As a job, mine’s about as good as you can get. I’m in out of the cold all winter, I get to sit down most of the time and it’s interesting enough that I never find myself watching the clock and waiting for quitting time.
In fact, about the only time I really hate it is when it comes time to teach someone else how to do it. But if I want to take a holiday – or get the flu for a day or two – there has to be somebody around who can fill in.
It isn’t that what I do for a living is all that tough to explain to someone else, though to total novices it might seem complicated, and I don’t mind at all if they think it is. (Whenever a touring group of students stops by my desk to watch me work at my computer, I hardly glance their way and instead look seriously at the screen like I’m designing a better solid rocket booster for the space shuttle, not typing up fall fair results.) No, my trouble is, I have so many peculiar ways of doing things and to get someone else to agree to do them that exact way without rebelling is hard.
Job trainees nowadays have an annoying habit of asking why this has to be done this way and that, that way. And their trainers, by nature, don’t like to be expected to answer these impertinent questions from young upstarts fresh out of school. That’s why you might overhear them saying, “Listen, Socrates, I didn’t invent newspapers. I just work at one.” Or: “What, do I look like an information booth?”
The reason I hate the question “why?” is because a lot of the time, I haven’t got a clue why. Someone else who sat at my desk long before I got there started doing things this way and every one of his successors has just kept on doing it, including me. Kind of like the retired farmer who goes down to the barn every night to make sure the door’s locked, even though there hasn’t been an animal inside the building for years.
You can’t tell a trainee you don’t know why even though it’s pretty obvious you don’t, so you have to devise explanations and try to explain them. They don’t believe them and neither do you but pretty soon they get sick of listening and are darned sorry they asked. Trouble is, five minutes later, there they are asking you about something else, as if, by some miracle, you might know the answer to that mystery. It soon becomes obvious that they’re tormenting you and that they like doing it.
In the end, you have no choice but to lose your temper and demand that, right or wrong, this is the way it will be, my way or the highway. Before you’ve turned your back, they’re already doing it their way.
The trouble with training others for your job is the knowledge that they will no longer hold you in the high esteem they might have at one time, once they find out how ordinary the tasks you do every day actually are. When they’re new, they’re full of awe and this is a desirable state to keep them in. But as you train them, you can see that glow of admiration fading from their faces. They’re never the same again. Where they might have shown respect – even got you a coffee from time to time – now they call you by your first name and want to take their breaks with you.
And of course, it’s a sad, sad day when one other person in this world can do what you do and you know, with time, he’ll probably do it better. Because from that day on, you’re aware that your indispensability factor – the thing you count on to get you through all those days you come to work in a bad mood – has been removed.
However, since it’s unlikely that a hundred years from now anyone will be doing the tasks you think are so important to do today, you might wonder if any of this is worth losing sleep over. Then you come to your senses and realize that it certainly is.
If you can’t lose sleep over the thing that puts the corn flakes on your breakfast table every day, just what can you lie awake about?
1988 Jim Hagarty
