Work???

I’ve always thought of working as selling your time, and since studies show that you can’t take it with you, all you really have is time.

I used working as a metaphor for selling out, but that’s not really accurate. Selling out is when you are doing something you are against for some kind of reward. If you wanted to be a soldier or a teacher all your childhood, and then became one when you came of age, that would not be selling out.

Most of the jobs I have had have been pretty neutral insofar as I thought they were making a better world or not. I guess being a substitute teacher was the closest I came to having a job I believed in, in that if I did a good job it was a better day for the kids and the staff, and if I didn’t, it was a worse day for them.

The one job I can think of where I didn’t feel like I was doing the right thing was when I worked for the real estate pirates. These are the guys who you see in the papers about once a year where some poor widow has neglected her property taxes for a few years, and now is being turned out of the home she had lived in her whole life for not paying a hundred bucks or something.

Well it’s not really like that, well almost never. The thing is the state needs your property tax money right now, and not when you can get around to paying it. So if somebody will step in and pay it for you, that makes it alright for the state. And the person who steps in is going to want something for their trouble, and what they get is interest from the property holder if they want to get back in the clear. It’s a long and involved practice but what it amounts to is that over a few years, if you don’t pay up, you slide deeper and deeper into their debt, and eventually you may lose your property to them.

So the thing is they are doing good work because they are ensuring that the govt gets its property taxes, and really you have to screw up pretty badly to lose your property, and it almost never happens that a widow gets kicked out of her house. Though I did notice whenever my employers came across a story about a widow losing her house their eyes took on a certain gleam.

In all those deals where money is switched around here and there like the pea under the walnut shell, it never did seem quite right to me, but I needed a job, so there I was. No big deal, I was not there long before I got canned. And like all those stories about getting canned, it was a complicated situation, and it was not my fault.

The thing that has been drilled into our heads since we were knee high to a tall toadstool was that we should study hard and then we could get a job that we would like, and then we would have the best of all worlds. And there is a certain amount of truth to that, but you can have the greatest job in the world with a really cool boss and then he gets run over by a truck and the next boss makes your life a living hell and there is nothing you can do about it, because unlike those wonderful woodsman days of yore, there is not another job just down the block.

And that is the whole problem anymore, there are more people who want jobs than there are jobs, and the people who are handing out the jobs are the rich people, and the rich people have all the money and hence all the power, and any change would have to come from them, and fat chance of that.