1:41am January 3, 2015

Is it just me, or do a lot of these “Life Hacks” screw over poor and working-class people who are the main ones who have to deal with the consequences?

Footnote(s) under cut to save space, and to allow me to ramble off-topic without disturbing the main post.

I was just talking the other day to my staff(1)(2)who used to be a waitress. Given the shitty wages and difficult work environments, I’m honestly not sure whether it’s better to be a waitress or a staff in the DD system.

So anyway, she was saying one of the most obnoxious parts of the job, was when people would come in with the intent of getting a free meal. They’d eat most of the food, of course, and then suddenly they’d pull out a hair and drop it in the food, or pull a bag of dead bugs out of their pocket and drop a bug in the food. And then start… my dad would call it “flushing up and down like a toilet” — making a huge, loud fuss. And then blaming it on her, the waitress. And demanding to leave without paying. And she’d be saying “Um… I was standing right here when you put that hair in the food.’ And she’d tell her supervisor the same. But it often didn’t work, and the restaurant wouldn’t get paid, and she wouldn’t get tipped, and stuff was horrible for everyone… except the people who were getting a free meal.

I told her I’d actually read about that technique in a book before. Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book — a hippie/yippie precursor to Life Hacks, I swear. And yes, I just did a cursory web search and already found people referring to Steal This Book as “life hacks”. So I’m not the only one who noticed the similarity.

This is a link to a free PDF version of Steal This Book, if you’re curious. The part in question:

In fancy sit-down restaurants, you can order a large meal and halfway through the main course, take a little dead cockroach or a piece of glass out of your pocket and place it deftly on the plate. Jump up astonished and summon the headwaiter. “Never have I been so insulted. I could have been poisoned” you scream slapping down the napkin. You can refuse to pay and leave, or let the waiter talk you into having a brand new meal on the house for this terrible inconvenience.

-Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Book

See… I’m kind of weird in that I don’t mind the idea of lying, cheating, or stealing when you’re poor and starving (or cold in the winter, or whatever). I think a lot of social rules go out the window when survival is at stake and that is perfectly fine with me. Especially when you’re lying, cheating, or stealing from places that are directly or indirectly keeping you poor in the first place.

I also know what it’s like to be starving and look in a restaurant window, and seeing all these people just eating, like it’s no big deal to fork over more free spending money than I had had all year long, just to eat a fancy meal. And being so jealous, and so envious, and so hungry, above all, that I genuinely wished I had the nerve and the ability to rob the place. Obviously I never did rob the place. But when I did get the money to go out to eat, and I had leftovers, I’d make a point of giving them to someone who didn’t have the money for it. Because I knew what that was like.

You’d leave scraps for the stray cats, and leave out the plate

It’d always be empty next day

What she didn’t finish, she’d leave for the cats

For she knew what it felt like, to live like a stray

— Donna Williams, Not Just Anything

Anyway, the problem I have with these tactics for getting free food is not that they’re dishonest. It’s that they screw over working-class employees like waiters and waitresses, as well as screwing over the small business owner who own a lot of thee restaurants.

I can remember waking up and checking my bank balance only to find it had dropped to something like $-250. Yes, that’s a negative sign. I hadn’t been spending a lot, so I was puzzled. And broke. And unable to pay the overdraft fee because obviously I had no money in the bank.

Luckily, the identity-thief was being kind of stupid that day. I mean in addition to not checking whether a bank account had any money in it before trying to rob it. He had the receipt sent to my address, under his name. I called the bank and they said they had an entire division deoted to tracking down identity thieve, they took the envelope from me to help track the guy down. And apparently they did. Whatever happened, though, the bank gave me all my money back and didn’t charge any extra fees. Which was good because I think I was living on $534 a month at the time, which even in 2000 was not a lot of money.

But that’s a good example of what I mean: If you’re going to lie cheat and steal to get necessities — and I’ll excuse nearly anything of the sort when it comes to securing a poor person’s survival in a system where everything is stacked against us — don’t fuck over other poor and working-class people in the process. We’re not the ones keeping you down. We’re in the same boat as you. Some of us have it a lot worse than you. And don’t assume you can tell by looking whether someone is poor or not. People seem to be able to tell I’m poor on sight. I don’t know why that is any more than I know why the kids at my private school that was mostly upper-middle-case and rich kids, could tell at a glance that I was neither upper middle class nor rich.(3) Especially given that we had school uniforms, which are supposed to cover up class differences but they clearly don’t.

At any rate, most life hacks that deal with stealing and cheating people, end up with poor and working-class people footing the bill. And that, Abbie Hoffman, is not some kind of radical thing to do, it’s what the upper and middle classes do to the poor and working classes all the time. And most of the modern-day Life Hacks people don’t even pretend to be radical. But either way. If you have to lie, cheat, or steal to survive, I won’t automatically judge you. But I will judge you, hard, if your method of lying, cheating, and stealing is fucking over people just like you, people without a lot of money, people with kids at home to feed living paycheck to paycheck, I can’t get into that kind of “Life Hack”, whether it’s the modern kind or the Abbie Hoffman kind. And don’t get me started on seeing the whole thing as cheating a monolithic “Establishment” which doesn’t contain actual people who get hurt, let alone actual working-class and poor people who get hurt. Blech.

_______________________________

(1) So a lot of people get the wrong impression when developmentally disabled and/or psychiatrically disabled people talk about our staff. Most people think of staff as the servants or assistants to rich people, and they assume the power goes accordingly. There’s one grain of truth in this: In an organization serving people with disabilities, staff are at the lowest rung of the ladder among people who are paid to work there. But take not of that phrase again, among people who are paid to work there.

Because there’s one more set of people who come below staff in the power hierarchy of the organization. In fact, we always come last. The only exceptions I’ve ever seen are DD people who have been hired by the agency to make it look like they have DD people doing quality control, basically. They’re usually people who are easily mainpulated in soem way.

One guy I knew was blind and was in charge of making sure the faciltator of the local self-advoccacy group didn’t grab too much power from DD people. Problem was? The guy was blind and the facilitator was smart. he accomplished most of her power plays by means of visual signals, body language, things a totally blind person (which he was) would never in a million years be capable of noticing.

I talked to him about it once, and only once. He became very upset. He kept saying “But she’s my boss, I have to get along with my boss” and “This is the best-paying job I have ever had, pleae don’t make me give it up, please can we just stop discussing this or I might have to reevaluate whether you can be my friend.” And things like that. As is very common with clients hired by the agency that serves them in order to do so-called quality control stuff, they found a very passive man who hated conflict, paid him more than he’d been paid his entire life, made sure the one woman he needed to be watching the closest

(2) I’ve talked to a lot of staff about what they want to be called, collectively. This is because I’ve gotten a lot of undeserved shit on the Internet for saying “my staff” or “my staff person”. I’ve talked to them in groups and individually. The overwhelming consensus is that the people on the Internet are being silly. They are called staff by the agency they work for they call each other staff, and their DD clients call them staff.

I’ve only met one staff person in my entire life who didn’t like being called staff, and that’s because she spent her adolescence in mental institutions, where the word ‘staff’ takes on even more connotations of misused powered control.

But for the most part, they seem to prefer “staff” or “caregiver”. And they think “personal assistant” (a favorite of the phys-dis crowd) as well as “personal attendant” and “attendant”, sound a whole lot more like the employees of rich people than staff does. If you’re dealing with a particular staff person and you want to know what job title they prefer, just ask them. Ask them if “staff” is bad, or if “caregiver” is bad, or if “personal assistant” is bad, or what exactly they do prefer. And as long as whatever they say isn’t so outlandish that you’d be uncomfortable saying it, then for that person, and that person only, say it.

I tend to say staff or caregivers for generic staff, and LNA (Licensed Nursing Assistant) for the people who help me in the shower and do personal care. Nobody yet has minded, aside from the one woman who associated staff with institutions. But once she’d worked in the DD system long enough, she told me she didn’t mind being called staff anymore. So this idea that the word staff is demeaning to staff… doesn’t come from staff. It appears to come from people on the Internet who want to paint me as a rich spoiled brat. (Rather than someone of mixed-class upbringing who has lived my entire adult life near or below the poverty line, and don’t have any rich relatives. And who has spent most of my life, since I was seven year old and I’m thirty-four now, receiving either psychiatric or developmental services, or both at once.)

I did get one person really pissed off at me for saying LNA. It was a staff person on the Internet who felt he’d been abused by his clients with impunity. I had asked the semi-rhetorical question as to whether the LNA who had just given me a bath would think me better off dead (which many do), or whether she saw me as a real, whole person living a life within the various constraints of disability, which really are just one variation of living life within the various constraints of humanity. He seemed to think that all clients are “abusive” towards staff. And then he said something like “But you aid she’s just an LNA so it doesn’t matter, right?” Which confused me because she called herself an LNA. It seems like online people get really tetchy about things like this in ways that the people actually doing the work rarely do.

(3) I call my upbringing mixed-class most of the time. By normal class analysis (who owns the means of production, among other things) my parents were upper-working-class — like plumbers, who often make more money than some middle-class people yet are still working-class. My mother was a respiratory therapist and then a secretary on a tree farm. My father was an electronics technician for decades. He had the capacities to be an engineer, but he only had a two year degree from a technical college, so they made him a technician. So my family only became solidly middle-class when my father changed jobs and was given a job as an engineer. And that was either shortly before I left home, or after i left home.

So after my mixed-class upbringing, I was dumped straight down into SSI-levelp poverty, $534 a month. After my dad retired, I got enough money to just barely exceed the poverty line, and when he died, I’m now exceeding the poverty line even more. But the poverty line is a shitty measure of poverty because I’m definitely still poor. After they sold the house and retired to a teeny mountain town in the middle of nowhere, my parents became just as poor as I was, if not poorer. I remember my mother selling her gold teeth to buy groceries.

And that’s how it goes in my family, generally. People who manage to get a comfortable income, lose it the moment the economy won’t support it anymore. And this has a lot to do with having been poor and working-class for generation upon generation until you hit that stroke of luck. The skills for survivingat poverty working-classs levels are not the same skills you use when you’re getting a middle-class income (whether you’re technically middle-class or not). My parents sacrificed a lot for us — I remember my mom working two or three jobs at a time, and ranking the way her day went every morning by coming into the kitchen for breakfast and saying “I only got two hours sleep,” or however much sleep she got. And all of this… this is why class privilege is so complex, because we had middle-class money privilege but not middle-class social privilege, and that’s just the beginning of that whole tangle. This is why I find a lot of tumblr privilege analysis to be shallow and confused. No matter what kind of privilege is under discussion, it’s going to be way more complicated than you either have it or you don’t. I could probably write a book-length manuscript just on the ways privilege and oppression connect with each other in my life, and I think everyone else in the world could do the same. (That is presuming we had the desire and ability and I have neither.)

I’m very grateful for what they did for us, especially when my psychiatric bills ran them down to the ground. I still feel guilty, but I couldn’t help going crazy, so…. yeah. I just remember, because I was never supposed to be left unsupervised, them taking me to long boring meetings with financial advisors who were obviously getting rich off people like my parents, given how huge their houses were, and how many high-tech gadgets they had that I’d never even heard of. But every time we went to one of those meetings, I felt so guilty, like “If I could just stop losing skills, stop flipping out, stop my bad behavior, etc. then we wouldn’t be having to do this.” But I couldn’t.

I had kind of a fantasy that I could just become normal any time if I wanted, but that fantasy was just sa much fantasy as the one where I was a thousands-of-years-old woodland creature who lived on the inside of trees, but whose soul had been switched with the “human” soul at birth.. Seriously, they were both equally impossible in my case anyway, and in both cases I made them up and tried my best to believe them because the alternative — reality — was unbearable to me at the time. And yes, some “Otherkin” are going through what I was. This does not make it okay to mock them. In fact, mocking someone for creating a fantasy to escape the brutal rarity they are living in — if that’s what they’re actually doing, and you can’t tell that from the outside so stop trying — to laugh at someone for finding a way to cope with the unbearable is to kick them when they’re down. Which makes you a bully.

Adolescence is hard. It’s even harder for people dealing with any kind of disability or abuse or (in my case) many kinds of both, and to lack the cognitive skills to understand what is happening. I’m not saying all Otherkin are teenagers and twenty-somethings with severe psychiatric or emotional problems or have all been abused. I’m just saying there’s a fair number who are, and it is their business, not yours, to decide if and when they longer want or need to use this coping mechanism anymore. As coping mechanisms go, it’s among the least harmful I’ve ever seen. Although, as my psychiatrist was fond of informing me, retreating into fantasy is very passive and can open you up to more abuse. But it’s still sometimes the best of an array of not-so-great choices.

And for those who don’t know me: I began identifying myself, or at least part of myself as an elf or woodland creature, before I’d ever heard a thing about Otherkin. Seven or eight year later, I was approached by a member of an Otherkin community and asked if I wanted to join. I knew deep down that this was a fantasy on my part, but on the other hand, if I went there and found people from the world I thought I came from, maybe it would prove it was allele after all. I told my psychiatrist that I didn’t believe I was an elf anymore, which was technically true. But I spent several months in the Otherkin community trying to work out whether anyone there was like me. Nobody was. Not even close. And a lot of what was going on had more the feel of an RPG than a community of people who sincerely believed they weren’t human. In fact they borrowed liberally from the terminology used in RPGs. They also were very into glamour, and I hate glamour with a passion. Glamour is the art of making other people see things differently than they really are. I’m pretty good at seeing through glamour.

These people were very big on seeing glamour as a good thing, a powerful thing, a thing that made them powerful. They had flame wars over the color of the sky. This place was not for me, and I left and stopped identifying as Otherkin altogether shortly thereafter, either in public or in private. But Otherkin was never a name I took on myself, it was a name someone else said when I explained my feelings of being a woodland creature. (Even the word “elf” was a name I took on because someone else used it on me. This has a lot to do with how shitty my cobbled-together communication system was at the time.)