Job

 The expression jobs for the boys has transformed into jobs for the boy. In the Land of the Long Weekend people are scratching their heads about anyone with one job secretly taking on five more jobs with the same work hours and no increase in pay. Not only taking on the jobs, but wanting to. How many more jobs was he doing, they ask expectantly. A general rule universally truthful is that every extra job you take on means less and less time spent on the main job you’re there to do. Multiply that by five and your main job may be reduced to looking like you’re doing something, which might be all you are in fact doing. The term micromanage is normally used in a pejorative sense of someone who does not trust other people’s performances, so must spend time watching over every action of others in their jobs, interfering with the processes, and generally creating tension and confusion. This is one cause for the saying too many chiefs and not enough Indians. However, the term has yet to be invented for someone who secretly signs himself up for other people’s jobs and then does nothing much. Or at least, does something but no one knows what, least of all the actual holders of those jobs. Yet what does he know from being in those jobs that he would not have otherwise known, the inhabitants wonder, rolling their eyes. Inhabitants of the Land of the Long Weekend are also finding it odd how anyone would not think to tell someone they know about these extra jobs, not least the people who are supposed to hold those jobs. The literature at this point introduces words like secrecy and dysfunctionality and messianism as a way of indicating that what is going on is very odd. Novels could be written (titles like ‘Unhelpful Teals’ and ‘Unprecedented Bushfires’) describing this kind of behaviour though they might be read as fanciful or perhaps satires of a society that assumes everyone behaves the same way that they do. Psychological treatises analysing this case might use language that is libellous, which is why they are circulated in attachments between professional friends, or deposited in a 100-year time capsule with a rugby scarf and an Hawaiian shirt. Defamation is however acceptable in cartoon form or comments threads. Some weekenders ask how the head of the organisation didn’t know about someone doing other people’s jobs without their knowledge, to which the answer is he did know, at least that there was some sort of duplication of resources going on, only it’s very hard to say no to an employee whose CV includes the position of prime minister somewhere near the top. Descendants may prise open the capsule to find that this was indeed a once in 100-year event, that the scarf must go into a museum immediately, and that the psychological report for this employee contains antiquated terms, quaint was one reaction, that need translating into present day jargon (‘trigintism’, ‘scomania’) to be comprehensible, or believable.