Response: He Works Hard for the Money
Well, Bunky, I hate to shatter the high esteem you hold for me because of my stellar career and meteoric rise in this place some affectionately call Dewey’s World. I know how devastated you were when Pee Wee Herman was pinched. The truth is, the very foundations of my career and all the early decisions that went into it were based on selling myself short. Not surprising really, since I’ve done that my whole life. I went to an easy college, chickened out of transferring to a more prestigous one, cowered from accepting an offer at a high-powered graduate school. I’m not sure when I started selling myself short or why, but I usually blame it on my sister and my mother; oh and my father.
I did have career aspirations early on, though. Here’s my list in order of how desperate I was to have the career:
Professional assassin
Sniper
Paratrooper
Intelligence agent (not a James Bond spy type, but like an analyst)
Preacher
City planner
Letter carrier
Librarian
Bus driver
Anyone can see that, like any good Pisces, I was pulled in different directions. I wanted to kill people, but I also wanted to help them. The problem was that no matter how many guns and knives I owned (a lot) and how many years my Soldier of Fortune subscription ran, I was ultimately too damned chicken to go through with one of those top jobs. After I got out of the cult, I just couldn’t bring myself to be a preacher. And, after I’d been to Europe a couple times and four years of college, I couldn’t allow myself to be a letter carrier or a bus driver. So, I was left with librarian, city planner or intelligence agent.
I laughed out loud when I read your account of the Oil Bust because I was affected by it, too. My worldview as a young teen just beginning to think about my future career was profoundly influenced by the Bust, but the funny thing is you’re affected by it the way I was by people telling me about the Great Depression. The Depressioneers were my age now when they were telling me to play it safe: “if you could keep your job, you’d make it through,” they told me. “So, find something that’s very secure.” My dad was no help, he grew up after the war when opportunity was limitless. He was unfazed by the Bust because, as he said, “I’ve never had any trouble finding work.” And it’s true, he hasn’t; he never went to college and never had a Career, but he was never unemployed (but he never worked with the black stuff). Still, those stories of the Depression weighed on me as I saw the unemployment lines on the news and friends moved away as their laid-off fathers took them to greener pastures elsewhere.
The thing about the Oil Boom was that people lived like there was no tomorrow. The new cars, big houses, rhinestone cowboy boots, and worst of all, the oil boom shacks thrown up by the thousands in far northwest Oklahoma City. Nine out of ten of the college kids I knew were Petroleum Geology majors or some other major related to the industry. By the time their four years were up they were lucky to be a bank teller and the ones who got a job moved to Dallas.
Combining the shaky economic times of my youth with my habit of selling my self short, meant that I went the librarian route. Not that I don’t love what I do, but notching reference questions on your belt is not nearly as exciting as notching heads of state you dropped from a fifth-story window at 500 yards. Or driving through a regentrified neighborhood in a former slum and knowing your plan made it happen. But I’ve got a career and as long as I walk the straight and narrow, I’m likely to keep it through good times and bad.
I’d say you’re in a good position, though, there’s an element of freedom in working non-career track jobs because you always know in the back of your mind you can chuck it and do something else. You don’t have to play games to get ahead and nix to all the kowtowing. Moving from job to job keeps it interesting and you can always say you’re gathering material for that next album. Now, I don’t like to give advice, but here’s what you do: marry a high-achiever and then follow her to another city while she fulfills her career goals. Or I hear stripping pays well.
posted by St. Fiacre @ 4:17 PM,
