How many Moroccans does it take to change a lightbulb?

This isn't the beginning of a racist joke. It's the beginning of a reflection on how the definition of "work" is strongly culturally bound. This isn't something I had thought much about before moving to Morocco.

Before T and I came here, B (who lived here for a few years) told us a story about an attempt to pay one of his utility bills (I forget now which bill it was). He went to the office of the utility company to pay his bill. The office was open; B had the right amount of money; people were working there. Nevertheless, he was told he couldn't pay his bill because the man whose job it is to take the money was not there. If I remember correctly, B had to make more than one trip and spend quite a bit of time waiting. Apparently the-man-whose-job-it-is-to-take-the-money also worked in another office at the same time that he worked in this office and had to be summoned back to this office in order to take B's money.

Here's the great part of the story: When the-man-whose-job-it-is-to-take-the-money showed up, he walked behind the counter, took B's money from his hand, and handed it to one of the other office workers who had been there all along.

His job was literally, and solely, to take the money.

I don't have such an extreme story from my own experience, but I did start observing similar "jobs" almost from the moment I got off the plane in Casablanca. I used a couple of the restrooms in the Casa airport, and each bathroom had its own attendant. The job of the attendant in the first restroom appeared to be to sit in the restroom and notify people that the soap was out. The job of the attendant in the second restroom appeared to be to talk to her counterpart in the nearby men's restroom.

There are also guards everywhere. The University campus has two sets of guarded gates that people must go through to get onto campus. There is also always some sort of guard standing by the road in town leading to what I think is the public swimming pool. And if you park in downtown Ifrane, you don't pay for a parking spot, but when you leave, you pay an attendant for "watching" your car.

My favorite work set up was in Banque Populaire (our Moroccan bank). The door into the bank is always locked, so the bank pays a man to unlock the door when people walk up to it so they can get in (I was in the bank for quite a while and never saw the man deny anyone entrance). This man is also paid to take numbered tickets from a machine and hand each person one so everyone knows when it's their turn to go up to the counter.

Oh, and speaking of the counter...when we went to the bank, there were only two tellers working, and they were working at the same station. The only other employee we saw was a guard. The line was long, and if we hadn't basically cut in line, the bank would have closed and we would have been turned away before our number was called. I'm sure many people were turned away at closing time that day.

My American sensibility says: Why pay a guy to unlock a door and hand people tickets? That's not essential work! Why not train him or someone else as a teller so the line can be moved along more quickly? Why not split up the two tellers who are working? But the fact that I have those thoughts shows that one's sense of what constitutes "work" is culturally bound. Morocco is a very poor country, with a lot of uneducated people who need jobs. Culturally, then, it makes sense to pay people to mop the sidewalks or attend the restrooms or whatever.

There's also another aspect to this idea of "work," which is that there is an amazing entrepreneurial spirit here. People create jobs out of almost nothing. There is a man who walks around the souk selling drinks of water. There are other people who sell plastic grocery bags at the souk. In Fez, I saw a young boy standing in the middle of the road selling boxes of facial tissues to people driving by.

I'm sure there must be jobs in the U.S. that make very little sense to people from other cultures. In fact, once I start thinking about it, there are jobs in the U.S. that don't make sense to me, especially all the paper-pushing jobs created by the private health insurance industry. But maybe that's a topic for another day. Right now, I have to go do laundry, which involves giving a ticket to a woman whose job it is to start the washing machine for me.