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"I've Had 98 Jobs" 4/21/2016 4:08:30 PM
I wrote the following account of a brief Saturday evening encounter as an exercise for a writers' group I attend on Friday mornings:
A while ago, I had supper at a cozy restaurant in downtown Toronto. I chatted with a waiter I'd never seen before, a man about 60 years old who saw that I was reading a spy novel. In the course of our conversation, he told me that he'd had 98 jobs. Wow! I'm wondering now if he's shooting for a hundred.
This man's comment about one of the big features of his life got me to thinking. When I was a university student, I learned that it's important to say what the words we use mean -- define your terms. What did he mean by "job". I neglected to ask. Did he have 98 different employers? If he started working when he was 18, that's an average 2.3333 employers a year. Double wow!!
Suppose, though, he once worked for a large chain of restaurants and waited on tables at 15 of their branches and consider each transfer a different job.Or suppose he took a wide understanding of the word "job" and counted two days he once spent helping a friend add a porch to his house as a job and considered all the times he may have gone fishing and caught trout for his supper as jobs and thought the time he took to organize coin and stamp collections as jobs, and so on.
Or it could be that he has a disability that limits him to part-time work.
He told me that he used to read a lot and once took 26 hours straight to read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. He now reads mostly magazines because he hasn't had a couch for several years to lie down on. Did he count reading books as a job? Myself, if I spent 26 consecutive hours reading one book, I'd know I was working a t a job and would want to be paid handsomely,.
Anyhow, it's obvious that this man has done many things I've never done, but I won't pursue that line of inquiry.
So back to 98 jobs. What does this mean for me? I haven't met 98 people like this man, only one. And if I wanted to get to know him better, at the rate he's going, I doubt I could find him eight times not to speak of 98. My father worked for one employer for 37 years. I spent 35 years working for three employers -- the US army for four years, a bank for 13, and a church in north central Ontario for 18 years, plus part-time library jobs at schools I attended. The man I met and I are very different from each other. We would probably agree that one and one add up to two.
Now, I know people who'd ask what's wrong with this person that he can't hold a steady job. If I knew him well, perhaps I'd find him so irritating that I'd end up knowing the answer to that question. Never mind fretting about that, though. I've already conjectured that I wouldn't be able to find him eight times.
My encounter with this man means that I met an interesting person who wasn't afraid to share his story with a stranger and as a result showed me a side of human experience I'd never seen before. As I think about him, I recall that I met a cheerful man whose burdens I know nothing about and they may be considerable, as they are for many people, including folks looking for work. Nevertheless, this man carried on with courage, strength, and resilience. He must enjoy many parts of life and find plenty to hold his interest everyday. He didn't look to me to be a world-class complainer.
