Long ago I wrote a piece explaining the difference between A-work and B-work, and finding that most types of work actually contain both. A-work, I explained, is hitting the sheet metal or the typewriter keys, cutting into cloth or patients; it is bakers kneading bread, cops grabbing robbers, farmers reaching out their sensitive hands to adjust the milking machinery, lawyers speaking up in court.
On the other hand B-work is all the inescapable things that go with all such activity. It is lawyers leaning against each other’s desks disagreeing about the case of Rex v Blockett; it is calming a row by saying, “I’ll have a word with him;” it is gardeners arguing about the proper time to plant and whether cat shit is good or bad for roses. B-work is teachers arguing about colleges and whether girls should be educated like boys – and if not how.
There’s much of this double A and B in any work situation; but I never mentioned C-work which is common, usually unavoidable, and exasperating. It is a normal but often a trivial spanner in the works – computers not working, a colleague arranging an anniversary event on the wrong date or failing to order enough printed paper or notify everyone who should know.
It is also, of course, deciding that good old Timmy’s the right man for the job and finding out he’s just died – or it might be hearing your colleague Timmy had died and writing a sad letter to his widow and getting a cheery letter back from Timmy himself. The subtle difference between C work and the other two is that it needn’t have any serious connection to the work itself to have an important and tiresome effect on it, and too often all we can do is sympathise.
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