Work: Two Fingers in the Air

Note: Hoping to turn this into a creative non fiction essay with several different parts. Total goal isn't completely clear, and this is certainly a draft. Just thought I'd share.

Work: A force is said to do work if, when acting on a body, there is a displacement of the point of application in the direction of the force.

Rosemary returned to her receptionist chair during the first week of the rest of my life, turned back in the direction she came and shot a double-barreled bird flip in the air. Welcome to your career change, Dan. Share a cramped, bland office and suffocate in the equally bland life of proposal writing for a surveying and engineering firm, and act as a referee between your boss and his receptionist.

Here’s the office: White painted walls and gray carpet, light gray desktop with light gray drawers, a gray bulletin board, a set of cabinets with doors painted white with a countertop shaded in a blue trying its hardest also to be white. The lone decoration – at least until I added a Cubs schedule to the bulletin board – is two maps - one of Illinois and the other a close up of Chicago. Both good for planning my escape.

The door to our office opens toward my desk, so my immediate scenery is the door and the back of Rosemary’s head. The door is wood. It is brown with a silver door knob. It’s nice. Rosemary’s hair is dark brown and curly. She is in her 60s, seems to hate this place, and is prone to outbursts. The person I replaced apparently left because of escalating conflicts with Rosemary. The outbursts don’t bother me, I’ve certainly dealt with worse, and I appreciate a good “Stone Cold” Steve Austin impression as much as the next guy.

Rosemary’s two-finger salute was directed toward Tom, our boss except he refuses to admit it, who no doubt was out of the line of sight in his own office, but most likely felt the force of emotion emitting from the fingers just the same. Tom professes to have 10 years left in his tenure and anointed me as his replacement about 10 minutes after arriving. Tom is a marketing robot bought on clearance from some sort of Cold War era robot-making factory in Siberia. He has the necessary information logged in his memory cards, but his brain wiring is so mish-mashed together that it comes out in fits and starts and oftentimes is lost in his programming before it reaches his lips. His nearly daily proclamation of adult ADD is probably as accurate as it is maddening to work with. In the end, he lives by our owner’s credo “Show up every day and do our best,” and while he has few scruples when it comes to business, he genuinely seems concerned about pretty much everyone and everything.
 
Rosemary hates Tom, and Tom inexplicably fears Rosemary. I am the buffer.

Which brings me to a memory from a wedding reception I attended several years ago with my wife. The best man – I think – was the brother of the bride, and delivered a toast where he commended his little sister for picking a man, who wasn’t afraid to work or to get his hands dirty. I suppose that’s a sign of living in the rural Midwest where work and the willingness to stick your hands into basically anything is valued over all other personality traits. Hell, for all I know, that beaming husband went home and mauled his wife, cheated on his taxes and refused to recycle, but damn it if he wasn’t first in line to help pull the engine out of my old Ford. What a guy!

The part about having a fear of getting one’s hands dirty actually stuck with me for a while. I realized sometime between my teen years and advancing into adulthood, or adulting if you’re on Twitter, I grew a distaste for doing anything that did get my hands dirty. Weird right, especially for a kid that grew up on a farm. I don’t know how it happened, other than that through a series of jobs and life choices, my hands rarely did get filthy, and when they did, I didn’t like it. Once I heard that speech, a shame for this condition started to brew. It’s probably why I eat so many sweets. Maybe officiating Rosemary and Tom skirmishes is my penance.

Working hands and hands working evolved us beyond the apes. Some of us make that step into constructive time consumption, stop and look back, and wonder why the hell we ever left the jungle. The rest of us put on our pants on each day and trudge through the tasks, quietly, diligently, lazily and sometimes with both middle fingers flashing above our head.

The modern way for measuring life is by work, at least in my mind it is, and lately my life ruler has been out seeing how I measure up.