1990s, when it became okay to use retrenchment as a mechanism to manage your business,’ he said. ‘It meant that you didn’t have to invest in people anymore; you could hire them or fire them as you needed. At the same time, we saw the casualisation of the workforce. This working environment is totally new, less than thirty years old. Naturally, it’s radical and unusual.’

The working world Rod first encountered was also new, though the implications of the change were different. ‘I was born in 1949. That’s the only reason I’m not a butcher like my father and grandfather,’ he said.

My paternal grandfather was a soldier and a building superintendent. My paternal grandmother was a cleaner and, from all reports, a social climber. In 1967, my eighteen-year-old father felt exceptional, as though he could do anything. After he dropped out of teachers’ college to be a journalist, he was on the career track by twenty, the first person in his family to own a car, and not just to buy a television but to work in television. It makes me wonder, if his was the first generation that didn’t have to become their parents, is mine the generation that couldn’t if we tried?

There are so many more of us. We are more educated. Life is more competitive. The new opportunities that open up barely replace the old ones we have been training for. It would have been unheard of in Dad’s youth for an educated young person to have been made redundant three times before the age of twenty-five.

When Serge and I met, he was trying to swing himself up out of survival jobs and into a career. He put himself out there, way out past the breakers. He did expensive private courses and unpaid internships and eventually landed a fancy job in a competitive industry. On paper, he had sorted the whole career thing and was on his way to adult success. It was a joy to introduce him to my parents. His job was a kind of spell, its fizzy powers reaching across my life too. While I had never thought of my parents as traditionalists in the realm of gender roles, I felt their relief. They seemed to believe that Serge could look after me while I pursued my whims and worked part-time. His job was evidence that we were on the right track. That I was finally growing up. They didn’t need to worry anymore.

‘I suppose with your job, you can take off and work in the States or in the UK?’ Dad said.

‘Yep, that’s the plan.’ Serge smiled, squeezing my hand.

‘Good, good,’ said Dad, raising his eyebrows, impressed and relieved. He stubbed his cigarette out decisively as if to say ‘that’s that then’.

Meanwhile, little clues made me suspect this career of Serge’s was unsustainable. Once, when we were very fresh in love, I asked him to come home with me, and he refused because he had to mentally prepare for work.

‘Being with you is magical,’ he said. ‘And work is so, so grey. The contrast is too much of a shock.’ It was an utterance both lovely and heartbreaking. It was a sign of things to come.

By the time we moved in together, Serge commonly worked thirteen-hour days, back to back. His job was technical and screen-based, and if he messed up, he expected retribution: snide remarks and cold-shouldering at best, bullying at worst. I lost track of how many times he claimed he’d been ‘black flagged on the last lap’ and ‘stitched up a treat’ and therefore would not be home until the wee small hours. Sometimes I held him tight on a Sunday night while he shook with anxiety about Monday morning. His health suffered, his heart suffered, our life together suffered. He would not quit, though. Quitting was akin to leaping into an abyss. Besides, what else would he do? Would he go back to selling DVDs at a shopping centre? He looked at reskilling as an electrician, a sound engineer. How would he support himself while he studied? How would he deal with more debt? Each question seemed like another stress-bomb. Often, conversations about these options ended with a fight, with Serge’s body tense, his face grim, his hands moving compulsively to smooth the space between his eyebrows. ‘I can’t talk about this right now,’ he’d say, and I’d know we had hit the wall.

I didn’t want to become another source of stress in his life, another person asking ‘what are you going to do?’ when every answer seemed untenable.

On good days at work, Serge seemed to forget all of this. He was eager to forgive his boss and redeem his workplace. This was just as frustrating. He would come home and excuse everyone I was supposed to hate last week. He was trying hard — too hard, I sometimes thought, though his family disagreed.

Then suddenly he was retrenched. A small-business concession meant that he did not receive any severance. Instead, he worked out the year at the place that was letting him go, under bosses who thought that sudden unemployment was just the way of the world, not anyone’s fault or responsibility. Work stress was replaced by straight-up depression. During this time, he dreaded contact with his parents and relatives. It is hard to grit your teeth and admit you are not okay, knowing that the response, though loving, will be an accusation.

‘What will you do differently next time?’ asked one uncle, capitalising on what he saw as a teachable moment.

Unlike my own parents, who taught the imperative to follow your dreams, Serge’s insisted that to be a man, you needed to have a job, and that job was a conduit for your self-respect. For Serge, whose mother had marched him down to the local computer shop to take on a $5-an-hour retail apprenticeship as a teenager, job loss was shattering. For a year after his retrenchment, I watched him struggle to reprogram his thinking. He took a survival job. He wrote songs and spent more time playing in his band. He tried to find value in his life of which no one could strip him. It wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t short-term labour, but it might be the most important job he will ever have.

If Serge’s work history is a familiar sob story, his half-brother Chris embodied exactly the kind of go-getter spirit that conservative politicians in my country think young adults should have. Side by side, they are a version of Rich Dad Poor Dad, a good brother, bad brother for the millennial sledging machine.

Chris is a great taker of advice. When he finished high school, he listened to his parents and, instead of bumming around, going to parties, and faffing at an impractical arts degree, as was his aptitude, he packed up his station wagon and went to work as a trainee farmer.

It was beautiful out there on the remote saltwater flats. He liked the work and the adventure. He liked the solitude. But his boss was abusive. He’d bully Chris daily. And the pay was untenable — less than $5 an hour, a trainee rate that favoured employers and opened young workers up to exploitation in the same way that work-for-welfare schemes tend to. Chris spent two years living in a caravan and learning to farm, while his parents insisted that this was the hard-knocks approach to growing up and becoming a man. It didn’t make sense to him. At twenty-two, when his traineeship ended and he was due a proper wage, the manager started trying to look for ways to get rid of him. The bullying amped up. ‘We’d be repairing a fence, and he’d stand there and stare at me down his riflescope. I mean, we were only thirty minutes from town, but it was a big property and we were alone. I kept thinking there would be so many ways for him to get out of it. So many holes he could dig.’ Chris laughed grimly.

Chris wanted out. He wanted to become a pilot. He tried to enrol in an aviation degree, but it wasn’t covered by government funding and, despite two years of full-time work and almost no living expenses, he didn’t have enough for a deposit. His parents were staunchly opposed to hand-outs. They were also opposed to unoccupied young people. You need to make money straightaway, his father advised. You need security. Finally, Chris dealt with unemployment the way one recent prime minister thought all young Australians should be forced to: he showed his initiative and went to work in the mines.

‘I had to give away my dog,’ he said.

I gasped.

‘I know! That was the hardest thing. I’ll never get over it. I went out there with a week’s worth of clothes and a thousand bucks. I spent the money on a course in basic haul-truck operations. Pretty much just driving a little dump truck in a limestone quarry until I got the hang of it. Luckily the people who ran the course liked me and gave me a place to stay, because pretty soon I couldn’t even afford to eat.’

He worked in a timber mill and a factory before he finally got a job as a trainee dump-truck operator for a big mining corporation. ‘It was a full-on thing to do at twenty-two. Everyone on the plane had a beard. When we got to the site I was like, oh man, this place is so tough. I couldn’t believe what I was doing.’

Chris talked me through ten years of work in the mines. How it was difficult, even at such a young age, to get used to the drinking culture. How you could get fired for cutting your nails wrong. How the brain starts malfunctioning on rosters of seven days on, seven nights on, and then seven days off. It wore away at him. He lost his partner and sometimes, he felt, his mind.

‘I became a pretty angry man,’ he said. ‘I was angry for years and took it out on everyone.’

Chris told work horror stories with a playful tone, making it sound like a lark, making me laugh at stories about being run over by a dump truck, of snapping his vertebrae changing a tyre, of attempts to ‘humiliate me into quitting’ when he returned to work after injury.

‘I grew up really loving the whole cowboy take on masculinity,’ he said. This narrative was the only way he could integrate his work into his sense of self, like a kid playing role-play while the other parts of him detached, collected the funny anecdotes. I understood this implicitly; it’s a defensive position I have practised for years.

At thirty, Chris got married and mortgaged and had a baby. But since the price of iron ore is due for another fall, he’s been feeling more precarious than ever. At the time I spoke to him, he didn’t have a contract and wasn’t sure what would happen next. He suspected a firing squad. ‘Last time they set up a little portable redundancy office and people lined up,’ he said. ‘There was a plane waiting for them on the tarmac to take them back to Perth. It was pretty dramatic.’

‘Are you stressed?’

‘I don’t care,’ he said with a laugh. ‘I spent ten years moving back and forth across the country and working insane hours and being treated like shit. I still don’t know if it was worth it.’

‘Do you feel like you grew up out there?’

‘No way!’ He laughed again.

What made Chris feel grown up, finally, was installing an oven. ‘Instead of smashing up the bench like I would have a few years ago, I stopped and worked out another way to do it,’ he told me proudly.

I understood what Chris meant by invoking the oven as a symbol of adulthood. He needed autonomy, time, and space, to figure out how best to do something, but he had never had that luxury. His job, and with it his twenties, had been about forcing something into a space that it didn’t belong. He had never really wanted to work in the mines. He persevered in anger, at great cost to his body and his mental health. He did it for money. He did it because it was expected of him. He spent all his money on toys; he fought with his girlfriend and friends, stayed out all night, imagined he was a cowboy. He was bored and confused and acting out. Then he realised that he wasn’t the problem, and found the confidence and resolve to take his time, to do things in a way that made sense to him.

‘I think that’s evidence of maturity,’ he said, putting on a mock-serious voice.

I agreed, though I suspected that surviving trauma, and finding a new, more rewarding social role as husband and father, could as easily be catalysts for this revelation as the oven. Or maybe it was because he’d finally saved the money to train for his pilot’s licence: ‘When I’m flying alone, that’s the most grown-up feeling,’ he said. ‘It’s like, I can’t believe someone is actually letting me pilot the plane.’

When I got off the phone, I started thinking about Mishka, my foster dog. I still felt sad about the dog Chris had to give up, but living with Mishka had taught me a lot about the nature of work. She was a frantic and confused animal: a kelpie who had never seen a farm but wanted to round up the traffic, and leapt onto every high surface to get a broader view of her domesticated terrain. She jumped on the table, the kitchen counter, the hoods of strangers’ cars. She strained at her lead when walking, constantly looking around and taking in everything, getting a read on every moving object. When she was excited, she could run huge circles at motorbike speed or shriek like a death-metal vocalist. She was happiest when she had herded everyone into the corner of the room and was sitting on their feet. These are annoying behaviours. She was what some might call a ‘bad dog’ and, in her previous homes, she had taken some mighty wallops for it. The first time I picked up a stick to throw for her, she cowered in the grass. Some humans had tried to beat her instincts out of her.

About six months into our time together, I took her to a herding camp for dispossessed working dogs. The gnarled and gentle farmer who ran it had eyes that twinkled like sapphires. He fed me and the other attendees tea and Iced VoVos and patiently explained what a dog is. ‘They have different drives and desires. Humans love dogs because they have high pack drive. They want to be with us. But they also have prey drive, and we need to understand that, too.’

The farmer did a healthy business with city dogs in trouble on account of their prey drive. These dogs tore up the couch, ripped the washing from the clothesline, and wouldn’t let little Billie out of her playpen. They hid in the hedges, waiting for the fast car in order to race it down the suburban street, and one day soon there was going to be an accident and someone might get killed.

‘They’re bored and confused,’ said the farmer. ‘Their lives lack purpose.’

Working dogs, like people, need jobs that make sense to them, and thrive when that work is rewarded.

We humans lined up by the paddock, each with a straining, yowling dog on a string, watching as three bedraggled and much-put-upon sheep were led in, bleating protests. Here it comes again, they must have been thinking. That arsehole is sending in the rookies.

One at a time, the dogs entered the pen, the farmer murmuring incomprehensibly at them. And one by one these delinquent city dogs began to listen. Mishka barked and whined and spun around in the dirt until it was her turn to get to work.

‘Make her sit,’ said the farmer.

He unleashed her and began his call: ‘Eeeeeeergiddee-giddee.’

Mishka flattened her ears against her skull.

‘Eeeeeeergiddeegiddee.’ The farmer began to move, holding his hands out in front of him, palms up.

Soon the kelpie moved, too. She mirrored the farmer’s movements; she ran left, and then, when he gave her the cue, she ran right. She ran circles around those sheep, nipping the air at their heels. When she had them packed in the corner, the farmer said ‘come’, and she ran up and sat on his foot, her eyes never leaving the bleating sheep.

The winter sun beamed across the paddock. City dogs yipped and strained on their leashes, and Mishka, maybe for the first time, walked a straight line, with purpose.

‘It’s beautiful to watch her work,’ said the farmer. ‘She’s so natural.’

I held onto her lead and cried with joy.

If you have work that moves you, you will nip the air with glee. If you work only to survive, or have little opportunity for undertaking fulfilling work, you will howl and destroy the furniture.

As I thought about and researched workplace trends for young people, I became increasingly aware of the limits of my methodology. I was asking around, and therefore not expanding my worldview much beyond the network of people (and dogs) I knew. This was a problem in my conception of what constituted adulthood, too — I didn’t know how young people related to work in Iceland or Peru. I read an article that asserted in France, it’s déclassé to talk about work over lunch. You are expected to have other, more important interests. I read, too, that some companies in Sweden began transitioning to a six-hour work day in 2016, to allow employees to give priority to their families. I also knew that even in middle-class Australia, there were young professionals who loved their jobs, who had established careers, and had firm visions of their futures. I racked my brains and rattled my network to find one.

‘I think that satisfying careers are still possible in lots of industries,’ Chloe, a thirty-two-year-old marketing professional told me, delivering exactly the dose of flat optimism I was craving.

Chloe was pretty much on track, adult-wise. In her twenties she travelled, lived overseas, studied in a decidedly non-vocational discipline that she loved, and then had an aha moment when she took a marketing unit and realised that this was something she could do for money and actually enjoy. She completed her masters and took some unpaid work experience. Less than five years later, she was a bona fide career woman.

‘I’m an assistant marketing manager — the next step is marketing manager. I’m certainly in a role that corresponds to roles in other places, and there are steps up the ladder that everyone can see,’ she said.

I asked her if she felt as if she has job security and, even though she is on a rolling one-year contract, she said she thinks so. ‘If you are good at your job, they keep you, right?’

I stayed quiet. I’d read too many statistics on workplace discrimination, and particularly after Serge’s redundancy, sentiments like this felt like betrayal.

Chloe had impressively adult work problems, such as training a new assistant. We talked a little about the expectations of young people in her field (she does not consider herself young), and she explained that many of the fresh-out-of-uni people in her workplace seemed to expect their careers to move fast and would job-hop to make it so, while workers with a few more years of experience, like her, stuck around.

‘Do you think that is entitlement?’

‘Yes and no.’ Chloe knew the statistics that suggest moving workplaces is the best way to progress in terms of salary and seniority. ‘It’s a shame, though. Organisations don’t value staff retention,’ she said. ‘But every time we lose a staff member, we lose an incredible amount of institutional knowledge. And then there’s the digital disruption. The number-one job in marketing now didn’t exist five years ago. People who took jobs in social media and digital marketing five years ago have it made.’

‘For now,’ I said with a laugh, but Chloe’s view was brighter — so much so that I began to wonder why. We went to different kinds of schools and had different families, but otherwise we have had similar privileges. And we had similar interests, as well as friends and some politics in common. Why, then, did we feel so differently on the subject of work?

‘I used to start each birthday with a personal business plan. I’d try to identify where I was going and what I was doing,’ Chloe confided. She had other disciplinary measures, too. Applying for five jobs a day, for instance, even if she didn’t want any of them, just to stay limber. This sounded pathological to me, but then I remembered the time I heard Chloe say ‘I will not accept failure,’ over a plate of lacklustre gingerbread and decided it was probably just determination. The same kind of determination, perhaps, that kept me in my bedroom writing while my friends took holidays and started families. The difference, then, between Chloe and me was not so much one of character or drive. It was about economic validation.

‘It’s an interesting question,’ Chloe mused. ‘Would I do this work if I wasn’t getting paid?’

‘Well, would you?’

‘No! Or yes, I would, but less of it. I work bloody hard, and there are people who work even harder than me. The cost of living is relentless. I’d love to buy an apartment, even though I know that is such a traditional and impossible goal. But also, I’m anxious that in having a career and working so much, I am missing out on travelling, and doing the stuff that I think of as constituting my identity.’ Suddenly, she got wistful. ‘That really is an interesting thought … that people need to be generating wealth to have worth. It’s definitely true for me. That’s where I struggle, as well, with maternity leave — I don’t know if being a mother would be enough. Not that I wouldn’t love my children, but …’ I waited for her to continue, but she didn’t.

In her musings, Chloe illustrated some of the arguments for and against the Universal Basic Income, a welfare replacement plan once favoured by both Martin Luther King Jr and Milton Friedman. The UBI has come back into vogue over the last few years as unemployment and poverty striate the populations of rich countries. The concept is a guaranteed payment just above the poverty line for every person. I would get a UBI, and so would someone living on the street, and so would a mining company CEO. The payment would be equal: we would not be means- or activity-tested for it; we would not have to prove our commitment to it or show proof of how we spend it. It’s an expensive but, some argue, necessary salve to the prevalence of unpaid, lowly paid, and casual work; workplace deregulation; and technological and environmental disruption to the labour market. It would be a safety net for everyone who can’t drive ride-share in a world of self-driving cars, can’t frack a depleted landmass or leave their small coastal town every low season to find other work. It would give people time and autonomy to start their own endeavours, give parents support to care for their children, and help young people to establish themselves, study, and volunteer.

In 2016, Switzerland held a referendum on the notion of a UBI. In 2017, a two-year government-testing program began in Utrecht, Netherlands. The trial seeks to discover whether a UBI will lead to better health outcomes, longer-term job satisfaction, and more wealth creation, as it did in trials in the developing world, or if the Dutch recipients will just sit around on their divans all day doing bucket bongs.

A UBI sounds like a radical plan, but it’s actually kinda conservative. It’s a way to save capitalism, rather than to overhaul or undermine it. To make the UBI work, there would be no tax concessions, but middle- and higher-income people would be able to invest their payments and become richer, as is their wont. Poor folk could just live. There would still be plenty of people to do the casual work that’s around because living on the poverty line isn’t much fun. However, if a job is so stultifying, so body- and soul-destroying, that people do not want to do it, the employer would need to entice workers with good conditions, rather than simply relying on a punished underclass.

The most compelling thing about the UBI to me, though, is the potential cultural shift that it would engender. The very premise of a UBI is the insistence that everyone has value independent of their labour. What would that have meant to Serge, or to Chris? How would it have impacted my own feelings of self-worth as I worked to solidify my place in the world? I can’t know for sure, but I think it would have stopped the Mickey Rourke monologue. I think it would have allowed me to locate myself within and beside, instead of continuously, and adolescently, against the world.

Rod the careers coach thinks that unpaid internships and volunteering positions at corporations is akin to slavery. Nevertheless, it is an important part of many young people’s working lives. It certainly was for Chloe, and for Serge. So I decided to follow their lead, and my father’s advice, and put myself out there. I began browsing the extensive unpaid-job ads in my city. Australia is a long way from introducing a UBI, and so my lack of time put me at a disadvantage. I couldn’t spend three to five days per week working unpaid in an advertising agency or for an online magazine, earn enough to pay my bills, and have the time to finish this book. Also, being a thirty-something intern is a joke. Vince Vaughn already made a comedy about it. I imagined a staff of twenty-five-year-olds reading my application out loud and giggling, forwarding it around the office. Subject: Nice PhD, loser.

For weeks, my inbox was peppered with proforma rejection. I was about to give up when I received a sunny pink email. ‘Congratulations! You have been accepted as a volunteer at Business Chicks.’ I would be one in a team of volunteers running an event, the email informed me. It would be inspiring. I would learn new skills. I would have the opportunity to ‘network with the chicks’.

I dressed for the occasion: a vintage pencil skirt, low court shoes, and a white button-up shirt, the same one I wore in high-school stage band, the same one I have worn for every corporate job interview since. I felt very undercover reporter as I crossed the floor at the casino. It was oddly calm and cool at two in the afternoon on a Monday — sedate, like an airport that no one takes off from. When I got to the River Room, I realised my mistake. Off-duty and aspiring business chicks did not dress like secretaries in Mad Men. Their uniform was activewear, black Nikes, and heavy makeup. The volunteers were mostly university students, and a few women in their fifties.

Also, we were not, as it turned out, going to learn anything about business. Instead, we would be working as an assembly line, stuffing gift bags for guests at a corporate breakfast.

The gift bags were pink and poorly made, with ‘Business Chicks’ scrawled on one side and ‘Well-behaved women rarely make history’ on the other. They were to be stuffed with ‘product’, singular, as if the abstract noun would disguise the utter shittiness of these objects. Product was little packets of boob tape and bright green facemasks and dehydrated blueberry powder (for super smoothies!). It was gluten-free crackers and bottles of flavoured oil and plastic salad bowls with fork and spoon moulded into them; bags of sweet-potato chips and sugar-free vodka cruisers and strawberry chia pudding and organic goat soap and discount codes on credit-card rectangles (a subsection of product referred to as ‘collateral’) and vouchers for cupcakes and coffee and organic cotton tampons in patterned wrappers and water infused with ancient Australian flower essence. Product was unilaterally choked in plastic and utterly pointless. Even the Business Chicks administrators knew this. ‘By the time you pull it all together, we could have given out, like, a five-thousand-dollar scholarship or something,’ one observed, fanning herself with a stack of collateral.

We worked for six hours without a break. It was hard work, but I tried to chat with the women around me. There were students of economics and business, mostly in their early twenties, ambitious and conservative. I felt self-conscious. I wondered if I passed for a student in my twenties. Two women interned full-time at PricewaterhouseCoopers. One regretted not being able to take more time off work to come back tomorrow. None seemed to have a definite answer to my question about what they wanted to do after uni.

‘Something in business,’ said one.

Among the non-student volunteers, there was an office manager who re-did everyone else’s work, and a former homemaker who spent much of her time volunteering at a food bank but seemed glad she didn’t actually have to meet any poor people. One woman announced proudly that she had her own business and was just about to launch her first product. We cheered. ‘A true business chick!’ said one of the paid workers.

‘Why are you here?’ I asked a nutritionist who had also recently started her own business.

She thought it would be interesting and, ‘just, you know, for the business environment’.

Great piles of trash bordered the River Room: cardboard and bubble wrap and plastic of all kinds. In the Palladium, pinked and streamered for the occasion, we placed goodie bags on seats and decorated the tables with an array of product — pens, nut milk, packets of muesli, and powdered coconut water. The goal was to overwhelm the diners. Each table was crowned with an affirmation: ‘The world is your goddamn oyster’ or ‘Be a goal digger’. Everything was pink, pink, pink here. Positive thinking. Fat- and sugar-free. FAME. PORSCHE. MILLION DOLLARS. HOT YOUNG WIFE.

I peered into the gift bags dubiously. The next morning at dawn, 1,200 women who worked for banks and accounting firms, for real-estate developers and fitness franchises, would turn this room into a tornado of trash and exclamation. The syllables of beau-ti-ful would bounce back and forth beneath the chandeliers like tennis balls, punctuated by the faint sound of alarm clocks in the hotel above us. The room would become a human sculpture of the internal mechanisms of a poker machine, replete with spinning cherries and dancing kittens. A winning melody, electronic and upbeat; women cheering for the new Business Chicks CEO. Cheering for the word ‘entrepreneur’, a word that designates the genius progenitors of product. Cheering monumentally for the guest speaker — a famous domestic goddess. But the most important thing was that, amid the hoopla, they signed up to become premium members of Business Chicks.

‘It costs one-ninety-nine but they will receive more than three hundred dollars of beau-ti-ful product, so it’s a no-brainer,’ I was told.

The most important job of volunteers, then — more important even than wrangling the product — was to get those sign-up sheets. It made me feel like Avon calling. It made me feel as if I rang the number on one of those photocopied telephone posters from the 1990s: ‘Make a thousand dollars a week from home, I show you how.’ A Ponzi scheme that unfolds like this: you make money selling the idea of making money to someone else, who onsells the idea, and so forth.

After six hours with no break — snacking on oily crisps soaked in synthetic-tasting herb, and pink pudding orbs with the texture and smell of Gak — I needed to get the fuck out of there. I could hear the casino hotting up. Whoops and sighs. Fake waterfalls of money. I slipped out of the River Room and made my way through the punters, past the stores selling handbags and the bars selling too-pink cocktails, and soon I was out on the street. The world expanded to its natural size once more, and my brain loosened.

A few weeks later, I read this in a book by Laurie Penny:

The ‘career woman’ is the new aspirational ideal for young girls everywhere: she is a walking CV, her clothing, make-up and cosmetic-surgery choices merely means of upgrading her ‘erotic capital’ to generate more income for herself and her boss. She is always beautiful, invariably white, and almost entirely fictional. Nonetheless, it is her freedom that is prioritised, as states across the world cut services and provisions for poor women while championing the cause of ‘women in boardrooms’.

It’s too long to fit on a gift bag for Business Chicks, and it is not beau-ti-ful, but it is so, so true.

In the last months of my thirtieth year (I can’t write that phrase without thinking of the Ingeborg Bachmann short story that bears that title, describes a morose, disconnected life, and ends with the biblical line ‘Rise up and walk! None of your bones is broken’), I had a windfall. I sold the idea for this book to a publisher, and in so doing I became, for the first time, a validated writer, rather than a hobbyist and aspirant quickly ageing out of the opportunities for emerging writers. I got paid an advance of a bit more than nine weeks’ pay at minimum wage, and I even had an editor, a woman my age, experiencing similar dilemmas, who was paid to talk to me about them, and about my work, as part of her job. She sent me emails at midnight denaturing my shitty drafts. She clearly had a job she believed in, or at least could not put down.

Suddenly I too was in possession of the magic spell. I did not have to defend myself or my choices. It was wonderful, and fraught. I thought about Chloe’s observation. Did I need other people to validate the very real work I had been doing? Clearly, the answer was yes. I found something else out, too: nothing makes you feel grown-up quite like having people to listen to what you have to say.

During the period in which I planned, researched, and wrote this book, several other things happened that impacted on my thinking about work. I finished my PhD and began teaching at universities. The job was fiercely casual and only available half the year. I ran from class to class, ate standing up next to the vending machine, deflected student questions about where they could find me, and wondered, more than once, after reading this or that report on the erosion of our tertiary sector, if I was the modern equivalent of a scab worker. Despite this, the job was undeniably fancy. People gave me a different kind of look when I answered the ‘what do you do?’ question. They looked at me with surprise. They looked at me like I was an adult.

Better yet, I found that I loved teaching. For the first time in my life, I actually looked forward to going to work. It was a revelation. Some days I tilted my nose to sniff the air and smelled cut grass right there in the classroom. At those moments, a student’s enthusiasm could rattle in my inner ear like a command, a low, guttural sound: ‘Eeeeergiddeegiddeee-giddee.’

At the same time, there were massive and well-reported changes in the two big media corporations in Australia. Fairfax and Murdoch, I read, would no longer preserve the local newsroom model in which journalists write copy and then march it down the hall for subeditors like Dad to fix all the grammatical errors and send back snarky memos about split infinitives and missing conjunctions. Rather, all subediting would now be done in a centralised office, with journalists and subs uploading and downloading copy from a remote database. The news broke, and almost immediately, Dad took a redundancy. He was stoic, but switched from wine to vodka. The money in his severance package was great, but being suddenly unemployed in a remote area at sixty is sad, increasingly common, and puts to mind the fate of Buster, the hard-working horse in Animal Farm who is turned into glue and pet food by the pig rulers he worked so hard to instate.

I worried about my younger friends in the media, too. Alice had cracked up laughing when she noted that most of our university peers became journalists. ‘They must be the last crop of journalists,’ she’d observed. I thought of Priya, whose career in journalism began just as my Dad’s was wrapping up.

‘It’s really bad because management always said we won’t be letting any journos go, and yet here we are,’ she told me.

‘Are you worried about your job?’

‘My contract is almost up. Anyway, I’m too worried for my colleagues right now. Some of them have much more to lose. And you know, even though they’re letting so many people go, they are still trying to work out a way to keep people like me because I’m young and digitally literate. It’s so ageist, actually. I’m under no illusion that I will be the hot young thing for long.’

Priya’s comments reminded me of Rod’s observation that seniority is not what it used to be, that the modern workplace is geared to the new and cutting-edge. I told her how Dad’s redundancy was tantamount to a loss of identity.

‘It’s sad,’ she agreed. ‘The industry has totally changed. But you know, if it was like it used to be then, I wouldn’t be working there, because I’m a woman and I’m brown. So sometimes I think, what are we actually mourning when we eulogise the good old days?’

Dad thought he would work in newspapers until he died, without taking cuts in grade or salary. In his head, that was how the work hierarchy functioned, and I felt awful watching his sudden and ugly realisation. But I was also worried for Serge, and Chris, and Priya, and me. Were Serge and I hot young things who had missed our chance? Was youth fetishism in the workplace the new narrative of decline? Was it all downhill from thirty? How far down does a hill go before it’s a valley, or the ocean floor? And what about all the people who never had a shot at a career-track job?

After the redundancy, Dad valiantly took his own advice and put himself out there. He flew to Melbourne and Sydney to talk to editors at the major papers.

‘Listen,’ he told them. ‘I’ve been in this game for forty-five years. I can write you a weekly, syndicatable eight-hundred-word column on life in the Top End. “Diary of a Geriatric Crocodile Dundee”, or something to that effect.’

The young editors listened patiently. They smiled and nodded while Dad made inappropriate comments about their sex appeal and rattled off the names of long-dead legends. Then they informed him that he was more than welcome to send articles to the relevant editor to be assessed for publication.

‘They want me to do the work before I get paid!’ Dad said, outraged, chain-smoking and drinking Canadian whiskey on my front stoop. ‘This is a brave new world, Junior. I don’t envy you.’

At this point, Dad was still three years from retirement age. For a little while he took a job as an online content producer, that same patronisingly titled position I held in talkback radio when I first got out of university.

‘I’m a super-user,’ he proclaimed with mock pride, referring to his new social media status. His eyes were glazed, though, his shoulders slumped. He was far too thin. ‘It’s not journalism. I don’t know what the fuck it is, but it’s not that.’

‘Content production?’

‘Content. Yeah, right. More Newspeak. It’s data entry.’

To commiserate, I told him about the people I knew who manage the social-media profiles of brands, emerging or established. I’d told my psychologist the same story and she shook her head in sympathy, admitting that the first thing she asks a depressed young person is what they do because nine times out of ten it is something vacuous, lonely, and remote.

‘They tweet as coffee and socks,’ I told Dad. ‘They Facebook as minor celebrities.’

He shook his head and took a drink. ‘When did Facebook become a verb?’

‘Remember Jen from school? Companies send her products and she puts them on top of her boobs and takes photographs.’

‘Whatever.’

He’d taken on the vernacular of a 1990s slacker, and seemed to be worse every time I saw him. At dinner, he ate nothing and told the same stories over and over. His hands shook as he lit fresh cigarettes, while others smouldered in the ashtray. Still, he was always ready to glove up for a sledging match. In fact, the matches were deadly, his fighting style kamikaze. Short-term memory shot, he would repeat the same sequence and frustrate me out of the ring. We fought about my life, about his life. I felt as if he wasn’t listening. He felt like I was an overgrown brat. After one particularly intense visit, I went home sore, and for a little while, we didn’t want to speak to each other.

Dad worked in web-content production for two more years before he received his final redundancy. His career was over, had been over, he realised, for a while. Watching Serge and Dad lose their jobs, and with them, their sense of themselves in the world, was hard. It reminded me not to let myself fall face-first into my work, like falling into a deep pool on a hot day, water filling my ears, eyes squinched shut to the world around me. It also heightened my conception of myself as contingent. Because I am not just a bad adult, but a reaction to this new, radical, and unusual labour environment. I own nothing I couldn’t throw in a pile tomorrow. I’m educated and middle class without the security or the economic resources that those words imply. I’m not yet radicalised — I’m still nostalgic, missing things I never had — but I’m poised, paused, ready.

Around the time of Dad’s first redundancy, we had our last-ever sledging match. I was visiting over mid-semester break, clutching a draft of my dissertation covered in red pen marks. I knew better than to ask Dad to sub it: academic language galled him, and when we squabbled about the definition of words, it was like fighting in two different martial-arts disciplines, me spinning around in some wild capoeira sequence while Dad just jabbed me repeatedly in the snout. It was better to provoke him in other ways. I left out an article about how late my generation starts working, and the flow-on effects this has in terms of housing, starting families, and our projected retirement savings.

Dad read it, narrowing his eyes under pharmacy bifocals.

‘I think it’s wrong,’ I offered, sparring lightly, bouncing, warming up. ‘People still work early, just not in jobs that become their careers. The so-called unskilled jobs are poorly paid and casual, so you are working, but you can’t actually save for anything.’

‘Young people don’t work as early as they used to,’ he said.

I gloved up and took a swing. ‘I worked at fourteen!’

‘Where? The art-supply store?’

‘The hairdresser.’

He snorted. ‘That’s weekend, pocket-money stuff.’

‘Yes, because during the week I was at school.’

‘You’re still at school!’ he said with another snort.

I took the hit and got back up.

He sighed. ‘Well, if you’d work full-time, you’d have —’

‘I’d have what? Money? A house?’

‘Probably not.’ He grimaced. ‘I was going to say you’d have had your confidence shot.’

My arms dropped like lead at my side. The ring dissolved. Maybe it was never really there to begin with. We were together now, bruised, side by side in a hostile terrain that Dad had not been able to see before. This is what happens, I thought, when you attach people’s value to their job. Labour markets fluctuate, but people’s needs are fairly stable. We need enough money to live. We need to feel useful. We need to be connected to one another. We need to be accepted and validated in our small place in the world. I didn’t know what to say. Finally, we could see each other more clearly, but instead of relief, I felt as if my heart was breaking.

Dad took off his glasses.

‘Whatever,’ he said, and went back inside the house.