Still vaguely paranoid after all these years...

The thing of it is, of course, that if you’d told me in 1987 that I would still be working in this dump in 2012 I would have laughed my ass off and then told you, in a completely impolite tone of voice, that you were out of your damn mind.  Yes sir, that’s what I would have done.  None of that civil service baloney for me, are you nuts, no way, Jose! Of course, this being twenty-five years later and here I am, still toiling away in the egregious mold pit like some proletarian drudge out of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, well, that’s more than a little embarrassing, I have to say.  Laughing in someone’s face when they’re right and you’re wrong is always discomfiting in retrospect. Even in currentspect, which I’m fairly certain isn’t even a word, it’s discomfiting.

Actually, I’m still wondering how I’ve managed to hang onto this job, given my absolute lack of qualifications and basic unsuitability for it. I have a degree in the basic subject matter, but I got it back in the early 1990’s when all the information I needed was in books and it was just a matter of finding the right bit of information in the right book. But at about the same time I was getting my masters degree Tim Berners-Lee was inventing the World Wide Web, thereby rendering everything I’d learned obsolete. This is annoying in and of itself, you know, because no matter how you look at it, the time and money I spent getting that damn degree is now time and money flushed down the rat hole.  And all I learned in graduate school was theory, and while in theory there is no difference between theory and practice, in practice theory is a waste of everyone’s time and energy. Nothing I learned in graduate school prepared me for how to deal with exploding toilets, leaky roofs, crazy people defecating in the main room, adults aggrieved that they have to obey our rules, horny teenagers going at it amidst the flower pots, kids setting off fire alarms, oil burners glowing in the dark, and the dead guy in the men’s room.  I don’t remember any of that coming up at all in school, not even once.  I wonder why I’m still here sometimes. I think it’s just a lack of imagination on my part, but I could be wrong about that.