Mensch-Maschine
Dentists, I have recently read, take their lives more than any other profession, barring tollbooth workers and doctors. This statistic seems to make some amount of sense to me, seeing that what this profession mostly entails is standing over another person with your hands crammed down their throat as you ask them questions which can only be answered in monosyllabic grunts and garbled incoherence. So close, you are, but so far away. The same could be said of toll booth workers, who (with the exception of the dude at the Hudson exchange, where you pick up the Rip Van Winkle bridge, who mirthfully takes your change at 2:00 am as you make your way from Bard college, haphazardly ripping through the mountainside with reckless abandon) also have the most overtly pointless interactions with human beings. I think about this as I whiz down Washington Avenue in the back of a car last week, driving past the girl lifelessly waving traffic by whatever baroque construction they have set up there in the middle of the night. No traffic is on the road at this time, and no one appears to be doing any work, but there she stands, in her reflective orange uniform, waving your car through with an illuminated glow stick. “Is that what that girl does all night?” I want to know. “That’s totally outrageous!” I tell everybody. I cannot believe. It seems, at least, evocative of some kind of statistic, but mostly I use it as conversational fodder throughout the night, telling this to people who look back at me blankly and walk away.

Oh, man, I get so uptight about working conditions. I can’t believe a job like mine even exists, and that they haven’t refined computer systems to a point where they can more efficiently load that information in there. Charlie Chaplin made this commentary 80 years ago in Modern Times, but we don’t seem to be so up-to-date, here in modern times. What my job basically entails is entering dog-licensing information into a computer database for future referencing. I keep getting paranoid about sitting in front of a computer all day, the cancerous tubers it’s planting in my brain. And then I come home and look at my own computer, clack out an email, fret over another blog entry. It all seems pretty self-destructive to me. I explain this to my sister later, telling her all about how relaxed the actual job atmosphere is. No constraints are there in Information Systems, and no allotted work to be done. Mostly, it’s the job itself, I explain indignantly: the actual work, and the malleable worker robot drones who I have to work with all day. It’s kind of alienating. What is your problem, my sister wants to know. I don’t know, is all I can tell her. I don’t know.

Tonight is another night, the same as every other night. A light drizzle comes down, fogging over the windows in a car. I have to go to the bank, slicing through town, driving in a straight line past the capitol building to where I need to go. I end up see the girl waving construction through on Washington one more time, and I look out at her, my face pushed right up against the fogged window of the car. Her eyes lock on mine and she waves at me, sitting for moment that seems suspended in time. And then the light turns green and she motions to me with the bright orange glow stick of a wand she carries, magically, unenthusiastically.