Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

I’ve had so many jobs since I was eighteen I can barely remember a fraction of them in the ensuing fifty years. It’s usually the worst one that spring to mind, some lasting not even a full day, some far longer than ever expected or desired. Jobs I had in college were so great in number and brief in endurance it seems as if every week I was doing some mindless, boring task until getting the boot or quitting, and they all just shmush together in an amorphous glob stuck in some corner of my memory bank.

But one I had during the interminable college years was all too brief. I answered an ad to test a nasal decongestant for about a week, the only two qualifications being having a cold, and having the ability to breathe. I was eminently qualified for the second part, having been able to breathe successfully for the prior twenty years, and I faked the cold, which is easy when you have allergies. Imagine, getting paid for breathing! Where are you going to get a job like that … outside of politics?

Then on the flip side there were jobs I quit the same day I began. One such h beauty was at a ski slope exchanging ski boots for patron’s shoes. Started out easy enough. You gave the size ski boot requested, took the person’s shoes, tagged said shoes, put them on a shelf and gave said person the corresponding tag number. Piece of cake – at first. Then people started coming in thicker and faster, all in a big hurry to get out to the slopes. Pretty soon I was furiously searching for the right boot size, tagging the shoes and stashing them on the shelves as the lines got longer and the demand for rapid service increased. By the end of my morning shift I was grabbing, tagging and stashing so fast I never checked to make sure I was giving the corresponding tags to the right people. I was moving so rapidly to keep up with demand I’d hand out tags to any hands stuck out in front of me. Figuring I’d made dozens of mistakes in these first few hours I concluded the prudent thing to do was to quit, well, actually to quietly slink away before end of day when the skiers returned to claim their footwear. For all I know those people are still looking for their shoes and that was 30 years ago.

Then there was the job in college working as a file clerk for the ILGWU (International Ladies Garment Workers Union). I’d be handed a large stack of file folders, put them on a metal roller cart and wheel them into a cavernous room with row after row of floor to ceiling numbered metal shelves containing a gazillion files. The top row of course were well out of reach and only gotten to by using a rolling stair contraption like the ones in libraries.

That was the job. Find the right place for the file in the right row on the right shelf and repeat. And repeat, and repeat, until the boredom was palpably nauseating. I did last the whole day though, which I considered some kind of an endurance record, and at least some of the files made it to their rightful place.

Which brings me to the subject of jobs and work at a time in our fair land when the shortage of which is no laughing matter. Awful jobs abound, but having no work is one of the worst things that can happen to a person. We all know we can’t survive economically without a job, at least with some modicum of comfort. There is, thanks to those who fought for it, a safety net when there is no income and not the wherewithal to meet bills and expenses, but such a bare subsistence level is nothing one wants to have to face. And yet far too many of our fellow countrymen/women are in this camp. I suppose it’s an accomplishment that we do not let people go without food or shelter in our country – there are agencies and facilities that provide for those in need – though when one drops to that bottom level of threadbare existence the prospects must be grim, bordering on hopeless.

But work is so much more than a job or wages. It’s so much a part of our identity, who we are, our sense of self-worth or even our reason for being. For so many of us, work gives us meaning – no matter what the task. It can be our source of pride, of fulfillment; the deep sense of usefulness. Even if and when one no longer needs to earn a living and can retire to a life of pure self-indulgence, it seems all too often that without the need to work, at something, one withers and dies. It could be said that the human need to work, to engage with life at some level, even if it’s cerebral and intellectual is as hard-wired into our DNA as the other imperatives.

Goofing off is great, and here I speak with some authority. Vacations are splendid, and simply doing nothing, woolgathering or stargazing can be sublime, but not for long. Sooner or later the urge to be doing something, to be working at something, arises, and one gets back on the wheel and picks up a hammer or a broom or a pen and sets about some task. It’s an integral part of being a human.

Which is why we invest so much of our lives in working, doing jobs, even when we’re not paid for it. It drives volunteerism – the need to be useful to some one or for some thing. Somewhere along the line of my life I learned a most important lesson, and that was it’s not the job that matters, no matter how odious that work might seem, but the attitude toward that work and the decision to do it to the best of one’s ability that matters. Herein lies self-respect.

For these and myriad reasons it’s now so important that jobs be generated and people put back to work. This is the government’s primary tack at this time; to get Americans working again, not just for the sake of the economy – that amorphous concept we all talk about and barely understand – but for our people to feel whole again.

Millions of us, individuals and families, whole communities were mugged, rolled, robbed and left for dead by a bunch of venal crooks in Armani suits and Gucci loafers. Well-dressed con men, but fraudulent cheats nonetheless; many of them the same high-paid hucksters Bush gave tax breaks. One or two, a Madoff or a Ken Lay go to jail, but the vast majority gets even bigger bonuses, and continues to scheme new ways to fleece us sheep. Why aren’t our jails overflowing with these low-life miscreants?

It’s no wonder people get apoplectic, don ridiculous costumes and rail against government, even when the administration in power wasn’t the one to blame. And it’s no laughing matter when the unhinged and the violence-prone among them are further incited by hate-mongers and the political stooges who fan these flames. It’s a dangerous time in our country when the deranged and the closet racists are easily manipulated and their furor turns to violence.

If President Obama, a well-meaning and temperate fellow in my estimation, wants to restore our country to some semblance of normalcy, he’ll follow in the footsteps of FDR when he took the wheel and got the masses of unemployed working and productive again. And then, if he’s half the man FDR was, he’ll come down really hard on Wall Street and the big corporations that have been screwing the public with reckless abandon since the restrictions and regulations were s__t-canned by Reagan in the 80s and Clinton in the 90s. But that’s for another little fireside chat.