Am I obsolete?

The world moves on. You know it. I know it. It’s called ‘progress’. I, for one, am very glad to be typing this on a PC instead of the electric typewriter I learned on at college, for example, but…

This COVID-thing’s come as a bit of a shock. All these working-from-home, phone-not-ringing, contact-not-permitted rules upon rules (imposed for well-intentioned reasons, whatever your private opinions about loss of liberty and wealth vs health) have wrought an overnight change in the way we work. I mean, literally overnight. On a March Monday, I had two jobs. By the Tuesday, I had none. That quick. That scary. And not because of anything I’d done. It wasn’t as if I’d stirred the MD’s coffee with the rectal thermometer and then discovered he was watching.

I’m an office worker. I shuffle paper. I generate content. I talk to people. I book work. I process money. I plan events. Suddenly, no one’s doing any of that. The ‘phones have fallen silent. There are no events to fill. There’s no money to process. There’s no job. What do you do when what you do is no longer done; when something you thought would always be there - the gentle revolution of the administrative cogs - just stops? Do you wake up at 3am convinced you’re suddenly as irrelevant as heraldry?

I’ve got a permanent tightness in my chest now. I might be obsolete and, if I am, I’ve no idea what to do about it.

Unless stress concerning my current employment predicament kills me fairly sharpish, I’m probably half way through my life, give or take, and yet the way I make my living seems so over I might as well be a pair of Jane Fonda’s legwarmers.

‘Take a letter, Miss Moneypenny’ has become, ‘I’ll Zoom ya, buddy’ - and rightly so…much more efficient; more practical in today’s fast-moving world. Poor old superseded Secretary no longer required.

If everyone’s working from home, then everything they generate is online via accessible portals - yet more lovely efficiency…but bye-bye paperwork, filing, ‘keeping on top of things’. No need, when the computer does it for you. It seems the geeks have inherited the earth.

For a career-administrator, where does that leave me? Re-alphabetising my CD collection, and drying out my teabags on the line to reuse them ‘cos there’s no wages to buy any more, I expect. For us planners, organisers, tidiers - whose workload is generated by anticipating the requirements of others and pre-empting their needs - where do our skills fit in this ‘brave’ new world of keeping your distance, isolating, not interacting or gathering together, not generating anything but a series of 1s and 0s in binary computer-speak that exists nowhere but the ephemeral cloud?

I could retrain. (Not sure how I’d finance this with no income, but ho-hum…)

What as? What do we need now. Really need?

I can only speak from my own experience of lockdown in the rural Kentish countryside. We need: the loo to flush and the taps to work, online exercise gurus, pizza delivery men, grocery drivers, broadband suppliers, the postman, the dustman…and that’s about it. There are already umpteen people being all of those things. Not sure there’s an opening for me to perform any of these careers in a notable fashion that’ll make my fortune. Thank God for writing, I say. I may not earn enough out of it even to support my rampant Dominoes habit, but at least it takes me away from the gnawing terror of my irrelevance for a few blissful hours a day.

Off now to suck my thumb and rock gently in the cupboard under the stairs until my next pizza arrives.

It’ll be fine…