Embracing Your Inner Psmith

P.G. Wodehouse, Psmith in the City.

Mike and Psmith (“There is a preliminary P before the name. This, however, is silent. Like the tomb. Compare such words as ptarmigan, psalm, and phthisis”), school chums whose antics were chronicled in Mike and Psmith, are, for unrelated reasons, suddenly removed from the pleasantries of school and sent off to work at The Bank.  And, Mike finds the prospect dismal.

There are some people who take naturally to a life of commerce. Mike was not of these. To him the restraint of the business was irksome. He had been used to an open-air life, and a life, in its way, of excitement. He gathered that he would not be free till five o’clock, and that on the following day he would come at ten and go at five, and the same every day, except Saturdays and Sundays, all the year round, with a ten days’ holiday. The monotony of the prospect appalled him.

That is work.  Stripped to its essence that is exactly what work is.  Yes, some people do work outside, and some people travel, and some people work in non-profits, and some people work at their homes, and some people get high pay, and some people get no pay, but one way or another, work is, day after day, the endless repetition, day after day, of the same thing, yes, day after day.

Students do not know this, of course.  The school years are different.  Two weeks of vacation at Christmas, three months of summer (four if you go to Mount Holyoke!), spring breaks, Thanksgiving breaks, and an assortment of other breaks.  School days end well before five. And everyone knows that no matter how bad your teachers are this year, next year at least you get a new set of teachers (well, unless you are home-schooled).

Students, by and large, imagine the time when school will finally end and then get real life begins. They imagine the exciting prospects of The Job. Jobs are exciting.  You do exciting things with interesting people and everyone enjoys the days.  Worst case, and I mean worst case, you end up with a job at something like Dunder Mifflin Paper Company, and your life has its dull moments to be sure, but it is punctuated by all those zany antics. 

Sure, everyone knows RealJob ™ is not the same as The Office™; Real Jobs are never as boring as the TV Show pretends they are.

Then work actually starts, and it hits everyone somewhere between six and eighteen months after graduation; this is forever.

That is the decision moment.  And that is the moment when Psmith in the City is most needed. 

Mike Jackson facing that prospect of the unchanging tedium of life, gets depressed.  Very depressed. “The sunshine has gone out of his life.” This is a perfectly normal reaction to looking with a brutally honest examination at the future. 

Psmith has exactly the same job.  He also does not want to be there.  His first words on showing up at work: “Commerce has claimed me for her own.  Comrade of old, I, too, have joined this blighted institution.”

But, that is where the comparison stops.  Faced with the tedium of work, Psmith does not despair.  He makes a game of the whole thing.  He decides to enjoy himself.  His irritable boss, Rossiter, walks up to demand to know what he is doing there, and Psmith begins the fun:

‘I tell you, Comrade Rossiter, that you have got hold of a good man. You and I together, not forgetting Comrade Jackson, the pet of the Smart Set, will toil early and late till we boost up this postage department into a shining model of what a postage department should be. What that is, at present, I do not exactly know. However. Excursion trains will be run from distant shires to see this postage department. American visitors to London will do it before going on to the Tower. And now,’ he broke off, with a crisp businesslike intonation, ‘I must ask you to excuse me. Much as I have enjoyed this little chat, I fear it must now cease. The time has come to work. Our trade rivals are getting ahead of us. The whisper goes round, “Rossiter and Psmith are talking, not working,” and other firms prepared a pinch our business. Let me Work.’

Ok, you may not want to talk like that at your workplace. 

But, do not miss the deeper message here.  Work in the postage department at the New Asiatic Bank is boring, very boring.  Rossiter is an unfriendly manager and Rossiter’s manager is the even worse Mr. Bickersdyke.  There are no prospects for enjoying this job.  Mike knows that full well.

But, Psmith refuses to let the circumstances depress him, and in his own merry way finds amusement in everything.

That is the choice: do you want to be Mike or Psmith?

I am often asked if I like my job and I always talk about how much I love my job.  I truly do love my job.  And when I talk about how wonderful it is, people believe me that it is a wonderful job. 

But, here is the funny thing.  I have lots of colleagues who have exactly the same job I have.  And they do not love their job.  At all.  Come around the school on a Friday afternoon in the middle of July or October and you can instantly tell who loves this job.  They are the ones who are cheerfully working.  Most of my colleagues are not here.  At times, one might suspect what many of my colleagues like most about their job is that nobody chastises them when they do not come to work.

That is the real challenge of your life after school.  You can’t change the fact that there is an inherent monotony to your daily tasks.  But, you can decide how you are going to respond to that monotony. 

Embrace your inner Psmith. Remember that no matter how bleak work gets, put it in its proper perspective.  Decide you enjoy it.  Even if you don’t think you enjoy it, just decide to enjoy it.  It won’t always work, some days you will loathe it.  But, honestly, will you enjoy it any more if you drag yourself in every day thinking about how much you hate it? Try entering with a smile and telling everyone what a marvelous day it is because you are now there, ready and excited to Work.