BUTTON PUSHING MONKEY

I just want to take this opportunity to say something that very few people I know can say – I love my job. Well, perhaps “love” is too strong a word – how about “appreciate” instead.

I appreciate my job for many reasons. First of all, it is meaningless. This, in itself, is neither a good nor bad trait – it’s just the reality of the situation. There is a near infinite variety of meaningless work available to folks in corporate America, though in most cases, people are “forced” to pretend that it means something, at least while they are actually at work doing their job. I, however, can acknowledge the total lack of meaning in my work at all times and in fact laugh out loud at its absurdity. I know a few people who are actually doing something for money which is a true extension of their inner self, but by and large, most folks I know are simply making the trade of time for money.

For most of my life, I’ve had a very difficult time with this trade – I mean, this is my LIFE we’re talking about – how am I to feel about trading that “in” for something?

But, as I’ve had to come to accept, that is the way of the world in which we live at the present moment. I do X and they give me Y dollars – simple mathematics. (Or simple arithmetic to be more exact.) So, given that reality, I’ve found something to do which I find non-onerous, if not particularly fulfilling. But, with it’s other perks, it gives me plenty of time and energy to do the things in life which DO mean something to me – in other words, it’s a trade I’m willing to make.

When people ask me what I do, I almost always hesitate to answer. I try just telling them that it has nothing to do with reality and just leave it at that. If they question me further, I’ll actually explain it to them, letting them know when they start asking questions that it sounds much more interesting than it actually is. There are about a million other things in my life which I find more engaging so I usually avoid discussing what I do for money because it is really quite boring, at least in my opinion.

Today, however, I’m feeling a surge of gratitude, perhaps because this is the one day of the month that I actually have to leave my house to do my job. In doing so, I come into contact with people who have to go OUT THERE every single day, and I really feel for them. I just sort of coast into an office once a month (with my partner no less – we work together), push some buttons, laugh about what I’m doing the whole time, then leave. Thinking about having to do something, anything, which would require me to sit in an office every day really brings on this sense of gratitude I’m feeling at the present moment.

And what is this silly work which I so glibly coast through? Brace yourself for the two most absurd words in the English language – market research. I suppose it means something to someone somewhere or else they wouldn’t be willing to pay so much money for it, but I find no “real” value whatsoever in knowing whether Budweiser or Bud Light twenty-four ounce cans sold more over the Labor Day holiday. I just don’t care – I can’t imagine what I would have to do to my brain in order for this to matter to me.

But luckily, I don’t have to care – I just have to push buttons accurately. I know, at a corporate level, that this information is VERY important… but it will never be important to me.

I also like that it doesn’t require my mind at all – it’s almost as though I am totally detached from the entire process. Most of what I do (I’m not going to bore you with any of the gory details) is enter numbers from invoices into a tiny computer. It is a relationship between my eyes and fingers, sort of like looking at a page and just typing what is there. It feels, mentally, to me much like crocheting or some other work which I can do with my hands without really thinking about it. It is, in a way, relaxing. I stare, my fingers type, while my brain is free to do whatever it wants.

Add to that that I do my work extraordinarily fast, and the job just gets better and better. For the first couple of years that I worked for this company, I did things at my own pace, but found that that’s not really what they want or expect. According to them, it is statistically impossible for me to work as quickly as I do (and they are the statistical experts, right?), so I repeatedly found myself in a position of having to work in front of my boss (who I try to avoid seeing more than once or twice a year) so that he could validate that yes, I do in fact work this fast.

So, to make them happy, I now do the work at my own pace then leave the clock running until such a time as they would assume it is “supposed” to take me. This is great for a few reasons, namely that I “get paid” to do things like take a bubble bath, drive to the grocery store, or type this Blog. I still finish in way above average time, thus qualifying me for all of the speed bonuses while maximizing the amount I get paid to do the work. I figure if they wanted it “as fast as possible,” they wouldn’t penalize one for doing it “too” fast. This way they’re happy, I’m happy, and no one has to stand over my shoulder to validate my position at the far end of the bell curve.

Another thing that I like about this work is that I can do it whenever I want. There is a set amount of work to be done every week, and no one cares when I do it. There are no early mornings, no rush hour traffic, no dress codes, no co-workers, no customers, no stress. Of course, I am required to manage my time myself, but that is something I am certainly capable of doing. And to me “time-management” means four-day weekends – every week.

My partner put himself through school doing this job, and while his former classmates are still trying to figure out whether they are ready to “take the jump” into their new career (it takes an average of three years to build up a consistent clientele), he is able to work this job around his new one in whatever way he sees fit. He doesn’t have to quit one to begin the other – he just has to schedule his time accordingly.

We have also been able to “share the wealth,” so to speak, among our friends. Since my partner and I were hired, almost every new employee in this district has been a friend of ours. This is good for the people we know who are looking for something flexible, but with a steady income, while they pursue other interests. For artists, musicians, students, etc., it is a perfect fit. It is also good for us in that we get a nice monetary bonus for each person hired, including friends who live in other parts of the country. My boss is certainly happy with the level of people we have referred to him, and has asked if a) we know anyone who has a “normal” career and b) if we know anyone with an I.Q. under a hundred and fifty. He’s happy, they’re happy, we’re happy – everybody’s happy.

The best part of all of this is that I do ninety-nine percent of the job at home. When I first started, I did a lot of field work, but as the work changed and my seniority increased, I’ve ended up in perhaps the cushiest position I could imagine. For some reason, most people don’t like to do invoicing – it’s tedious, time consuming, and unless you have a particular level of finger dexterity, very annoying.

To me, it’s cake. It takes most folks ten hours or so to invoice a store, but I can get it done in less than two. There is one chain of stores in this area which must be invoiced at their corporate headquarters (though that will be changing in the next couple of months), but other than that, all of the invoicing is done at home. This means that I get paid to work in my house wearing my pajamas, listening to Miles Davis while drinking tea with my feet propped up at any hour of the day or night. What could be better?

I suppose being paid for doing something you truly love, but until that day comes, this is an all right trade with me. And, as I say, it leaves the time and flexibility for me to do the things which do matter to me. I’m not exhausted or stressed out by my job and it takes very little energy. If there is something that I want to do on a Tuesday afternoon, there is nothing to keep me from doing it. If I want to stay up all night writing and not get up until noon the next day, no one will care. If I want to shove all of my work into one really long day and then be off for the rest of the week, no one will stop me.

I’m sure, if I tried, I could think of a million things about this job to complain about, but why? Yes, it’s meaningless, but at least it’s a harmless sort of absurdity that I can laugh about. I work for “the man,” but he’s so removed from my actual day to day life that I can easily forget about him – it’s not like he’s breathing down my neck and staring over my shoulder every day. And, sometimes, he even pays me to take a bubble bath.

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(In fact, I wrote a novel last November for the NaNoWriMo contest based on a fictionalized account of this job. ((Well, actually, I wrote it in six days -- just not six in a row.)) It was called "On The Clock" and yes -- that's how it was largely written. It is "My Crazy FINISHED Project" in the left-hand sidebar. Not that I recommend reading it -- remember, with NaNoWriMo the word count counts more than the words.)

‘CUZ-MET

My partner and I took a very interesting trip over Labor Day weekend. Though he is, technically, an only child, he comes from a very large extended family. His mother and father were married late in life, both of them having had families from marriages previous to this, which makes my partner the youngest of a very large generation.

This weekend, his father’s side of the family got together in West Virginia to visit the old homestead situated in the mountains outside of the small town of Lizemores. This town was founded by my partner’s great-grandfather who, at the age of eighty-three, founded a town, redirected a river and built a mill by hand. This type of behavior is typical in his family – they are all quite long-lived and seem to have boundless energy. (I am beginning to understand him more and more by having been exposed to the stories of his larger than life ancestors.)

The trip began with the most amazing coincidence… When I was seventeen, my mother and I took a trip to Virginia Beach, and being true to our nature, we took the scenic route all the way there. Driving through the back roads of West Virginia, we passed the most picturesque inn along the Gauley River. I fell in love with the place – it was beautiful, old, quaint, and was situated right next to the river with a view of the waterfalls. Ever since, I’ve dreamt of going back.

A few years ago, my partner and I ended up driving along the same route through West Virginia, this time in search of his ancestral roots. Again, I wanted to stop and look at the place, admire the view, and state my intention to some day come back and actually spend a weekend at the inn.

Memory being what it is, I could never remember the name of the place once I had left. So, in planning this trip with his mother, it never occurred to me that we might be staying in exactly the place I had so long desired to visit. Even the mention from her that our room faced the river and the waterfalls didn’t cause me to wonder if, perhaps, she was referring to the same place. There are a lot of rivers in West Virginia. I mean, what are the chances?

But, what do you know… Friday afternoon I found myself pulling into the parking lot of the Glen Ferris Inn with my luggage and a reservation for the suite at the top of the building facing the river. So, after all these years, I not only had the opportunity to stay there, but I got to stay in the nicest suite in the whole place. How fortuitous is that?

And it was everything that I had imagined – I had an absolutely fabulous time. Cherry furniture, a gorgeous view, strong water pressure, a kitchen and dining room, gigantic comfortable beds – it was heaven.

I also got to meet my partner’s father’s side of the family, which was very interesting in and of itself. They are all quite intelligent individualistic people, and they came from all over the country. It is always odd, though, since he is so much younger than anyone else from his “generation” in the family. Most of his cousins have already retired, and most of the people who call him “uncle” are ten or twenty years older than he. (Though she wasn’t there, I know that his oldest half-sister is sixty-six.)

I also got to hear all of the old family stories, some of them dating back many generations. Great, great grandfathers who were titled by William the Conqueror, others beheaded by Henry VIII, founding fathers and signers of the Declaration of Independence (his ancestor had the second largest signature after John Hancock), founders of towns and mountain men who studied vast arrays of subjects and taught their children to read music by burning notes into the walls of the woodshed. There is also the uncle from my partner’s father’s generation who, from the time of his mid-twenties on, wore nothing more than a loin cloth and lived in a cave up on the mountain. In the summers, he would put up a sign in the front yard and offer tourists the opportunity to have their picture taken with “The Wild Mountain Man of West Virginia” for twenty-five cents.

Today their interests and occupations are no less vast… I met the aunt (who is now in her mid-eighties) who spent a good deal of her later years teaching school in places like Papua New Guinea, the cousin who was a wing walker (you know—the crazy guys who walk around on the wings of planes WHILE THEY’RE IN THE AIR!!!), the uncle who “spoke” to horses and taught one of them to respond to more than a hundred hand signals, the cousin who speaks five Asian languages and lives in Pakistan… the list goes on and on.

And out of all of these truly unique people, my partner still sticks out. (I heard him referred to as “heroic” by several people when he wasn’t around.) While visiting the old cemetery at the top of the mountain, it started to rain. Though it had been overcast when we began our trek, none of us thought to bring umbrellas or roll up car windows. Taking shelter as best we could under the heavy pine boughs, my partner decided to RUN down the mountain, gather the umbrellas, roll up windows, then RUN back up the mountain with the supplies. Mind you, it had taken the rest of us more than half an hour to trudge up in the first place, but it was less than ten minutes from the time he disappeared around the first bend until he reappeared with the pile of umbrellas.

An uncle of his (the youngest of his father’s generation) had decided to drive his car up the mountain rather than walking, despite the fact that the road wasn’t really a road anymore. (A tractor would have been fine, but not an American luxury car.) Needless to say, he got really, really stuck in the mud. My partner pushed him out, though the only way to go was forward. Since he had to come back out, my partner “built” a road out of logs and stones, filling up the huge muddy ruts so that the car could make its way back out after the visit to the family cemetery. Somehow, he managed to do all of this without getting half as muddy as the rest of us – I swear he’s part raccoon.

We went to the site of the original homestead where my partner’s father was born, and heard stories of what life was like at the beginning of the last century. On the site where his grandmother used to do her washing, we heard the story of how, one day, she tripped over one of the children’s home made toys and fell face-first onto a board with a rusty nail sticking out of it. When she tried to get up she couldn’t – the nail was bent and had lodged itself into her eye socket and was caught behind her cheek bone. Being a woman of stout heart with only small children around to help her (her husband was up on the mountain and far out of ear shot), she stuck her finger into the wound, unhooked the nail from behind the bone, then went about her washing.

We also visited the one room school house where several of the children had been educated, and even had the benefit of one of their old teachers to show us around. (The people in this family seem to live forever.) Though it was small and housed children of all ages, the level of education there seemed to be quite impressive – any stereotypes of uneducated mountain people are completely destroyed by learning about the topics that these people studied. Many of them continued their educations all the way through life, some of them becoming veterinarians, surveyors, lawyers and the like well after the time when most folks would think about retiring.

It fascinates me that the generations of my partner’s family are so long-lived so that one can get a first-hand account of what life was like many decades ago. In the modern era, it is often difficult to get a sense of what life was really like not all that long ago, making it easy to forget that life as we know it wasn’t always this way. I find the sense of history intriguing – my partner’s grandfather was born at the time of the Civil War, his father born at the beginning of WWI, and he during the Vietnam War. That, to me, is quite a span of time.

All in all it was a very enjoyable and interesting weekend. I think that it’s neat when people take an interest in their family history and take the time to trace back their ancestral roots to see where they lead. It gives the feeling of continuity and belonging – it isn’t as though one just dropped out of the sky, or as though life itself began only one or two generations back. For so many people in the modern age, it seems as if we just go through life in our own little boxes, never knowing or understanding where it is that we came from.

It is also interesting to note the repetitive patterns of behavior within families – as I say, I feel as though I understand my partner even better now that I have a sense of where he came from. According to him, however, the most impressive trait that his family possesses is the ability to marry well. They’re obviously doing something right and he is more familiar with them than I, so I won’t argue with this assertion. However, I’ve always known that he is an extraordinary person, but now I see that is at least in part due to his extraordinary heritage.