The Art of Quiet Protest

 I’m worried about the younger generation. This might be a sign of my advancing years but I actually have grave concerns. 

I’m worried that they’ve lost the art of quiet protest. 

The young Amazon driver who accidentally delivered a lifetime’s supply of coffee pods to me yesterday is an example of what worries me. 

She had left the humongous box on the doorstep and had reversed halfway down the drive before I opened the door. I looked at it and thought, “That’s odd, I don’t have a Nespresso machine.”

I took it in anyway because there was an outside chance that my son had ordered it.

Then I looked at the label and realised she had delivered to the wrong road. 

“I’ll just finish my paragraph,” I thought, “and then I’ll walk it round.”

Two sentences in and the doorbell rang again and a young anxious looking woman in a pink jumper, holding a black phone the size of my Nan’s purse blurted, “I’m sorry. I think the code was wrong.”

“Oh yes. Thank you for coming back. I was just about to walk it round there.”

“Oh thank you,” she said, her eyes looking a bit distant and glassy.

“They keep doing this. You see we don’t have to look at the actual addresses. We just scan the barcode and the SatNav tells us where to go. It’s a good thing really. It makes everything really easy but.... When I delivered another package to number 24 I realised that it was the wrong road......It’s....anyway..,thank you for that.”

“Are you okay,” I asked.

Why do I do this? One conversation with me can send someone who is functioning into some kind of mental health crisis. She wasn’t even ‘perfectly fine,.’ She was stressed and anxious. Her phone/SatNav/life controller had just pinged her a message to say that she was now late.

“You should tell them,” I said, “They need to know that they are asking too much for you to make up time because of their mistakes.”

“There’s no point,” she sniffed, “It won’t change.”

“But how can it if no one tells them?” I said.

She just shrugged. She wasn’t going to be the one to say anything.

This is what worries me. 

How have we got to a point where people can just put up with things that aren’t working for them because they’ve decided that’s just the way it has to be? 

Now, more than ever, it’s important to tell bosses when things aren’t working. People have kept themselves to themselves for a year and so no one really knows what anyone else is going through. It doesn’t have to be a big deal. It’s enough to quietly explain that you need a toilet break. It’s enough to request a new office chair if you are having to work from home. It’s enough to explain that you are going stir crazy working from your bedroom floor in a house you share with dope smoking students. If young people aren’t going to join unions to fight their causes and want the freedoms that come from working independently then they have to act like the truly self employed and set their own boundaries. If someone is telling you when you can have a pee then you are not self employed. Self employed people work from home and charge companies extra for it. 

I might write to Amazon on her behalf. If she’s not going to do it then maybe I need to.