Hours and hours of waiting, nothing unusual. Then I pull up to the job centre booth. The man inside doesn’t even look up. He just rolls the dice on the board, notes the results, and looks up the chart on his computer.
‘Okay,’ he says after a moment, ‘looks like you’re assigned to the West Division, W-M22, and you’ll report to Green Sector B11, where you will be… picking up-’ He squints, making sure he has read this properly. ‘-Picking up orange soda cans from southmost facing gardens only. You have eight hours to collect six-thousand two-hundred and eighty-eight orange soda cans.’
I sigh and pick up the work detail he passes through the slip. Just my luck to get one of the impossible tasks. They’re all randomised, of course. Location, duty, quantity. Sometimes you get jobs that are laughably easy. Paint three inches of white matte paint on any north-facing lamppost. And sometimes you have to pick up six-thousand two-hundred and eighty-eight orange soda cans from southmost facing gardens only. In all likelihood Green Sector B11 doesn’t even have one orange soda can in all of its southmost facing gardens. If I remember right, its an industrial sector, filled with nothing but factories.
‘Why?’ I say, absentmindedly.
The man in the booth looks confused. ‘What?’
I’m not sure why I asked that. I suppose I think about it every day. Never really occurred to me to say it out loud. Everyone must think it. But this is just the way things are.
‘Well you have to have a job,’ says the man after I don’t reply.
‘Do I?’ I say.
The man blinks. ‘Uh… yes. Everyone needs a job.’
The idea, I suppose, was that if there were enough people in the world to do all the jobs, then you could just assign them randomly every day, and eventually everything would get done. No need to worry about education, job interviews, pay, anything like that.
‘But you know this isn’t going to get done,’ I say, holding up my work detail. ‘It’s impossible. And more to the point, it’s pointless. Why just orange soda cans and why just southmost facing gardens? Why don’t I just collect all the trash?’
The man looks addled. He points to the dice on the desk before him. ‘Because…’
I sigh. ‘Nevermind, have a good day.’
He nods, watching me warily. ‘You too.’
Paddy Dobson
15th January 2022