Is Your Job Worthy of Cocktail Party Discussion?

 

 

In 1979 when I was seventeen, my father, recently divorced from my mother, picked me up in his silver Peugeot to take me to his apartment for dinner. On the drive my father, an upper management engineer, asked me if I had any plans for my future. I told him that at the gym I had met a couple of garbage men who said they had connections for me if I should ever want to work with them. I was tempted to take them up on their offer. After all, I had no specific college aspirations. And the thought of making thirty grand a year, considered rich in the eyes of an adenoidal adolescent in the 1970s, and being finished with my job by nine A.M. seemed like striking gold.

“There’s no way you’re going to become a garbage man, ” my father said looking at the road ahead with a knowing calm as he shifted into fifth gear.

“Why not?”

“Because someday you’ll be at a cocktail party and someone will ask you what you do. What are you going to tell him, that you’re a garbage man?”

That was the end of the discussion. My father knew that even though I was a confused teenager full of sloth and harebrained schemes, that ultimately my vanity, my pride and my class consciousness would steer me clear from becoming a garbage man.

But my foolishness persisted. Six months later as we gathered ingredients inside a supermarket for another dinner inside my dad’s apartment, I told I told him I knew people at my gym who worked as cashiers at this same grocery chain. The money was good, the benefits were decent and the work seemed relatively easy.

“You’ll never become a grocery clerk,” my father said calmly.

“Why not?”

He stopped pushing the shopping cart and told me to take a good look at all the employees with their box cutters, their feather dusters and their slack-jawed expressions. Were these the kind of people I wanted to hang out with for the next forty to fifty years of my life? Were these the type of people whom I aspired to converse with and to befriend?

Indeed not. These were Lifers, mushy-brained cookie-cutter personalities whose banal, predictable existence would drive me to suicidal despair.

However simplistic my father’s caricature description of the Lifers, I was suddenly averse to the idea of working all of my adult years at a blood-sucking supermarket chain. I decided to take my father’s advice to go to college and find a job worthy of boasting about at some cocktail party.

So now I’m fifty and I teach English at a college. And here’s the irony: I’ve never, never, never—not once in my life—ever been to a cocktail party.

And I doubt I ever will.

 

Comments

[J. Marshall]

This story sounds familiar.

At the risk of sounding too class-conscious myself, our Dear Ol' Dads had a point. I'll refrain from calling the feather duster and box cutter-equipped coworkers as "slack-jawed" or "brain-dead," but the point is valid that your occupation will dictate the kind of people with whom you spend the bulk of your waking hours. If they don't share the values, life experience, or interests you do, it can be dreadful.

I did graduate college, but it took me nearly thirty years and two career changes to end up somewhere close to what Dad had in mind for me, and I regret not putting forth the effort sooner.

I'm not a fan of cocktail parties myself, but the few I have attended would have been much more pleasant if I had met an educator or two there to talk to. I'm sure your father is proud.