Shadow Puppet Storyteller

I Have George Jetson's Job

I took the company's employee survey this morning. Corporate HQ is in Chicago and like most media conglomerates, I think they realized they have all these step-children but don't really know what's hip within their own brood. In hindsight, don't think I answered to the best of my capability. By the time the space was given to give written commentary, I was too numbed and disgusted by the multiple choice ranking type questions which were already categoried and homogenized for making easy use of the raw data for making the inevitable pie charts.

It only underscores my feeling that I am yet again a cog. I am a conscientious worker and I put 110% into what I do. Partly due to my vampire shift, partly by being in an operations position rather than contributing content, I'm not in a job where I know the jobs of many other people in the company. I only have a general idea, an outsider's idea - which seems wrong. I lose out in having a view of the daily greatness that the paper contributes to the local community and society. Except in knowing the satisfaction and awe that it gets recreated every single day.

I had a taste of Journalism in high school, I was a page editor of the monthly school paper, but I enjoyed designing the yearbook more. That "job," had the satisfaction of choosing photos from a proof sheet, marking and cropping with a bright orange grease pencil, drawing art by hand, even taking event pictures on film - never sure if the shot would come out. Heck, who knew if we'd even be granted the budget to develop all those pictures. Creating that yearbook twenty years ago, eventhough it was at the historical beginnings of computer-assisted layout, was not my last creative endeavor that involved real sweat and tears. But for me, it seems the computer had started that progression until "hard work" was replaced heart and soul by "hardly working." More and more it's the enabler to which all people move further away from the context and components which make all forms of work "working."

I am by no means a technophobe, but it is perception I'm focusing on when I say that I have George Jetson's job. The Jetson's live in the future that has the flying cars and the vacations to other planets. This Hanna-Barbera cartoon program from the Sixties took the fantasy home life of television families and smashed it together with the working class reality and what-if issues of the future. George had plenty of home issues to focus on, but usually he was grumpy about his job and how hard he worked. But you see, his hard job simply involved flying into work on time, clocking in, and pushing a button routinely all day long to have part in making Spacely's Sproketts. Well, that's where I'm at too. Hah!

Trust me, I get a little eye strain, and a sore index finger all the time. Anybody else remember the cartoon finger of George Jetson all crooked and red, or swollen like it was hit by a cartoon sledge hammer?

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