No Way To Make A Living » transport

You’re Screwed

Lynne Pettinger — Thu, 17 May 2012 09:54:17 +0000

There’s a lot of construction work gone into the high-tech sport venues that are now littering the country. Sometimes it’s the smallest things that matter. These screws are some of the ‘missing masses’, as mundane and as important as can be (Latour, 1992).

(source: cyclingweekly.co.uk via Ewen Speed)

On your hands and knees: your mate lines up the screws, as straight as can be, and you drive them right in. All the way. On any cyclist’s list of the things that matter, avoiding a puncture is up at the top.

Reference

‘Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts’ in Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, eds., Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992, pp. 225–258

Road Building, or What I Did on my Holidays (part 2)

Lynne Pettinger — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 11:38:38 +0000

Last night, I caught a minute or two of a tv programme about driving. An elderly Scottish actor drove an elderly English car along “one of Britain’s best drives” (defined according to an algorithm based on nostalgia for a time where driving was a select pleasure not a universal pain). This episode showed a road through The Trossachs, an area in the middle of Scotland, a little south of the Highlands, where the pictures, below, were taken. This is a road said to have been built for the pleasure of driving it (BBC 4, 25–10-11).

The car is the “quintessential manufactured object” (Urry, 2006: 17), and its production the object of some curiosity, whether from Goldthorpe, et. al. (1968) wondering what these affluent workers were like, or from Durand and Hatzfeld (2003), what working on the Peugeot line was like. The road on which the car’s success rests so heavily is less fascinating, existing as a frustration for the traveller and a taken-for granted by researchers. There needs to be more gratitude for this work, and more attention to the affordances offered by roads. They make possible being a tourist in the Trossachs, and getting to work in one Highland village from home in another. The kinds of roads that exist in rural places don’t have the promise and frustrations of the motorway or the by-pass: they don’t carry as much traffic, and they don’t have traffic lights and roundabouts, just passing places and warning signs. They make hills manageable.

In contemporary accounts of movement and change in social life, the way movement relies on the fixity and certainty of the road beneath our tyres is not much thought of (see Sheller, 2004). In the city, tarmac is taken for granted. Joe Moran’s On Roads tells us about the politics of road building, and the organisation of road systems, but tells us little about road work as part of the everyday (though its lovely to hear how road bases are formed from the detritus of industrial life: broken up tarmac from elsewhere, or crushed Robbie Williams cds (Moran, 2010: 256).)

The Pochain digger sits up high on a pile of gravel, with its own tracks visible on the leftover gravel, though not on the smoothed out road surface it will leave behind. It sits above the mountains, having opened them up to drivers. It’s been parked for a while as, though the road it built is finished, it’s no easy matter to get it back down the mountain. The rainy Highlands weather is taming the machinery, rusting it up.

References

Durand, J. P. and Hatzfeld, N. (2003) Living Labour: Life on the Line at Peugeot France Palgrave Macmillan.
Goldthorpe, J.H., Lockwood, D., Bechhofer, F., and Platt, J. (1968a) The Affluent Worker: Industrial Attitudes and Behaviour. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Moran, J. (2010) On Roads: A Hidden History. Profile Books, London.
Sheller, M. (2004) ‘Automotive Emotions: Feeling the Car’. Theory, Culture & Society. vol. 21 no. 4–5 221–242.
Urry, J. (2006) ‘Inhabiting the Car’. The Sociological Review. Volume 54, Issue Supplement s1, pp 17–31.
Richard Wilson/Jonney Steven Britain’s Best Drives, BBC4, October 25th 2011.

A Long Day

Dawn Lyon — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 08:31:22 +0000

It’s the afternoon rush hour on the London tube. There are at least three people asleep in the row of seats opposite me, the physical impact of work (I’m assuming) visible in their faces and postures. It’s already been a long day.

Divine Command Theory

Lynne Pettinger — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 15:10:59 +0000

The shelters on platform 3 are behind royal blue plywood. National Express ask for my patience. I can’t see work, but I can hear it. Around the side of the hoarding, away from the wind there’s the entrance: a door propped open by a trailer filling up with knocked down walls, some bricks still cemented together. I catch the guy inside the shelter pulling up his reflective safety trousers and tightening the drawstring. He pretends not to see me until they’re properly fastened.

His mate, a Geordie, comes up and says to me – I know, you’re looking for a bit o shelter. No, I say, I’m just being nosy. Trousers says ‘nothing’s going on here’, and we all laugh. I listen in. The Geordie has a bit of A4 paper he’s found tucked behind the seats in another shelter. It’s someone’s university work.

‘Your task today is to explain and discuss Divine Command Theory’.

‘Aye’, says Trousers. ‘After I’ve spent the day knocking down bricks, I’ll do that’.

‘That’s your thesis, is it?’ Geordie says. He folds the paper neatly and puts it into his pocket.

‘Sci-Fi’ says Trousers, and they take it in turns to list sci-fi films. The train arrives as they’re squabbling about whether Blakes 7 can count because it was on the telly.

The new shelters are transparent all the way: there’s nowhere to sneakily pull your trousers up, or to leave your essay on Divine Command Theory.

Running At Work

Tracey Warren — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 11:46:06 +0000

When I can, I work at home on Thursdays. From my desk in a downstairs room, I look onto the street. This view has fuelled my long held obsession with time and speed at work, and in particular with people whose jobs require them to run in order to finish their work to time.

Thursday is bin morning on my street. The rules are: bins out before 7; bins must be at the edge of the property, handles must point the prescribed way to help the loaders grab the bins and manoeuvre them quickly. I obey these rules to the letter, terrified that my bin will be deemed incorrectly placed and publicly rejected. I also sneakily watch the refuse workers on my street whenever I can. This is because their job demands that they run. Run really, really fast.

The bin loaders run down the street, collecting groups of bins together, loading the bins onto the bin wagon, putting bins back onto the road (in a lovely neat row. See image, plus weeds!), and running off – really fast — to the next group of bins. Their pace is set by the driver of the wagon who keeps his (it’s always been a he so far) vehicle moving all the time. This morning I passed as the loaders were heading to the next road. I think sprinting is the best description of their speed between streets.

Sociology has had a great deal to say about time and the control of work, drawing on other disciplines like history and economics too. We can look to EP Thompson’s (1967) seminal work on the introduction of ‘clock time’ into the workplace, with hours and minutes taking over the organization of work tasks rather than the task itself. Sociologists have explored the impact of ‘Taylorism’ and its time and motion studies on how work was organized and experienced in factories, including when the quest for time efficiencies was picked up by Henry Ford and introduced into his car plants via the moving assembly line. Sociologists have carried out some great research into how workers’ experience their work time (such as Miriam Glucksmann’s account of working on an assembly line in her book Women on the Line –first published under her pseudonym at the factory of Ruth Cavendish (1982)). Sociology has been fascinated with the speeding up of our working lives, and it has long asked crucial questions over whether our lives more generally are becoming more rushed or more leisurely (e.g. Veblen, 1963). And, of course, what role does profit accumulation play in any speed up?

Back to bins. My parents have lived in the same house for about 40 years now. They can’t get the wheelie bins out themselves anymore, so they have help from the local Council. So do many of those living along their street. Now, one of ‘the bin lads’ rushes ahead of the bin wagon to open the gates of those properties that are allowed help, to go and get the bins and place them out on the road. He puts the bins back after they are emptied, and closes the gates. Even with this weekly help, my mam and dad don’t know the names of any of the ‘lads’ anymore, not like they used to. ‘They are like whirlwinds these days’, my dad reports ‘in and out’. My parents still leave a tip each Christmas: a couple of pounds on top of the wheelie bin.

This all reminds me of a lovely study by Ian McIntosh and John Broderick. In a 1996 article they discussed what happened at work when Southburgh Borough Council contracted out its cleansing and refuse collections (in 1988). In particular, they detail the increased workload experienced by refuse collection workers and street cleaners. The refuse collection workers saw huge increases in the number of properties that they had to cover each day. McIntosh and Broderick note that the bin wagon now moved constantly in order to complete the routes in time. There was no time anymore for cups of tea from and with householders; no more biscuits, Christmas tips, chats and helping with odd jobs. Currently, Brendan Burchell is carrying out some great analysis of survey data to explore work intensification over the years and also in diverse societies. At the Work, Employment and Society conference in 2010, he reported that one of the questions he is most interested in is how much time we report having to work ‘at high speed’ in our jobs. I wonder what the bin loaders would report.

References

Burchell, B.J. (2006) Work Intensification in the UK. In D. Perrons, C Fagan, L McDowell K Ray and K Ward (Eds) Gender divisions and working time in the new economy. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.
Cavendish, R. (1982) Women on the Line, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
McIntosh, I and Broderick, J. (1996) ‘Neither one thing nor the other’: compulsory competitive tendering and Southburgh Cleansing Services, Work, Employment and Society, 10, 3, 413–430.
Thompson, E.P. (1967) ‘Time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism’ Past and Present: a Journal of Scientific History, 38, pp.56–176.
Veblen, T. (1963) The Theory of the Leisure Class, London: New English Library Limited (published originally in 1899).

The Tour de France

Lynne Pettinger — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 17:17:44 +0000

For once, the big question of the Tour de France is not ‘who’s doping?’, the question is ‘who’s crashing?’. The Tour hasn’t been this dangerous for years. Slippery roads, whether from rain or oil, are well-known hazards for the road cyclist. And racing in a peloton of 100+ riders at 30+kph does raise the chance of touching someone’s wheel and coming off your bike. That the race needs tough bodies is obvious, and rapid mobility generates all sorts of problems for the workers who keep the race on the road: the team managers, technicians and motorcycle medics who patch up bikes and riders and keep them on target. This year it’s not only the other cyclists or the roads that are generating risk. It’s the tour’s own media circus.

Our experience of watching, for most of us fans, is one mediated by the cameras that scoot alongside the race. The close up shots of the breakaway and of the agony on the face of the climber are produced: this is not Baudrillardian hyperreality, simulations of simulations. There must be a zoom lens near the race, carried on a bike or car travelling at the same speed as the cyclists. Check out the motorcyclist’s pillion rider in this picture (and yes sharp-eyes, this isn’t France, it’s Colchester… it’s the best I can do). He’s facing backwards, holding that heavy camera, gripping the motorbike under him, trusting his driver. This isn’t easy work; it needs a combination skilled camera operation and the tacit knowledge of how to move your body with the moving bike, as well as a fondness for speed.

Stage 9 of the 2011 Tour de France saw more crashes than it should. The most horrific involved barbed wire, Johnny Hoogerland and Juan Antonio Flecha and a French tv car that swerved around a tree and in doing so knocked a man sideways. The other, Hoogerland was tossed into the air and onto a fence.

Drivers who follow the tour are usually ex-pro cyclists, well aware of how to prioritise the man-bike hybrid over the 2 ton car (and given the previous week’s accident where the Danish champion Nicki Sorenson was knocked over by a motorbike, you’d think everyone would be being careful). And so the newsmaker is the news at the moment. You can find pictures of Hoogerland’s flanks torn by barbed wire all over the internet; I have no desire to force you to look.

Sociologists such as Thomas Scheff, have been good at exploring the importance of the “inner contagion” (1990: 76) of shame as a marker of social bonds. We often speak of feelings like shame –and guilt — as individual, not shared, but Scheff argues that shame is a social emotion: something we’re keen to avoid feeling in ourselves in order to justify our belonging and we’d exclude those who were shameful. Guilt shares with shame the sense of being about self and other. After his tears on the podium, getting his King of the Mountains jersey, Johnny Hoogerland said:

It’s horrible, I can blame everyone, but I think no-one did this on purpose. I think the people in the car will have a very big guilty feeling and they will for sure apologise to me … and nobody I can blame for this, it’s a horrible accident and I was in it, and I just say to Flecha, we still alive.

Hoogerland’s understanding of the feelings of the other and the way he avoids looking for responsibility or to attribute cause, are notable. He leaves others to be angry for him, and he understands that he need not express a desire to know that someone else feels guilty; they will feel it regardless.

Reference
Scheff, T. J. (1990) Microsociology: Discourse, emotion, and social structure. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press.

Welcome to the Misery Line

Mick Hutton — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 15:57:27 +0000

Travelling in the last carriage on a southbound Northern Line train between East Finchley and Camden Town before the year 2000, the observant passenger might have noticed the Guard sipping tea from an enamel cup. Nowadays the guard is all but forgotten and those of you who have travelled on the Docklands Light Railway can probably guess that the drivers’ days are numbered too.

The guard’s function was mainly to open and close the doors at stations and give the signal to the driver (known as a Motorman) to proceed. I worked on the Northern line between 1977 and 1981, starting as a guard and qualifying as a Guard Motorman in 1980 (a Guard Motorman being the in-between stage on one’s way to becoming a full-time driver).

At that time the Northern line was known as the ‘misery line’, quite rightly so, as the service was plagued by staff absenteeism and frequent equipment failure. Problems were often compounded by the complicated nature of the line’s layout, especially at Camden Town where the two branches from Edgeware and High Barnet converge and then diverge to either the Charing Cross or City Branches. No modern tube line would be designed like this — have a look at the Victoria Line (opened in 1968) which has no branches or junctions and was One Man Operated (known as O.M.O in the trade) from its inception. The absence of passenger toilets on the system meant that late night boozers coming home from the pubs often used the platform ends or cross passages to relieve themselves so this added to the general fug which was counteracted (and compounded) by an evil-looking green powder which was sprinkled liberally in problem areas. Train crews also urinated in the tunnels or underground sidings and there were even a few instances of persons unknown defecating in the Tooting Broadway siding. As if that wasn’t bad enough there was found to be a section of tunnel between Golders Green and Hampstead which was lined with blue asbestos.

Camden Town was also one of the locations on the line where train crews would break for meals (or a P.N.R. — Physical Needs Relief) and once the service started to get out of sync the situation often arose where a crew due to come off for a meal break would find no relief crew waiting for them (either because they hadn‘t finished their meal break or because they were delayed on another train). Most of the staff had a pretty bloody-minded attitude to the job and we worked to rule all the time secure in the knowledge that the unions would protect us if the need arose. Given the above, the word ‘misery’ seems a fair adjective to use.

New recruits to London Transport (as it was known then) had to undergo a period of training at the White City School. There we sat in classrooms, kitted out in brand new uniforms that felt like they were manufactured from cardboard for East German border guards and learned about train equipment, signalling and emergency procedures (smoking was allowed in class!). First though, we had to watch an old black and white film called Rail Crash, presumably to give us the idea of what shouldn’t happen on a railway. In fact London Transport had one of the best safety records of any railway in the world up until the Moorgate crash in 1975. In the twenty-five years prior to that there had been one serious collision in Stratford (1953) where a train had run into the back of another in a tunnel resulting in the deaths of twelve people.

Once through the classroom stage, I (and my fellow newbies) were itching to get out and participate in what we had been lead to believe was a glorious undertaking with strict adherence to all aspects of rules, regs and time-keeping. (In fact, just about the only place on the whole LT network that had strict time-keeping enforced was the School). So with a head full of ominous and highly technical sounding jargon like Dead Man’s Handle, Tripcock Isolating Cock (TIC) and Drivers Brake Valve Isolating Cock (DBVIC) I reported for duty at some ungodly hour of the morning at a depot on the Central line where I was to finally get my hands on a train.

A guard’s job included taking over the controls of a train in an emergency and believe it or not the practice at the time was to learn to drive on a train in passenger service, despite the existence of simulators (you can try one in the London Transport Museum). On entering the cab of my appointed train the driver stepped away from the controls and told me to take over, he then gave me verbal instructions as to what to do. The chief skill involved in driving a train is in judging the braking and given that there is a trip system that prevents trains passing red signals this system of learning to drive is not as dodgy as it sounds. The passengers did get a rough ride though as a common mistake made by learners is ‘dropping the dead-man’ i.e. letting go of the Dead Man’s Handle which results in instant emergency braking and a loud noise of compressed air escaping. Some Dead Man’s Handles (I never heard the expression in the plural using Men’s) had a particularly fierce spring so were quite hard to hold down.

At the other end of the train the guard’s position was inside the last carriage (on some lines in the cab) and consisted of two panels, one either side of the car. Learning the guard’s job was also done on a train in passenger service and consisted of opening and closing the passenger doors, giving the signal to the driver to proceed and watching the train out of the station. Once the guard’s key had been inserted in the panel the controls would become live and enable the guard’s door to be operated independently of the rest of the train doors. The guard would open his or her door first when the last car entered the station and after checking that the train was fully in the station would then open the passenger doors by depressing two buttons simultaneously. After passengers had detrained and entrained the doors would be closed and the signal given to the driver to proceed (one ring on a bell operated by a button on the panel). As the train left the station the guard would keep an eye out for any untoward activity on the platform and close the guard’s door making sure that his or head was in the carriage before the train reached the end of the platform.

Tea can

Eventually a guard would be teamed up with a regular driver in one of the depots serving the line that he or she was working on. It was advisable to live near one’s depot as the first shift started at 05:19, the latest morning start time being 07:43. There were also shifts that started throughout the afternoon, a few night shifts and some ‘split’ shifts. Split shifts involved coming to work twice in one day to work in peak hours. Night shift crews ran the last trains at night, late staff trains, early staff trains and the first trains in the mornings. We also had ‘spare’ crews whose function was to be there in case of staff absenteeism. Night spare was a good shift — come to work, book on, if everybody shows up for work either bed down for the night in the mess-room or go home and come back in the morning to book off. I was lucky enough to end up crewed with a driver with whom I shared some interests and we spent many hours at night listening to jazz, reading and drinking Darjeeling tea. We were probably the only crew who had string on our tea-bags and as far as I know there was only one bloke on the whole of the Northern Line who drank coffee made in a cafetiere. Every mess-room had a hot water urn and most guards and drivers owned a white enamel tea can, the lid of which served as a cup. Other mess-room activities included playing cards, snooker at a couple of the depots, and I once saw a driver making a clock-surround from clothes-pegs.

There was also a lot of time to kill whilst running the service given that most of the guard’s time was spent not opening and closing doors. I read newspapers and did crosswords, eventually graduating to the Times via the Sun, Evening News or Standard, Telegraph and Guardian. I also played chess with one driver and games would start at the beginning of the shift with moves being made when we saw each other — either at the end of the line, in which case one had plenty of time for deliberation during the journey there — or at meal breaks. I am convinced that I learned more in four years of reading newspapers and doing crosswords than I had in the whole of my school career. Other times I just sat and stared at and re-read endlessly the adverts above me and even perfected the art of dozing off between stations to catch up on missed sleep. To this day I cannot sleep on a tube train without waking up every time it stops.

Guard’s panel

There were quite a few ‘characters’ at my depot (East Finchley), including a guard whose nickname was ‘Killer’, so-called because he had been involved in a passenger fatality in the Kennington Loop. The Kennington Loop was a section of track south of Kennington on the Charing Cross branch where trains would run empty southbound into the loop after detraining and emerge on the northbound platform. Killer was a diminutive Asian man who spoke unintelligible English and apparently a lack of communication between him and the driver over the train intercom had had something to do with the accident. This wasn’t surprising as the intercoms on the 1938 trains were almost useless. The guard’s panel had a small speaker and microphone with button next to it, the technique for using the apparatus being to press the button and shout into the microphone. At the other end of the train the driver would hear a strangled squawk from his speaker if he was lucky and using the same procedure as the guard, would shout back. The guard meanwhile in anticipation of a reply would have his ear pressed hard against the speaker grill — the whole procedure being akin to communicating with deaf relatives at Christmas. Killer was crewed with a huge taciturn West-Indian driver, who was mainly interested in playing cards, or sometimes with a very overweight moustachioed racist who drove like a maniac and arrived at junctions minutes early. This meant that the train would be held to time by the signalman. Passengers on his trains had all the fun of the demented fairground followed by seemingly interminable tedium.

Only two of the train staff at my depot wore full uniform, i.e. including hat, tie and matching jacket and trousers and most didn’t bother to carry all the equipment that was required i.e. timetables, traffic circular, note-book, lost property labels etc. Nearly everyone carried a hand-lamp though, although I don’t remember ever using mine or being aware of anyone else using theirs. Drivers carried a phone which could be connected to wires in the tunnel to speak to the line controller in an emergency. On finding lost property the guard was required to attach a label to it with details of where and when found, and hand it in at a terminal station at the next convenient opportunity. I never found anything of interest except an empty suitcase (quite a big deal at the time because of the IRA activity in London), and of course umbrellas. Quite a few of the train crews had snazzy umbrellas which they had found and kept. The rest ended up at the Lost Property Office in Baker Street which was run by a man rejoicing in the nickname of ‘Mr Brolly’. When he retired he walked out of the building under an umbrella guard of honour.

Then there were the suicides, sometimes referred to as ‘a person under a train’ in official passenger announcements or ‘one under’ by the staff. Deep tunnel stations have a trench in the centre of the track known as the ‘Suicide Pit’ and if you fall into the pit you will survive a train passing over you (these were installed during the depression in the 1930s). Apart from the risk of being mangled by a train there is a hefty current of 640 Volts D.C running through the positive rail which in stations is always furthest from the platform. I once saw a woman who had crossed the track at East Finchley, lie down across the running rail and positive rail and electrocute herself. My chief memory of that incident is of the smell of burnt hair. We often stepped on the rails whilst walking to the depot to prepare a train for service, not that we were supposed to of course. Some drivers at my depot had had as many as three suicides and I was lucky to avoid a suicide myself when driving, as the train behind me was chosen instead. This was at Waterloo going north, where trains enter the platform at about 30 mph. It doesn’t sound fast but even with full braking it would take more than half a platform length to stop. Jumping in front of a tube train is not a guaranteed way of killing yourself, surprisingly it is only about 50% effective and often results in horrific injuries instead. There are up to 100 such incidents every year on the network — many drivers have been severely traumatised by them and unable to drive again.

So how does a guard on a train in service happen to have a hot cup of tea? At East Finchley going south, the driver’s cab is right next to the stairs to the mess room so after stopping and securing the train, the driver runs up the stairs with a tea can, fills it and runs back down. This takes less than a minute. The driver pours a cup of tea and stops short at the next station (Highgate), leaving the tea can at the guard’s end of the platform before pulling fully into the station. After opening the doors the guard alights and picks up the can from the platform. A cup of tea and a newspaper help to pass the time, the only other entertainment being trying to trap double-bassists and their instruments in the doors.

Follow this link for an account of the last 1959 Tube Stock Train to run on the Northern Line: http://www.squarewheels.org.uk/rly/1959final/. District Dave’s website is very good too: http://www.trainweb.org/districtdave/index.html.

There and Back Again

Lynne Pettinger — Wed, 18 May 2011 17:26:37 +0000

I’m chatting to the ticket seller and the train driver at a station with one platform. The driver’s done London and back this morning, and now he’s on the third of seven trips between the same two stations. The journey is seven minutes each way, round the back of the allotments, across a couple of level crossings and then past the burnt out trading lot. The maximum speed allowed feels slower than a walk. There are a few minutes breather in between each journey, but it’s boring.

The ticket seller jokes with me. No need to worry about missing the train, he’s the driver, she says. He says he’ll go just as soon as he can be bothered to walk up to the cab, right at the other end. That’s his job: drive one way, walk back down 8 carriages, get in the other end and drive back. If only, he says, one day they’d set the points wrong and he could go all the way to Clacton.

Snow

Lynne Pettinger — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 14:25:26 +0000

Oh it’s snowing. Parents stay at home because the kids’ school is closed. Not even the 4x4 drivers can get up the hill to work; the buses have been cancelled, and it’d be a long walk in. And countless pounds are being lost as the workforce stays away (snow chaos costs £1.2bn a day). It’s a staple media story, one that usually arrivse a couple of days after the snowfall (after the story of the stranded commuter). Similar productivity losses are caused by heat in summer, holidays in August, the world cup and the Olympics, Christmas, and many other ordinary alterations to daily routines. But these estimates of loss are daft. They rely on a naive conceptualisation of the consumer (that if I don’t spend money today, I’ll never spend it), and, more importantly, a misunderstanding of work productivity. Productivity is linear, measurable and certain. This is what makes it knowable. But the urge to maintain productivity doesn’t reflect the rhythms of living, rhythms which are central to understanding what it is to do work. Time in industrial capitalism is regimented by the clock, and this is a rationality that is imposed – a technical condition and a means of disciplining workers (as E.P Thompson tells us). But work is not a defined object, done in a steady state, but always a becoming, something emergent. Thus productivity has to slip and slide sometimes because the temporalities of the worker, their ongoing connection to seasonal rhythms, doesn’t quite fit the temporality of the machine.

And what are people doing with their “snow days” off work? Mimicking work:

Paris métro

Luciano Spinelli — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 09:03:36 +0000

	‹english french›
The Metro, it’s metal against metal and energy. With 16 lines that extend over 214 kilometres and transport 3.9 million people a day, the Paris Metro is ranked fourth in the world for passenger volume and third by number of stations. We bring our attention to this network, with its art nouveau-style decor and its rhizomatic cartography; or, to be more precise, we bring our body in motion, with a photographic gaze that aims to unveil the sensations that guide us between the tunnels of cold light.		Le métro c’est du métal contre métal et de l’énergie. Avec 16 lignes qui s’étendent sur 214 kilomètres et transportent 3,9 millions de personnes par jour, le métro parisien est classé quatrième au monde en nombre de voyageurs et troisième par rapport à la quantité de stations. C’est sur ce réseau, habillé d’un style art nouveau et de cartographie rhizomatique, que notre attention se porte. Ou, plus précisément, notre corps en mouvement avec un regard photographique qui a pour but de dévoiler les sensations qui nous guident entre les tunnels de lumière froide.
	…
By following, or fleeing through these empty tunnels which repeat themselves at every junction, some play a game of cat and mouse. At rush hour, others let themselves be carried away by the crowd as if miming an advertising slogan like ‘Keep Walking Johnnie Walker’ in an individual video clip, the soundtrack in their headphones, on the moving walkways of Châtelet les Halles. These elements allow us to glimpse the centrality of the subterranean, since the Metro becomes a place where we get closer to an unsocialised state of nature. In this merry-go-round of the postmodern city, graffiti indicates the presence of phantasmatic beings. Our underground imaginary is put into pictures which focus on the movement of the train. The train drivers are our guides in this shadowy world, and these black and white photos, the expression of a lived urban experience. trans. Andrew Goffey/Dawn Lyon		En suivant ou en s’enfuyant dans ces tunnels vides qui se renouvèlent à chaque bifurcation, quelques-uns jouent au chat et à la souris. D’autres, lors des heures de pointe, se laissent entrainer par la foule qui mime un slogan publicitaire du style keep walking — Johnnie Walker, dans un vidéo clip individuel, sonorisé par des écouteurs stéréos, sur les trottoirs roulants de Châtelet les Halles. Ces éléments contribuent à entrevoir l’hypothèse d’une centralité souterraine car le métro devient un lieu où l’homme est plus proche de sa nature sauvage. Un manège de la ville postmoderne ou les graffitis indiquent la présence d’êtres fantasmatiques. Notre imaginaire nocturne est mis en images avec un point de vue qui fixe le mouvement du train. Ce sont les conducteurs des rames, nos cicérones dans ce monde d’ombre, et les photos en noir et blanc, l’expression d’un vécu urbain.