hey, squegee kids! listen up!

The higher I rise at the place I'm working, the more of a dead-end place to work it seems to become. If this place were to disappear tomorrow, a couple dozen guys would be fucked - they'd have to start over again as labourers someplace else. There are very few transferable skills you can pick up when you work at a composter. What are you going to do, go work at another composter? There isn't one. Maybe in the States, somewhere. Someday, maybe there'll be more.

It's possible I might be a candidate for plant operator if a position opens up - it helps having had the cross-training I've gotten from applying for all these different jobs, and it helps more that I've done them all pretty well. That move would mean a nice big raise. Still and all, it's a dead-end job. The guys who have them are wondering what the fuck they're doing with their lives.

I'm not going to blog about work anymore after this post. Not because I'm scared I'll get fired (I haven't really cussed anyone out or given away any trade secrets) but because it's not very satisfying. It's where I make my money, and it seems like I'll be stuck there for at least a year yet, but it's got nothing to do with me, if you know what I mean. I say this even though, after a year and a half of working there, I have a job I actually enjoy. It's fun moving that big old loader around. It just doesn't feel very important.

The composter has actually done great things for my self-esteem. It was quite a shake up for me to have finished a bachelor of commerce degree and gotten absolutely nothing out of it. The first job I had after I got the degree was one I probably could've gotten straight out of high school, and I hated it and I was terrible at it.

The jobs I had after that were pretty much impossible to enjoy or feel much pride in. Mostly they involved a lot of driving, stocking magazine racks or newspaper boxes, at night or early in the morning. No boss, just a bleary guy tossing bundles from the loading dock. Finish as soon as you can and crawl into bed before the rising sun fucks up your interior clock too much.

Then I figured I wanted to be a teacher. An after-degree program was two years, which I stretched to three, and then at the end of all of it to find out that it's basically beyond me to control a classroom of twenty-three nine-year olds, well wow. It just emptied me right out. Thirty-one years old, and I haven't got an inkling, I thought, what the fuck do I do now?

Now I'm thirty-three, but it's different. I've learned things, not just about composting, but about my brain. I used to think I was so stupid that I would never figure any job out. I'd just get fired from all of them and I'd live with my parents till I was forty and then I'd kill myself with pills out of shame.

Now I know I can adapt. Now I know that I am nowhere near as stupid as a lot, a lot, of people.

Five years ago I would never have typed that last sentence. Everybody's equal, I wanted to believe. Sure, the guys my dad drinks with when he's in the small town bar might not know a thing about Japanese business practises or the Discourse on Method, but they sure as hell knew a lot about trucks and tractors. What did I know about trucks and tractors, in spite of being a farm kid? Nothing. So who was I to feel superior?

Now I know that real stupidity is not a lack of knowledge. It's not even a learning disorder. Real, true, incorrigible stupidity is not knowing how to learn. It's even worse than that. It's not wanting to learn how to learn. And do you know how many people are just not interested in any damn thing you have to say?

There's lots.

And now, after working here for eighteen months, I understand that I'm not one of them. I am capable of a lot of different things. How many of the guys I work with would you guess keep a blog? I'd wager none. But I'm picking up the techniques and the routines of composting just as well if not better than anyone else there. Just because I know a few big words and like to write, it doesn't preclude me from being able to get down in the shit and work. How many bloggers have a job like mine? Not many, I'll bet.

And yeah, it tells me that I'm in the wrong place and in a way I'm kind of wasting time. But the fact that I'm picking it up, and I'm succeeding, and I'm respected - all of this is new to me. It's helped me to trust myself a lot more. And when I leave, I'll be ready to get into whatever's going to be next without carrying a sense of dread, a horrible shame, a fear that I'm going to be found out as someone merely passing himself off as intelligent but who is in fact an utter fool. Thanks to the composter, I'm through with that stuff.