While my agent forwarded the video of my audition, I went to invigilate an exam. There’s a guy who does it who is really really old now and he sometimes falls asleep. One of the others pointed it out. “We should say something!” “
“No,” I said. I’m in charge, thankfully. “He evidently needs the money or he wouldn’t be here. We have it covered.” She only noticed because there were so many of us we were totally fine for every eventuality. When people have too much time on their hands they start to look outside themselves at last. Sadly some people carry judgement into that look. “I’m not falling asleep on the job,” she maybe thought. “Why should he?” Because he’s in his fucking eighties, and he’s no more or less useless than you are when I ask him for something, darling. He’s just making use of the downtime while you’re demonstrating busy. You are both achieving precisely the same result. I know if I ask him for something he does it well. Much of the communication in an exam room is via sign and whisper. He can’t whisper for shit, but neither can she.
But this is why I long ago realised that working in an office would be death to me. I love people, but there’s a path of least resistance taken by those who haven’t got a deep vocation, and I just don’t understand it. Who knows what he’s capable of, who knows what he has experienced already, he’s still showing up for work – unless he starts working against us he’s welcome, and the fact he’s unusual makes him doubly so. I’m not gonna jeopardise his earning when we have too many invigilators in the room, it is dull as shite, and he has a snooze because there’s literally nothing to do.
This passes the time and helps with the bills. It is the opposite of vocational. But I’m able to send in auditions around it, and if I’ve got lines to learn it is a really good focused environment. I will continue to tick it over. And hopefully so will he. And hopefully nobody will tell on him. Because it honestly didn’t affect any of us.
We have to get better at leaving people alone unless something needs to be done. The idea of people’s needs and desires – measuring ourselves against them and that idea… This is at the heart of so much of the bad thinking we have at the moment. “I’m not eighty so I don’t need to sleep, why does he?” “I’m not terrified and alone in a country the other side of the world so I don’t need to be taken care of, why should they?”
People are magnifying things arbitrarily to serve their own agenda. “These old people are sleeping on the job so you can never sleep. They want to take all are sleep from are childrens! Vote Reform!” I wish things were less reactive than they are, but this is where we’ve got to.
If you’ve eaten any of these negative narratives, if you’ve been fed phrases like “suicidal empathy,” try to look at the agenda. It’s hard to have a reckoning with yourself but this cruel frightened bullshit is really prevalent at the moment and it isn’t going to get any better in the short term unless people realise they are being manipulated with their own fear and selfishness.
AlBarclay 