Take a break from whatever you should be doing with this edited extract from Adelaide-born, Melbourne-based writer Robert skinner’s memoir, I’d Rather Not, in which he attempts to evade gainful employment in pursuit of literary enlightenment, reflects on escapades ranging from reaching for the stars while sleeping in a ditch to running a literary magazine out of a dog park, and is generally thwarted in his search for a meaningful life by endless jobs, beagles, house parties, ill-advised love affairs, camel trips and bureaucratic entanglements.

War and Peace

I retired when I was 28 years old, but ran out of money the same afternoon, so I caught a bus to the dole office. My feeling about unemployment was: Someone’s gotta do it. Why not me? The pay was lousy, but I’d heard the hours were good.

I had been working for the past sixteen years – driving buses, washing dishes, picking grapes, packing boxes, building exhibitions and, once, digging the same trench for three days before someone told me I was digging in the wrong direction. (Subconsciously, I think, I’d started digging for home.) I was fed up with the whole racket.

At the Centrelink office I learnt that it was no longer called ‘the dole’. Some overpaid marketing agency had rebranded it ‘Newstart’. The walls were covered with inspirational posters (‘When opportunity knocks, open the door!’) alongside more practical advice, telling us not to drink alcohol before job interviews. Fake nails clacked away at keyboards. Someone called my name, and I followed him into a small room. I hadn’t even sat down before he started trying to sign me up for forklift-driving jobs on the other side of town.

‘Whoa,’ I said. ‘This isn’t the kind of Newstart I had in mind at all.’

I had only just moved to Melbourne. It was a place filled with magic and possibility. I wanted to meet interesting people at rooftop bars. I wanted to read Russian novels. What I didn’t want was a pesky job, but try telling that to your dole officer.

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘our economy seems to rely on a 5 per cent unemployment rate. Can’t I just be one of those 5 per cent for a while?’

The long answer was no.

People, I’ve found, want you to be busy. They don’t require you to contribute anything meaningful, otherwise how do you explain professions like ‘consulting’? They just want you to be busy. Genghis Khan could move into your street and people would say, ‘Well, at least he’s working.’

My dole officer changed tack. He straightened his tie and wafted some cologne in my direction.

‘What about truck driving?’ he said. ‘I’ve got some great truck-driving jobs.’

I’d spent the previous three years driving tour buses in the outback. One morning it had been so hot that I’d woken up with a lisp. I had a crooked back and still harboured some latent racism (mostly against the Swiss) that I was trying to deal with. I was sick of driving. But you can’t just come out and say that.

‘What sort of loads would I be carrying? I’m allergic to peanuts.’

‘Furniture,’ he said, eyeing me suspiciously. ‘No peanuts.’ I held in my lap my talismanic copy of War and Peace.

I had vowed not to get a job until I finished reading it. But the dole officer had obviously sworn some oath of his own. He was so dogged, I was amazed he hadn’t risen through the ranks yet.

‘Is it far away?’ I asked, eventually. ‘Just around the corner.’

‘Oh. That could make things difficult.’ ‘Difficult how?’

‘Well, I was thinking of moving.’

What followed was a series of long and glorious autumn days. I wandered through parks, winked at old ladies and had long boozy dinners in friends’ backyards.

My uncle was in town one day, and I explained that, what with the demands of War and Peace and everything else going on, I scarcely had time for a job.

‘Well, it’s a question of priorities, Robbie,’ he said. We looked at each other and I hit the table with my fist. ‘Exactly.’ When my second appointment came around, the dole officer asked me how I was getting on, and I told him about the projects I was working on. He made a few notes.

‘So, you’re writing a book?’ ‘I’m reading a book.’

He became businesslike. He said that, per regulations, I was to start filling out a job diary and applying for 20 jobs a fortnight. Twenty!

It was even more odious than having a job. It sounded like I would be doing a lot of extra work, so I asked if I’d be getting a corresponding pay rise.

His answer was long and wearisome, like your primary school teacher going on and on about not eating pencil shavings.

Eventually I pointed at the job diary and said, ‘But. But what’s the point of it?’

The point was ‘How dare you!’ The point was ‘We the taxpayers!’ etc.

Andy, my friend and housemate, had little sympathy. ‘They pay you $230 a week for doing nothing.’

‘I don’t get the money,’ I said. ‘Our landlord gets it.’ ‘Oh, not this again.’
‘Well, I work just as hard as he does.’
‘Not today you didn’t.’

‘It’s a Saturday, Andy. Jesus.’

‘Not yesterday, either. You spent all morning trying to glue your boot back together.’

‘Okay, so we happen to have a particularly hardworking landlord. But morally ...’

Then, through a series of clerical errors and misunderstandings, I accidentally got a job as a dishwasher.

Every time I start a new dishwashing job, I can’t imagine why I ever quit. It’s exhilarating. You feel like a general marshalling troops. Waiters pile up coffee cups and teaspoons on one side, chefs drop hot pots and pans into the sink on the other, and you’re in the middle of it all, suds flying. At the end of a shift you have that physical tiredness that feels almost like a life well lived. On your lunch break, if you get one, you send out group text messages: ‘Friends! You were right! Maybe this is the answer!’

And then, after two or three shifts, you start to remember. The sinks are always too low, so you stoop all day, or all night, and wake up in the mornings, or afternoons, with a cracking headache. You get covered face to feet in grime. The kitchens are hot, cramped and almost always an insufferable boys’ club. If you’re new they’ll send you off to fetch a made-up item, like a ‘rice peeler’ or a ‘bucket of steam’. (I would pretend to fall for that one and sit in the storage room reading a book until someone came looking for me.)

You become increasingly convinced that, in the world outside your kitchen, in some endless dusk, bands are playing on street corners, friends are having wild picnics and everyone you like is sleeping with someone else.

It becomes harder and harder to contain the long, loud bouts of moaning at the helpless purgatory of it all. And shift after shift the dishes keep coming. You could work fifteen years in that job and still have nothing to show for it. If you left the sink for one minute to accept your Golden Tea Towel Award, by the time you turned back the sink would be piled with dirties again. Worse, they’re the same dishes.

And dishes are as good as it gets, by the way. You need a biology degree to remove the oily film that clings to the inside of plastic containers. I had one, but for the wage I was getting I refused to use it. Sometimes I just threw dishes into the bin.

What sort of answer is this to the question of what to do with our short time on Planet Earth? Sometimes I would find myself standing at the sink with my hands dangling in the dirty water, thinking, This is it. I can’t go on. It’s just too pointless. And dishwashing is one of the important jobs! Imagine how the consultants feel!

As soon as I smelt spring in the air, I quit the dishwashing and raced back to the dole office.

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