the phil paradox

He had a square face. The kind of thin, jagged, slightly rough face that made you want to look away from the horrible truth he was about make you realize. Around his eyes there were tragic lines that seemed to say “I’ve been a victim, been through things I couldn’t avoid.”

Yet the stoop in his posture gave the game away as a face saving platitude, his outward appearance displayed it for the whole world to see. Somehow, somewhere along the line he had failed himself, done himself an injustice. And only he knew the where when and how of it, deep inside. But of course you couldn’t say this to his face. You couldn’t talk about it openly.

In truth, I didn’t want to talk to him. In fact I never would have but through an accident of fate and the contingencies of temp working. That strange “temporary” job of easy, low pay work that you take to fill up those inevitable spare few months that seem to crop up at least once in life. We ended up sitting at close quarters in the same office space for seven hours out of every weekday for five months of one otherwise good year in the mid-twenties of my life. At first I kept conversation to a minimum, but as the reality of our day to day life unfolded, I couldn’t help allowing a relationship of bare niceties from unfolding into a comradeship.

In most respects our lives and personal situations were very different, but the temporality of our daily work life seemed to unite us. Working in the same office, the same dark pit. It just seemed to make us the same. It removed any pretensions of difference or superiority I might have had for a bright, better life for myself in the future.

It was of course a ridiculous, transient and short lived similarity. As I had told myself, my time spent in this mind numbing temp job was to be limited to 4 months, maximum, while Phil had been surfing through temp jobs for at least 5 years. Though at that moment I existed in a career hiatus, an “empty zone” of little importance, I did have a purpose, back from traveling and saving money for the next step on my great path to life achievement. He, it was obvious to all, was a drifter, and an unwilling one at that, lacking the most basic common sense. He was without those faculties most people take for granted. We don't see them as a privileged, but they are vital to successfully negotiate some of the simplest tasks that come up in day to day life. He was desperately seeking a steady existence, a job that he could do competently, but this had simply not materialized.

To my own discredit, from the start I couldn't help harshly dwelling on how pathetic he was. But as the days rolled by the fact that we were engaged, at that moment in space and time, in exactly the same task, with the same pay, the same insecurities, became overwhelming. It made me feel as if somehow we were the same, that our lives were somehow linked or mirrored, not that different after all. My confidence in my own future withered as I sat with him, and I felt as if I could end up like him, and needed to understand him better as a human being in order for me to escape his fate.

So our differences faded from my view, and our small band of temp workers acclimatized to working together in the generic office pit. We quickly bonded as a group, and a kind of looking glass mentality developed. Temps and “regulars” routinely sent thought patterns across a great expanse of conjured self identity and recognition.

Temps despised regulars as sell-outs on life, and regulars despised temps as deviants. These unfair generalizations were underlined by some fundamental jealousies. Temps envied regulars their salaries, paid holidays and houses, their secure lives. Yet this is also what we despised. To us, the regulars were weak. They had meekly acquiesced to a life’s career spent in the generic. meaningless office pit.

In reverse, regulars envied temps their freedom. The freedom to leave and find another job, the freedom from emotional investment in the generic meaningless office pit. While temps could joke and poke fun at the organization at will, they had to respect the management structure, repeat the corporate platitudes, show belief in the motivational strategies. So the regulars also disapproved of our freedom, seeing it as a kind of deviancy: a lazy way out from the inevitabilities of life. Personally, I was happy to play this game for a few months at least, but Phil had been playing it too long. He was frustrated and deep down wanted to cross the divide.

“How about you Phil?” The question emerged naturally within the first week of work.

“Me? Well. Yeah,” he responded meekly. “Well yeah, actually I’m well over 30. Nearly 35. Yeah”.

He said “yeah” a lot, in a high melodious voice that tried to make it sound like he was a model of a personal motivation. I was shocked to hear his age, for something about him made it seem that he was in the same mid-twenties age bracket as me. Perhaps it was his “student days” attire; the knitted sweaters and dusty blazers that seemed to say “I’m a brash young genius, a forever student, look at me”. The corduroys and childish smile made him seem somehow adolescent. On hearing his age, I kept my thoughts to myself.

“Do you fancy going down for a break?” I would ask, for we took more breaks then we knew what to do with just to break up the boredom of our easy and ridiculously slow work.

“Yeah, sure, yeah.” And I would frequently accompany his rolled cigarette smoking in the rainy, chilly gazebo downstairs.

As the days and weeks passed, I began to appreciate the strange mix of ineptitude and brilliance that was Phil. On the one hand, he was a certified mathematician. He had written wikipedia sections on obscure mathematical problems and paradoxes that were
of interest only to the most dedicated of academics. It turned out that he was potentially a university lecturer, having completed a degree and masters in mathematics. Motivated purely by the enthusiasm of personal interest, he had begun optimistic work on a PhD Thesis, only to become bogged down in its as yet incomplete writing for over seven years. Seven years, it seemed, spent wandering from temp job to temp job, filling up his cramped studio loft flat with papers and illegible maths scribblings. Struggling to make a living and survive without his parents assistance as he grew older and it became more socially unacceptable, working in the spare hours to complete what must have often felt like a doomed academic enterprise.

Obviously, he was intelligent, yet he was constantly troubled by the simplest administrative tasks set for us as temp workers. Tasks which the above average monkey could surmount given the proper amount of expertly administered shock and banana therapy. This was the Phil paradox. On the one hand, theorizing about the nature of mathematics was, it seemed, a relative possibility, something that he could at least contemplate and fruitfully discuss. On the other hand, retrieving personal pension figures from the antiquated computer system, with its simple code and F number language, was an ordeal with just too many trips, twists and turns.

He would stress and sweat, writing endless notes and reminders to himself about this task and that procedure, sticking post-its in every available space. Often he would miss breaks, incessantly asking our tireless supervisor for help, finishing perhaps five hard fought retrievals a day that were frequently found error ridden. As this daily ordeal unfolded for Phil, the rest of us would breeze through an average of fifteen retrievals a day, spending the rest of our time surfing the web, playing games, having elastic bands wars, talking about football or simply moaning.

To avoid moaning or talking about football too much, we often theorized about the reasons for his scatty brain.

“He’s a genius”, offered Chris, an intelligent just turned eighteen drum and bass fanatic on his naïve pre-university gap year. “A mad professor. I bet if we ever saw his flat it would be full of blackboards covered with maths equations, like in that movie “A beautiful mind.””

“Yeah, Phil IS the nutty professor.” Agreed Bill, a good humored recent university graduate saving money and searching on the web for his opening into a career in the publishing world. “I bet he did a few drugs back in his university days. He’s smoked one too many spliffs.”

Personally, I was torn between the two explanations, my negative impressions about him often getting the better of me. For one thing, his alleged maths skills just didn’t square with his general ineptitude, and I wondered if he simply had a screw pulled loose somewhere. Perhaps he had fallen on his head when he was young, and he hadn’t finished his thesis because it was actually the ramblings of a madman. I kept these unwanted doubts to myself, desperately wanting to believe in his talents. The problem was that the area of “high maths” is so far beyond most people. It was very difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between “genius” and “mad ramblings” in a character as contradictory as Phil. As a philosophy graduate with a long held generally skeptical and
hostile attitude to “high intellectualism” of any sort, I couldn’t help but wonder just how “abstract” his seven year thesis might be. To me, the more abstract equaled the more useless.

Yet I didn’t voice these doubts. One of my central beliefs was strongly tested when it came to my attitude to Phil, and that was trust in gut feelings about people and a commitment to giving someone a chance and not judging them too quickly. Phil was the
sort of person it was easy to write off on a first glance, but the more you talked to him the more you realized that, however eccentric he was, he was actually a decent, honest guy. He was a good friend if you ever came to call him that, but one whose unique companionship offered none of the common boons that most friendships entailed.

Bluntly speaking, there were few if any benefits in being friends with Phil. He repelled many people, both with his frequent incomprehensibility and personal hygiene. He was frequently flatulent, though thankfully this entailed no bad smell. But the stuttering words that flowed from his mouth were as odious to most people as his many plasters and blisters that appeared on his arms and fingers. He was unable to keep up with the most elementary of conversation topics that friends often have. From the sociable to the raucous and comic, from the serious to the mundane, it was as if Phil was shrouded in a sticky grey fog, while the rest of us sat atop the clear mountaintops, gazing out across the plains.

So it was not a total surprise when it became apparent one day that Phil had “turned to the dark side”. Those who decided such trivial matters as staff recruitment were after all products of the decayed system they administered, seeing little reason to undermine inefficiencies and practices that had given them their daily bread and promoted their careers for years. When Phil realized that despite his failings, constant mistakes and slow productivity he might actually find long term employment where he sat, who was to argue that he shouldn't take that chance for normality and stability? The gazebo reminiscences of troubled tutoring jobs, Phil's sometime hope for a better income, characterized by unfortunate students mysteriously canceling "for no reason" now ceased and were replaced with contemplations of "going regular.”

There was a strange sense of inevitability about Phil's acquiescence to a life in the generic office pit. His financial situation demanded that he find regular work above all else. Yet a sour, un-repenting part of him was desperate to avoid it, to remain the eternal student no matter what. He found it difficult as we all approached the end of our respective tours of duty, allowing ourselves the luxury of talk about hopeful, post-generic office pit lives. When one well dressed girl announced that she had a found herself a well paid sales job in the city, Phil scoffed in an unguarded corner of a rolled cigarette moment that she was "going off to be a toff.”

“Toff” was a word that rang strangely in my ears, bringing to mind bittersweet memories of university days long buried. Days when most members of the student body were divided into "tossers" or "toffs". "Tossers" was a malleable category of the despised, pretty much anybody you didn’t like. "Toffs" were the wealthy, or seemingly wealthy, a financially secure class of "tossers" who drank cocktails while we sipped cheap lagers. They played golf and were often seen wandering the streets drunk at 11pm dressed in tuxedos. Destined for a better life from the start; they had the girls and the cars and would walk into good jobs with a casual laugh and the chink of expensive wine glasses.

Phil’s use of the word "toff" demonstrated something quite strongly to me. He had not, in the many years since graduation, abandoned his university mindset. While his cheapset clothes suggested this, they might conceivably have been the product of eccentricity, or poverty. Suggesting that this friendly and motivated young woman was about to become a "toff" simply put the nail in the coffin. Phil was lost in the campus world. It all fit into place.

Now I recalled how Phil claimed to have been the president of his college at university, where he drank himself silly and had many crazy adventures. Perhaps the formative years of his adult life. His present ineptitude must have been something quite different back in the student days. Before it morphed into a social disaster, it must have something more akin to election winning popularity. I wondered sadly how Phil had lived all these years, struggling with his thesis, seeing his friends change into successful people, hard workers and parents. How did he see himself now as he contemplated the small but monumental shift to regulardom?

I didn't hear from Phil after my time expired in the generic office pit. My last day came and went while Phil remained, continuing his struggle with administrative minutiae. Whilst I heard from my other comrades in arms, usually in digital forms of one sort of other, whether it was e-mail, text messages or social networking websites, Phil stayed out of the technological loop. His experience with telephony was limited to public phones, and communication was face to face or, one assumed, by letter.

The last time I saw him, it was a hot and crowded summer’s afternoon along the beach front. We strolled towards each other for some time before I noticed him, and when I did, I was shocked. He had a grown a huge, uncontrollable bushy beard, the kind that featured regular on late night TV education programmes from the 1970s. I waved to him, and shouted his name, but he didn’t respond. I wondered if he was blanking me deliberately, but as we passed within earshot I knew this wasn't the case. He hadn't seen me or heard me, even though we were within feet of each other and I my appearance was unchanged since last we met. The reason was simple. He was talking to himself.