I get paid by direct deposit now (on the last day of the
month, unless that day is a weekend or holiday, in which case the money goes in
on the business day immediately preceding), though I miss the days when I first
began working and got paid weekly by check.
This was at Market Basket, where every Thursday after one or two o’clock
the paychecks would come in on a truck, and you had to go to the courtesy booth
and tell the woman (it was always a woman) behind the glass your employee
number, after which she would rifle through the stack of paychecks and slip
yours through the slot between the glass and the counter. If you went right at one o’clock this usually took longer because there were still
many checks to rifle through, but if you went on the weekend the woman was
usually able to find yours without much time at all.
I didn’t think about this then, but having a physical
paycheck and stub (in my case the kind where you tore off three of the edges
and the stub came open, still folded on its fourth edge with the paycheck loose
inside) provided a physical reminder of the work you’d done, and that you were
being rewarded for it with money, the reason you went to work in the first
place. Sure, the paycheck was only cheap
paper with numbers and a printed signature, but the act of tearing it open,
signing it, and depositing it at the bank linked the act of working with the
reward of having money.
Now, though, the money goes directly into my checking
account without my seeing how, and though I can check the same numbers on my
computer or a deposit receipt, there’s no talk of money when I’m at work, or
anything that associates money with work at all. When I’m at work now and people talk about
money, they speak of the rewards of their labors as being disassociated with
the act of work itself, as if the money was being deposited into their accounts
on its own, as if work and money were completely separate. Though we all know that the money we receive
comes because we performed work that month, there’s very little within the
working experience to remind us that this is true.
When we forget that money comes because of work and that
work leads to earning money, we start doing the work without understanding why,
and spending the money without remembering where it came from. Work becomes an aspect of life rather than a
chore done to earn a reward, something we do without thinking, that we’ve
always done and continue to do, while the money flows in and out like the water
from a tap that we know not to waste but leave turned on anyway.
Such disassociations are dangerous because they make it more
difficult to leave a job we don’t like, or are ready to move on from. The more passively we view earning money, the harder it is for us to risk disrupting the flow. I try not to forget that, even if I don’t
have a tear-away pay stub anymore.
