The Unemployment Diaries

The Virtual Field 03.14.10

“Jesus Christ what’s he doing here?!?” says the woman sitting across from me. It’s her loudest outburst since I’ve sat down, but she’s been consistently alternating between mumbling and loud exclamations while reading her book. The woman to my right whose overweight with short hair keeps throwing me knowing glances to validate our table companions craziness. The guy to my right is reading a nature book and never looks up.

I’m at the Parkdale Public Library in Toronto, a neighborhood populated with addicts of various kinds, the working class, flannel wearing hipsters (the environmental type), and roti shops. My friends Kate and Ruth just moved into an apartment around the corner, and for the next few days the library is my virtual office.

One of the great things about freelance writing (which I’m not considering employment because I can barely buy a bag of chips with my pay) is that you have “freedom” from the 9-5 ball and chain.

Last Tuesday, I put my virtual office, usually stationed in my bedroom that adjoins my freelancer mother’s home office, and put it in a backpack. My mom’s freelance is considered employment because she put me through college and her desktop makes things feel more permanent.

Wednesday morning, I grab a cup of coffee, walk past the security guard in the tan uniform, and plunk myself at one of two little desks near an extension chord. The Parkdale Library is your typical community centre: A small room with big wooden tables, scattered newspapers, and lost-looking people on blue plastic chairs. The walls are painted brightly and there’s a plant to liven things up. A sign on every table says “We’re not responsible for stolen items.”

My first day went off without a hitch, as I smugly sent in a freelance article I’m writing for the Ottawa Citizen, and another for Progress Magazine. When I checked my e-mail the next morning, I found out both were unsatisfactory, and instead of enjoying the Toronto sunshine, I dragged my ass in for another day at “the office.”

My colleagues were all waiting for me. The Aboriginal man with long black hair who sits half awake waiting to get on the computer and the man with unruly grey hair who I occasional make intense eye contact with from behind his screen. The row of ten computers in the middle of the room have a waiting station like an airport where people sit in rows of chairs before boarding the internet. Or maybe it’s just to keep warm.

At my desk, where people with laptops hussle to get near a chord (there’s even apparent class divisions in the Public Library), I sit for hours with my screen almost touching the rotating cast of colleagues that take their place across from me.  There’s the guy with a black hoodie and baseball cap who sweetly says it’s alright when I have my spread stuff onto his side of the table and the man with dark black hair who never looks up at me though we accidentally play footsies under the table.

Me sexually harassing a colleague.

There’s the colleagues I don’t like so much: the lady at the desk who has loud, condescending conversations with people everyone is forced to listen to, or the office rebel, who saunters in loudly saying he needs to use the can, and then somehow finds his way past the “employees only” sign on the door to the desk area making the security guard and librarians anxious.

There’s the guy with a bandanna and mohawk who loudly says “hello” when I walk past him, snapping me out of a daze, and while flipping through DVD’s says “Whoooa. You have Terminator two but not one?” Ultimately, I decide I like him because he gets out of some late fines by bullshitting the annoying lady at the desk.

My office atmosphere is colourful, but when I realize I have to do an interview, I search for a secluded space. The private room is already occupied by some guy slumped over textbooks, and after setting up shop in the kids room, one of the librarians frantically rushes me out as a class he forgot was coming files in.

The librarian, an overweight man who speaks barely above a whisper, asks the security guard to take me downstairs where there’s a room. I follow the Chinese man who speaks Mandarin under his breath through a series of locked doors and past a classroom where someone is teaching adults. Though bearing a holding cell resemblance, the room is perfect.

The only interruption is the teacher walking by to see what the noise is and me gesturing “I’m on the phone.” Don’t you hate it when colleagues drop by at the wrong times?

When I go back upstairs an old man using a computer is talking to a young guy wearing a rare hockey jersey seated across from him about the team. I don’t remember the name, because I don’t like hockey, but the sound of their voices was comforting. Community. I’m happy to be back in the bull pen.

I don’t get my work done, but I’ve been staring at the screen so long I can’t see and realize I haven’t eaten in hours. There’s no boss telling me to stay, so I shut off my virtual office and walk outside.

I’m home now. It’s Sunday night and I’ll be showing up to my old office tomorrow, a couple of feet from my bed. It’ll be quiet, the washroom won’t smell like urine, and my concentration won’t be broken my the woman screaming obscenities. Still, I’ll miss my gaggle of colleagues, and look forward to the next time I relocate to my Toronto office.