Always on: The social ethic behind white collar labour

• The big problem with that is obviously I’m always coming in after hours, so there’s no tech support at all. The mini disc in this studio doesn’t work, so I have to try and crack into the next… I run on mini disc, because that was the equipment supplied to me… when I started my employment.

And the mini disc in this studio doesn’t work, so I have to try and use the set up in the next room to upload the mini disc

and then come back in here to do the editing. Although sometimes that studio

is locked because somebody’s been using it and then it’s locked onto their

user name and I can’t unlock it without putting in their user name. Yeah.

It was like I didn’t know how to do shit and I knew I didn’t know how to do shit but I was very passionate about the job. But I didn’t know like technical stuff and I didn’t know how to do it but no one was there to really support you or help you or teach you. It was like well, this is what you do and you figure out to do it.

‘…we tend to eat our lunch at our desk, and that’s when I’ll do a lot

of that recreational internetting’

‘There’s a culture in here of eating at our desks; so you go and warm something up in the microwave, and then come back and eat at your desk, which I don’t like.’

‘I try and keep it to the one pane otherwise I start to get stressed out.’

I do get a pang of sadness when both [my partner] and I are home and he’s on his laptop and I’m on my computer, I just have no idea why that would be the case that we would be both using the computer and be both in the home because, I don’t know, we don’t get to see each other very much and I don’t understand why we’d both need to be working at the same time.

You become consumed by spending 12 hours a day on the Internet and you study and work when you probably should be like talking to your family or something. But I spend – sort of my normal day is get up and turn the computer on before I eat and late at night, because it’s like right here, we’ll spend all that time on the computer or maybe you should go outside and exercise or something… I spend the best part of the day, most part of the day, online. Like either studying or like emailing or Facebook.