Solving Sorities
The Sorities Paradox grapples with the problem of how to rule boundaries around broad concepts. If you take a grain of rice, then add another grain to it, all you have is two grains of rice. But as you keep adding grains, you eventually have a pile of rice, and if you keep going, a heap. You couldn’t say, though, at exactly what point your collection of rice grains becomes a pile, or when it stops being a pile and becomes a heap. You wouldn’t even say that one grain of rice could ever make the difference between one and the other. How is this so? (Check out this interactive example - trying to pick the point when red become purple, and then the point when purple becomes red, and finding, surprise surprise, that it’s a different point).
Yesterday, I found myself facing a Sorities Paradox of my own. When does a tolerable situation become an intolerable one? At what point does an additional irritation, however minor, tip the balance in such a way that an activity that was viable becomes unviable?
I often do gigs that are unjustifably underpaid. I often have to wait a long time for the money to come through. I often do gigs in spite of ethical conflict. I often find myself, on a gig, being treated with less than the respect I deserve.
All in all, I’m in the habit of taking every scrap of work that I can possibly fit in, on the basis that it’s the only way to insulate myself against the inherent fickleness of the music industry. The money I got for tonight’s gig might be crummy, but its value will seem to multiply the next time I look in my diary and see empty weeks ahead. So yes, I put up with all of these things, sometimes in combination. The particular gig I was doing yesterday, and which I’ve been doing monthly for a while, was one which had always come with quite a collection of irritations. In fact, all of those I’ve just mentioned. But I did it, happily enough, for quite a long time.
It’s always been the case on this gig that there’s a problem with the background music. They like to leave it on while the band is playing (it’s a wandering trad jazz trio). I’d always assumed it was because there was some policy that there should be background music playing (maybe based on some research that people feed more into poker machines when themselves fed on a diet of insipid muzak), and our sound, since it would not carry to the outlying corners of the establishment and would thus leave some pensioners being robbed in relative silence, was not sufficient. Yesterday, I discovered that there’s another reason: the meal announcements (as in, “Number 29, your schnitzel is ready”) were going through the same system, and the volume for both muzak and distorto-number-calling was controlled (get this) by the same knob. So the minimum-wage drones, presumably not payed enough to crank the knob up for the announcements and down in between, refused outright to turn the music down. I don’t know whether it was the sheer technological stupidity of it all offending my gadgeteer’s sensibilities; whether it was the look of withering neutrality (thanks, David Foster Wallace, for the only phrase that comes close to describing it) on Mr Morethanmy Jobsworth’s face as he shrugged off our polite request; or whether it was the fact that the muzak was just that ten decibels louder than its normal, inconsiderate level. Whatever the cause, a line was crossed. The gig which had hitherto been a modest pile of modest irritations, became, on that day, a full-blown heap of shit.
And so, I’m going to go back on the habit of a lifetime: next time it comes along, I’m going to say “no”. I’ll lose the money (or at least, the three-month chose in action that I normally get in lieu of actual payment as such), but I’ll gain the satisfaction of knowing that, as tolerant as I am of many things that I probably shouldn’t be, I do have my limits, and what’s more, I know when I’ve reached them.
2 Comments
- Angus replied:
Congratualations, both for taking a stand and for making it through that entire post without once using the phrase “the straw that broke the camel’s back”!
June 24th, 2003 at 9:39 am. Permalink.
- matt replied:
“… three month chose in action …”
Heh.
The total product of my legal education so far … I get to laugh at lawyer jokes. Sigh.
June 24th, 2003 at 10:04 pm. Permalink.