“Smile. Look like you’re excited to be working.”

These are our stern instructions for the evening; no caveats, no exceptions. One should look perfect, but not ostentatiously so: hair scraped back and face pinched into a blandly ornamental femininity, malleable as a doll, and loaded up with crockery like a buckaroo; there should be no stray hairs, no stray tears. One should be gregarious, but not imposing: one should know when to shut up.

Some people, of course, are excited to be working. It’s an exciting opportunity to catch a glimpse of someone wealthy – the special treat of wiping up yuppies’ discarded slops as a mediocre boy band perform, or the rare chance to carry canapés around inside a Chelsea townhouse with impractically pale carpeting. These are quite the only perks of the job, but my God, what perks! The task of skulking in the dungeons of the palaces of capitalists is without a doubt a glory to which to aspire. But for those of us with less dizzying ambitions, this reward feels a little hollow, a little unsatisfying, like a turd tied with ribbon.

It’d be easier, somehow, to fall for the fairy-tale. To disappear into the job, turn yourself inside out, turn that frown upside down. I slick my hair back and slip into the anonymity of uniform – we look smoothed, replicated, like androids – I don’t wear my watch or check the time on shift because it’s not my time; it’s swallowed up unmeasured and unmissed. But somehow, the ache comes creeping up my back all the same, somehow the smiles become strained and the heat becomes unbearable. You thank God for the odd guest who stacks plates for you, smiling conspiratorially and saying, “I used to do this job; it’s shit,” and for the odd manager who cuts the crap and sympathises. But this just puts a crack in the façade, and the dread and despair seep through, flooding your bones, filling your lungs.

“Some people don’t enjoy this job, and think they can just turn up and get paid. You’ve got to enjoy the job.”

They awaken me the day after a shift with a disciplinary phone call. My phone is tucked up in bed with me, and so too, now, are Human Resources. The chief complaint: I did not smile. Far be it from me to argue that, as the sole owner of my mouth, and possessor of private experience, I did indeed smile: the supervisors considered otherwise. The determination of our emotional states is no longer arbitrated within ourselves but by the line manager overseeing the concoction of surplus affect. Perhaps I did not show enough teeth; perhaps I should have my cheeks slashed by a Glaswegian gangster for a more authentic visage of enjoyment. But what strikes me now is that appearance has been collapsed into reality: there is no more talk of “seeming”; I am required quite simply to love my job. We do not admit, here in Human Resources, the reality of things, but only the motivational, the aspirational, the gorgeous and infinite possibilities to be found in the stacking of plates.

 “Think of it as a performance. You’re acting. Enjoy the job.”

Rush through the kitchen in desperate heat as the chefs yell at one another. There’s a spinach crisis, and where’s the fucking jus on these plates? Jus isn’t an extra, it’s the fucking foundation of a dish! Shuffle up the pass, burning plates, artichokes. File past a red, sweaty, wobbling man who seems to do little of use but chivvy us out with a faintly aggressive pep talk. He grimaces in the face of a particular girl each time, all revved-up claps and cracking, crumbling enthusiasm, as the searing plates tug on her bones. She obliges him, laughs awkwardly, as though laughing off a proposition.

“Where’s that smile? I wanna see that smile. Yeah, there you go, that’s it!”

A porter photographs the waitresses on his phone as they mill awkwardly around, waiting but not permitted to sit down.

“Are you happy?”

He grins at the girls until they smile back, darts around and tries to take another photograph. I stay aloof, far too weary to intervene, but make a mental note to kick his fucking head in if he sticks that lens in my face. “You’re happy!” He smiles. “You’re happy!” He looks at me, not looking at him. “She’s not happy.”

“What?”

Faint laughter.

He returns, stares. “Are. You. Happy?”

I stare back, dead eyes and pursed lips: “I’m fine. Thank you.”

He skulks off.

I win.

“Smile!”

And this is precisely what makes it so difficult. Smiles do not switch on like lights, and our souls grow anguished far quicker than our muscles these days. The ubiquitous incapacity to smile that plagues us is a wan sort of resistance, a mere flicker thereof, a feeling that seems much more like defeat. The flexibility of labour, more than the shifts with 30 seconds’ notice, the pop-up workplaces, the endless travel planning, the terrible uncertainty, is really the flexibility of the soul, is tireless and empty “personality”: the fanatical prostration of ourselves on the altar of work, our ecstatic, perpetual capitulation. This featureless subject, this cypher, is the dream of capital: labour as regular as a machine, as programmable as a computer, as mobile as money.

Labour speaks. Labour hates. Labour is unkempt. Labour costs the US economy $550 billion annually with its poor attitude. Labour does not feel comfortable in this dress and no, labour will not give you a fucking smile. Labour is not the full-mast flag on the ship, but the invisible toil in its bowels; it weighs it down, reins it in, suffers and sabotages. We despair, for sure, but we will not disappear. It is precisely because we cannot bend that we will not break.