Out of Time
I consider the undertaking of this job to be significantly punctuated by one event which happened on my first day. It wasn’t particularly important in and of itself, although it didn’t half piss me off. I was pulling a cage (for one of the first times) through the swinging double doors which connect the shop floor to the mysterious netherworld of the warehouse. Dragging it backwards, as is the safe technique, the inner edges of the opening doors brushed down my forearms; this often happens because my arms are on the outside of the cage being pulled. In this particular instance the brushing became a catching and one door snagged on my watch. There is a clang of metal as the cage jolts to a halt and a clatter as something small falls to the floor. I am watchless. And this watch – an elegant Fossil watch given to me by one of my older sisters as an 18th birthday present, which I have worn ceaselessly since – has snapped at one of the leather connections. Not at a link, which could be easily fixed, but the leather itself has torn. This leather, according to one watch repair man, runs around and underneath the watch face, so integral is it to the watch’s design.
The significance comes, however, not in the damaged gift (I was inconsolable), but in the loss of my trusty timepiece. I am someone who feels at odds with the world without an immediate chrono-reference. I rely on knowing the time just so I can know my place in the world. I get an uncomfortable sensation of free-falling, of spontaneity and uncertainty, if my only source of time is guesswork. I wouldn’t purport this to be one of my defining characteristics; it’s just an example of overanalysis, and probably a case of the effects of disrupted routine being misconstrued. I’m used to wearing a watch, and without one, I feel weird. Perhaps. But it’s more specific than that, I think.
And so, given the mental legroom to overthink such a loss and to misapply significance, I considered this event a rupture in ethos. No longer would I be sure of the time, no longer would I put pressures of accuracy and of perfection upon myself, no longer would I shy from acting on impulse. Without my watch, my wrists become balanced, my limb-symmetry returned. And for it to happen during my first day at Tesco, I took it to be the start of a new phase.
Of course, that is, to a large extent, melodramatic rubbish. I borrow my mum’s watch when I go into work and I keep it in my pocket. But during the day, both at work and at home, I no longer wear a watch. Occasionally I rely on my phone’s clock to check the time but otherwise I coast along, glancing at clocks – I’d never looked at clocks before, when I wore a watch – and I notice the startling array of different clocks in my house. My alarm clock, too, has become crucial. In many ways I can’t really function effectively without knowing the time, but I realise that one of the repercussions of my watch’s damaging is one of efficiency: my timekeeping has been streamlined. Why bother with an individual watch when there are clocks everywhere? Phones, televisions, computers, radios, ovens, microwaves, cars. It reminds me of something a Chemistry teacher once told me about Einstein: allegedly, the famed physicist never memorised any telephone numbers. When asked why, he simply replied, why should he waste time remembering something that he can find perfectly easily in a book?
