When Karl Marx wrote about surplus value and commodity fetishism and the object taking on an intrinsic almost ghost-like characteristic with the obscuring of the relationship between the worker and the object, did he take into account that over a century later on a device the size of your palm you would be able to get into a virtual dick-measuring competition to show how hard you worked? In this essay I will —

 

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I am bad at sales. I work in software sales. Such is the dialectic of life.

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Work have put me up at the cheapest hotel they could find: in Stratford, East London. On the way from the airport, the Uber driver asks me why I’d choose to stay there. I shrug. He advises me to be vigilant in Stratford. He asks me where I am from. Turns out we are both Tamil. He offers more advice: always buy an automatic car. Never use your contactless card on the tube. Buy a travelcard. If you see a magpie, find another; it’s bad luck otherwise. Invest in gold, don’t sell for twenty years. Don’t smoke. Don’t marry a woman taller than five foot four.

When we get to Stratford, I make sure I screenshot the fare on the Uber app so I can expense the ride to work.

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I listen to the driver. I decide not to use my contactless card. I buy a travelcard the next morning. As I top it up at Stratford Station, a woman walks over to me. Her face is dry and scaly. She is not too old: early thirties at best. Skinny, hasn’t eaten in days. Foreign accent, Bulgarian,Ukrainian, that general area. Excuse me sir, she says. I need you to help me. I am without a home now. My landlady kicked me out. I have nowhere to go.

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In London, winter means winter. Gloves, thermals, coats. Black leather coats are in again. As are badges on coats. Always for progressive causes. Never seen a racist badge. A woman on the tube has a badge on her coat that says ‘Will you be my Palestine?’. After the events of October, there are Palestine flags everywhere. I consider the logistics of taking one back with me. Can I sneak one past Indian Customs?

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At the conference, the presentations are boring. I scribble notes to write a report, so work knows I was there. Every single talk is about Artificial Intelligence. A man with a thick Spanish accent begins every sentence in his presentation with “In Spain”. There is a loud cheer when we wrap for drinks.

There is a queue to meet one of the speakers, some tech guy at a glamorous video game. I deem it worthless. Everyone at this conference is older than me.  A woman my age walks around with canapes. Beef or vegan, she says. I have one of each.

In the corner of the room, there are two young men in suits. Slender, shy, clueless. Low in the food chain. I walk over to them. They tell me they are from Belgium. They are interns but they work with a company owned by the Belgian Royal Family. They work to improve trade relations between Belgium and the rest of the world. They ask me if I am free the week after next. There is an event at the Belgian High Commission that I must attend. I tell them I would not miss it for the world.

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In Stratford Station, when the woman walks up to me and asks for help, I reach into my pocket. I have a five pound note that I am ready to part with. As I hand it, she says she wants the money on her travelcard. I say I am happy to help her. I ask her for her travelcard, but this seems to provoke some resistance. She goes blank, momentarily, and then grows increasingly flustered. What travelcard?

Eventually, she tells me she does not have a travelcard. How can I top up a card, she says, if I do not have one? She asks me if I can buy her one, or if I can lend her mine.

I have just topped my card up with thirty pounds. I do not wish to hand it to her. I tell her there is a kiosk on the other side of the station, where she can buy a card for seven pounds. I can help her. But she gets agitated.

She grabs my arm and speaks very loudly. I can feel her nails pressing into my puffer jacket. A thinner layer and she would be clawing me.

An old couple walking past us stops and stares. What do they think is happening? Lovers’ tiff? Brown man verbally abusing a poor homeless woman?

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On LinkedIn a man in Delhi writes a post claiming that he has heard a lot about Adolf Hitler as a negative figure in history but after reading his autobiography, he believes that he had a few underrated qualities:

1. Charismatic visionary

2. Magnetic speaker

3. Extremely confident.

4. Very intellectual

5. Massive action taker

The man is a risk assessment consultant at Deloitte. He is fired.

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I meet a man whom I know through another man whom I know through another man on LinkedIn. I tell work I have him pegged as a prospective sale. Five minutes into our meeting he tells me he is balding. He tells me it could be the water in the new flat he has moved to, or the stress of his divorce; the reason he moved to the new flat in the first place. Either way, he has no recent pictures without a receding hairline. He has no luck on the apps anymore. I text work after saying that the meeting went well and we should convert this sale in the next few months.

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A dating app once asked me, unprompted, in a pop-up notification, if I had considered celibacy. I wasn’t getting many matches but it was very uncalled for.

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I tell work I am at a client meeting but I am actually at the Royal Academy with a woman from a dating app. We are at a Marina Abramovic retrospective. One of the exhibits involves walking through a narrow corridor flanked by a naked man and a naked woman. It sounds easy, but as our turn to walk arrives, we are both frozen with doubt. The couple look intently into each other’s eyes, would it not be rude of us to disrupt them?

My date notices that the man has a soft hard on. Be decisive, we joke. Hard or soft. Which way, modern man? We decide that we do not want to rub against a half-erect cock.

On our phones,  we look this work up. In the original Imponderabillia, Marina and her brief partner and artistic collaborator, the late Ulay, are the naked woman and the naked man. We ask ourselves if we would have squeezed past Marina and Ulay had we seen the original. We agree that their reputation would override our discomfort.

A man tries to crawl between the naked man and the woman. They are unfazed, the man and the woman, locked in each other’s eyes.

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On LinkedIn, another man from Delhi posts about being grateful to all the women in his life, a gesture attested by a visit earlier in the morning from “the most colourful and beautiful female one can imagine!”.

Attached to his post is a picture of him sitting in a verandah. Next to him is a massive, decidedly male peacock flaunting its feathers.

The man works at PriceWaterhouseCoopers as a consultant. The post is deleted the next day.

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The Belgians remind me of their event over email. I walk up to the Belgian High Commission and find my name on the guest list. There are founders from fourteen Belgian startups pitching their ideas to a room that consists of diplomats, bureaucrats, private equity managers, and me.

There are drinks afterwards and a cheese platter is being served. The Belgian High Commissioner keeps making jokes about the Belgian football team being better than the English, but the jokes never go beyond statements such as ‘We will beat your team the next time we play’, and ‘We have the best players in the world’. All of us non-Belgians laugh out of politeness. I text work saying the event went well and many meaningful connections were made. A definite expansion of our sales pipeline.

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The woman at Stratford Station has not just grabbed my arm but clawed into it, she clings on to me like her life depends on it. Every passer-by now stops and stares. We are, proverbially and literally, creating a scene. She wails and tears stream down her cheek. I try to calm her down, and she begins to say that her landlord is like me, a man from Pakistan (I do not correct her). He was very nice at first but then she began to fall behind on rent, and this made him increasingly very angry; last week, he kicked her out. She does not have anywhere to go and desperately needs money.

I try to wriggle out of her grip. I tell her I am very sorry and that she can have my five pounds. I am in a rush and must be somewhere. I cannot help her get a travelcard, but I am sure that she can buy one with the money. I insist that she keeps the five pounds, if I had more cash on me I would have readily parted with it.

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At the hotel, the nice old woman at the reception notices that my credit card entitles me to a room upgrade. The suites are booked out, but she can get me a much larger room. I am pleased with this unexpected development, though it is short-lived. When I get to the room, I realise that I have been given an accessibility room. Everything is configured for a wheelchair user: no shower cubicle, low door handles, an accessible toilet. But the woman at the reception is not wrong: it is a larger room.

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The woman I meet from the apps with whom I go to the Marina Abramovic show comes back with me to my hotel. I make a couple of jokes about the accessibility room. We sit in bed and I try to cast my phone to the TV to play some music. My Spotify refuses to connect but I play a YouTube video of a concert by a band from back home.

We strip a while later but I am unable to get hard. We go to sleep and we have breakfast at a cafe outside the station. I joke about how there is always a bouncer outside the cafe. She tells me the roughest area of London she knows is Harringay, where at a supermarket, she saw a bouncer with a black eye under each of his eyes. The bouncer at the cafe watches every bite we take of our croissant. We embrace as we say goodbye.

An hour later, I exit the shower and my phone pings with a voice note from her saying she had a good time but that we are not compatible. She does not wish to see me again.

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The man with the receding hairline does actually email me back, saying he is interested in buying our software. I send him a budgetary quote and I never hear back again. I keep telling work that his organisation works bureaucratically, we are due to hear from him any day.

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The woman at Stratford Station is wailing, kicking, crying. Her landlord, a man from Pakistan, a man like me (I did not correct her) was kicking her out. How could she get a travel card? She leaned into my jacket and began to cry. The man who sold the jacket to me told me it was waterproof, and true to his word I could see her tears roll down my arm, little round globules.

I tell the woman I absolutely must leave. The five pounds are hers now. I do not have any more cash on me. She asks me if I will come back to help her. I panic. I begin to stutter. Before I can think, I start saying that I live in Manchester. I am a university lecturer who lives in Manchester. I come to Stratford sometimes to teach at the university down the road from the station. I will not be back till next month.

 I feel her loosening her grip on my arm. The wailing has stopped, as have the tears. She takes the five pound note and walks away.

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A post on LinkedIn begins with the following words:

“I proposed to my girlfriend this weekend. 💍

Here's what it taught me about B2B sales:”

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My flight back to Delhi involves a long transit at Helsinki airport. White noise rings through the terminal: birds chirping, a waterfall gushing. I check into the lounge. There is a shower. The water is very hot. The white noise is even louder in the shower.

My phone buzzes with updates from work. I tune in to the white noise, I fixate on the rosemary bodywash. I think of what would happen if I dunk my phone under the shower and leave it there.

A group of Finnish men walk into the lounge in black leather jackets. All of them are bald and wear bandanas and sport handlebar moustaches. One of them has a snowflake tattooed on his neck. I presume they are a biker gang, maybe a heavy metal band, but they take out their laptops and work on Excel.

As the day proceeds, we end up chatting. I tell the man with the snowflake tattoo: I thought you were in a biker gang but you’re all just working on Excel. 

The man laughs and says: Finnish men, eh? What can I say? Either we look like thugs. Or like twinks.