The Shawlands Redemption
Three months after I left my corporate job, I’m still slightly nervous about taking a piss without asking permission.
Disclaimer: None of the following should be taken as a criticism of my old employers. It’s not. It’s simply my personal experience of adjusting to life after a stretch in a very traditional corporate.
“These walls are funny,” said Morgan Freeman in the Shawshank Redemption, “First you hate ‘em, then you get used to ‘em. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them. That’s institutionalized.”
Near the film’s conclusion, Freeman’s character—Red—wins parole after 40 years in stir. On the inside, he was a somebody. The man who can get anything for anybody. On the outside, he’s a old man packing groceries into paper bags.
“Restroom break?” Red asks his manager.
“You don´t need to ask me every time you need to go take a piss. Just go.”
“Forty years I’ve been asking permission to piss. I can’t squeeze a drop without say-so,” narrates Red, “Terrible thing, to live in fear.”
I’ve glimpsed Red’s anxiousness, if only just a little.
This June, I left my corporate job. I’d been there for less than 2 years, but the very next day, I found myself asking permission to take a piss, just like Red.
I worked in a very traditional industry (the car trade) and there were lots of rules and regulations to follow, and forms to fill in.
The walls were prison grey (technically battleship grey—the paint was a job lot) and the downstairs gents wouldn’t have been altogether out of place at Shawshank. But despite the correctional appearance of the buildings, over 2 years I grew to love the place and—more than anything—the people I worked with.
Like Red at Shawshank, in our shabby building in the Shawlands area of Glasgow I was somebody. It might not have been a glamourous Silicon Roundabout startup, but I was the Head Web Developer for a £2.5bn company, building a super-talented Ruby team, and I was proud of what we were trying to achieve.
There were frustrations,sure. Anyone who’s ever worked for a corporate knows you’d be a fool to expect any different.
But when my time came to move on, while I was happy to be off on a new adventure, I was gutted to be leaving one of the most talented teams I’ve ever worked with and a group of people I counted as friends.
One thing I wasn’t going to miss, though, was the rules. And yet…
Skip forward 24 hours and I’m contracting in a trendy TV production company. I’m wearing jeans and trainers (on a Wednesday!), there’s free fruit and beer. Hell, they even have a chef on staff and free tacos at lunch!
It was everything I’d missed in the old job. Everything we’d sat around at lunchtimes and bitched about. It was how I felt things should be.
And it made me nervous as hell.
I knew I didn’t have to ask to take a banana. But when you’ve spent two years being told coffee is a privilege, and reading Friday memos asking you to make sure your tea’s not too milky, it’s hard to—well—to really believe it.
And when you’ve grown used to running the last 100 metres to work, just to make sure you swipe in before the machine ticks over to 9:01 (and you’ll have to email your line manager, again, to explain why you were late)—well—it takes a while to get used to swanning in at 9:03 without anyone batting an eyelid.
And that’s how it came to pass that on the first day of the job, in a moment of muscle memory, I—a 30-something web developer with a rebelious streak and a history of being a pain in the ass— asked permission to take a piss.
It wasn’t even like that was the something I’d ever had to do in corporate life. They were strict, but they weren’t that strict. But part of me hadn’t adjusted to this bold new world where you were trusted to make decisions, rather than refer to a rulebook.
“Is it OK to use the bathroom?”, I asked, like a timid schoolboy asking a friend’s mother, “And I’ll finish off the document when I get back.”
I had become institutionalised.
Three months on I’m working in trendy agency in Shoreditch. There’s artwork on the walls, Herman Millar chairs, even free fruit and breakfast cereal.
There are no swipe cards, no dress code, and nobody telling me off for having headphones in.
Still, a full 3 months on, I do get a tiny bit nervous that someone’s going to pick me up on being 5 minutes late, or abusing my Weetabix priveledges by having 3 in a bowl.
Heck, I’ll even admit there are moments where I miss those prison-grey Shawlands walls.
At the end of the film, Red takes a bus down to Mexico, to meet the film’s lead character, Andy Dufresne.
Red escaped the stone walls of Shawshank Prison for the Pacific shoreline, excited by the way ahead.
“I think it is the excitement only a free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain…”
Having left behind Shawlands’ prison-grey walls for the sunny adventure of Shoreditch, I know exactly how he felt.
