When you are a kid, growing up, there are certain professions that you want to be. You want to be an astronaut or president. Sometimes you are a little more realistic and you say stuff like lawyer, doctor, or crane operator. Those jobs look cool to you as a kid.
But there are lots of jobs that you never hear kids say.
I want to be one of many thousand people who do tiny little jobs that are often directly at odd with other tiny jobs held by my fellow co-workers who work down the hall from me. Jobs that make us hate other people for daring to contradict us and our opinions about those tiny jobs. I want to pit myself against the person in the office who NEVER makes coffee and NEVER refills the copier. I want to jealously guard some office supplies or a mouse that I accidentally ended up with. I want to spend 9 to 10 hours a day sitting in a cubicle, by myself, wondering what I really should be doing, and how on earth what I am doing helps anyone. Anywhere.
I want to be involved with power generation. Not the guy who envisions bold new ideas for harnessing wind power or water power. I want to one of the guys who looks at dials and meters who checks whether the meter still reads 407 for 25 years. I want to be one of the guys who is instrumental in sending current from place to place, current that is unchanging and invisible. I want to dig hole after hole and run miles of wire, the same wire, everyday, for weeks and years to remote places or to anyplace so that people can have something that they expect should be there. They won’t appreciate it at all.
I want to write those little slips of paper like those that come with your mobile phone that say stuff like correction to pp 44 & 45. The last paragraph should not read as follows:
Cut the red wire, but first -new page- cut the blue wire when disarming the bomb.
Instead it should read:
First cut the blue wire. Then no new page cut the red wire when disarming the bomb.
Failure to follow these directions could result in serious harm. We mean bad.
I want to spend the better part of my productive days in a battle with a tin-horn administrator, bent on destroying my soul. I want to plot ways to avoid eye contact with this soul sucker instead of helping children learn about art. I want to experience disabling, unexplainable pain in my lower back that I numb with a combination of alcohol and ibuprofen while I mumble, at an appropriate distance, about the wonder of the human mind’s potential for creativity. Oh, and I want the school committee, consisting of townies who have not been to a museum since elementary school and who think I talk funny, to offer productive suggestions on my teaching methods.
Or I could be a campus cop at a small college.
Current Mood: chipper chipper
