The Learned Automaton

I really should be doing my taxes, but after discussing the following with Chadders, I feel like writing instead.

I hate my job. I hate the hours, the pay (especially the pay), the lack of responsibility, and several of the people I work with. In fact, the only things I don't hate about it are a handful of the people I work with and the horticultural and artistic aspects of it. Probably the thing I hate most, though, is the fact that I have a B.A. and am one thesis short of an M.A. and I do a job that will probably be done by a robot within fifty years.

I tell myself that my job is character-building, that it is something I will look back on someday, when I have a rewarding job and possibly a house, and remember as an experience that I wouldn't care to repeat but that at least gave me a few friends and a few funny anecdotes. And, possibly, the basis for a short story or even a novel (I started writing a story about a particularly interesting loiterer last week). But there are days, an increasing number of them, when I want to tell the prick of an assistant manager what I really think of him, strip off my three-sizes-too-big Kroger shirt, light it on fire, and storm out of the store in a blaze of glory and synthetic fiber. Saturday was one of those days.

It started out with one of the baggers (we'll call him Dallas) striking up a conversation with me in the break room. He'd just gotten a raise, he said. A whole nickel. We bitched about the ridiculous pay for a minute or two (bitching about common afflictions is how I make at least fifty percent of my friends) before I told him, resignedly, that my job is an embarassment to me because I have a B.A. and almost an M.A. and I work in the floral department of a grocery store.

He, of course, asked me why I had taken such a job. I wanted to say something to the effect of having always dreamed of working for a huge national grocery store chain, and that I figured having a college education would greatly increase my chances of being hired for a job in which, with the right equipment and a basic set of programming commands, a computer could complete seventy-five percent of the tasks it required. I laid my sarcasm aside, however, and told him that after I decided to stay in Oxford for another year, it had been the only job I could find within a twenty minute drive.

He asked what my degree was in, I told him English, and then he asked me what was the point of having a degree that wouldn't get me a job unless I wanted to get a Ph.D. and be a college professor. I fought down the urge to pontificate on the intrinsic and priceless value of education and told him I did want to be a college professor, that I could adjunct as soon as I finished my M.A., and that the floral department was just a means to an end until then.

Dallas then told me of his own plans to complete not one but two Ph.D.s simultaneously. I lightly praised his ambition and said semi-seriously that he'd probably be in school until he was almost thirty. The bagger (or "Kroger bitch" as they're otherwise known) then told me, very condescendingly, that his guidance counselor (that's right, the kid's in high school) had finished his Ph.D. in seven years, but that he's spread it out, and said he thought Dallas could finish his two degrees in five years if he did them together. Dallas also told me that he'd complete all of this schooling for free, since his mother works for Miami and he'd applied for free tuition, and that he intended to stay there for all of his degrees and then teach at Miami as well. I made an underhandedly patronizing remark about him having everything planned out as I went to leave the break room, and he called out to me, with an air of superiority, "Don't worry, you'll get back on track."

I wanted to get very defensive, but I realized almost immediately that I was taking this conversation more to heart than I should. Dallas still lives at home, and, if he follows his eight-plus-year plan, will continue to do so until he has his two Ph.D.s. Maybe he will be a college professor before the age of 28, and if so, good for him. I won't do so until well past thirty, if it happens at all, but I think that's okay. If the whole cancer debacle hadn't gone down last summer, I'm sure I would have my M.A. by now and be off doing bigger and better things than making floral arrangements and having pointless conversations with eighteen-year-old baggers who don't yet realize that the real world is complicated and mostly unreceptive to allowing five-year plans to go off without a hitch. But if the cancer debacle hadn't happened, and if I hadn't stayed in Oxford to finish my degree, I probably wouldn't have seen much of Linsey or Jess, or met Mark, or (I say this resignedly) learned how to make a really kickass floral arrangement.

Am I really off track? I'm dealing with my life as it's handed to me (this could spark a whole tangent on free will, but I still have to at least start on my taxes tonight), and besides that, I never really stopped working on my thesis. Progress is slow but real. It might take three months, it might take three years, but I will finish the degree. In the meantime, I'm storing Dallas away for use as a naive character in a future project.