A man out of work finds community at Occupy Wall Street.
by George Packer
DECEMBER 5, 2011 Ray Kachel took a bus from Seattle to join O.W.S. Photograph by Wayne Lawrence.
Until this fall, Ray Kachel had lived virtually all of his fifty-three years within a few miles of his birthplace, in Seattle. He was a self-taught Jack-of-all-trades in the computer industry, who bought his first Mac in 1984. He attended Seattle Central Community College but dropped out; not long afterward, he was hired by a company that specialized in optical character recognition, transferring printed material into digital records for storage. Eventually, Kachel was laid off, but for a long time he continued to make a decent living; keeping up with advances in audio and video production, he picked up freelance work editing online content. He also programmed and played keyboards in a band, and had a gig as a night-club d.j.; sometimes, between technology jobs, he worked in his adoptive parents’ janitorial business. He spent his money on a few pleasures, like microbrewery beer and DVDs. His favorite movie was “Stalker,” the 1979 sci-fi film by Andrei Tarkovsky. “Three guys traipsing through the woods—it’s visually and aurally very, very strange,” Kachel said. “Tarkovsky is famous for painfully long takes, creating an environment that’s uncomfortable without it being clear why.”
Kachel lived alone in a one-bedroom apartment. In the nineties, after his parents died, he became something of a hermit, with just a few friends. Small of stature, with short-cropped hair, drab clothes, and a mild manner, he was the sort of person no one noticed. Then again, a lot of tech workers were antisocial, and the information economy embraced millions of skilled, culturally literate, freelance oddballs. As long as the new economy made room for him, Kachel lived the life he wanted.
When the recession hit, tech jobs in Seattle started drying up. After the death of the owner of his main client—a company for which he did DVD customization—Kachel found that he no longer had contacts for other sources of work. He cut back on expenses and quit drinking beer. Last December, he ordered from Amazon a green, apple-shaped USB stick containing the entire Beatles collection; just before it was scheduled to ship, he cancelled the order. “Around that time, I started realizing spending two hundred fifty dollars on something wasn’t such a good idea,” he said. “I’m glad I made that decision, because I wouldn’t have enjoyed the stereo mix anyway.”
In March, Kachel’s mouth went dry; he felt sick with anxiety and could barely eat. He realized that he was coming to the end of his savings. He could survive as a barista or a delivery driver, but he didn’t think he was capable of chatting with customers all day, and he had stopped driving years earlier. He applied for every tech opening that he could find, but only one offer came, from Leapforce, a company that evaluates Web search results. Kachel signed on as an “At Home independent agent,” doing work on his iMac for thirteen dollars an hour, but the hours soon dwindled to twenty or thirty minutes a day. That was his last job.
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http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/12/05/111205fa_fact_packer
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