I'd Love To Have A Beer With This Guy

I wish I wrote this. I remember the last table I bussed. I remember the last dish I washed. I remember lunch duty this afternoon. Teaching is the hardest kind of sales job that anyone will ever do. Students are the only consumer group that demand less for their money (ok... their parents tax money.) It pays less then picking up garbage. I know what it's like to work for a living and even though I think teaching is more politics and show business then education it still beats working for a living. Staying up until 4AM desperately trying to rewrite poorly written curriculum so that my students pay attention to me instead of turn my classroom into Lord of the Flies when they get bored is far more personally rewarding then any measly paycheck and that includes the .4% raise they're giving us for aught seven. The reward comes during that faint moment a week later when I see it in a students eyes that the knowledge I tried to give them in lecture just clicked in their minds during lab.

Lisa and I talked frequently about my dropping out of gradschool. We talked about what would come next. I didn't know where I would land or what I would do. The only thing I really wanted when I returned to New England was to drive to work in a warm car and never have to wait for a bus or the T in February. I've had a lifetimes worth of cold predawn mornings standing in driving sleet, waiting for public transportation that despite the trememdous draft and lack of heat still smells of tinkle and despair.

In America the trains never run on time. Mussolini may have been a fascist but dammit, his trains ran on time. So what does that say about a fascist who wants to shut the train service down? That he's not even as good of a scumbag that Mussolini was? I don't know so much about that. What I do know is what it's like to stand 20 minutes in the cold for a bus that's late, waiting for it to take me to a job I hate.

Instead of baking cookies for the camera or asking state gubernetorial candidates how they'll stop global warming we need to ask our potential leaders serious job interview questions so we can see how they think. We don't need to know not how well scripted their handlers can make them appear to be.

Here are the 3 questions I'd love to hear the ruling class answer unscripted. My answers follow in red.

When was the last time you walked out your front door 5 minutes late for work and discovered you had to scrape the ice off your windshield? This morning.

What was the name of the last grocery clerk that rang up your groceries? Katie.

How many keys are in your pocket right now? Nine keys and 8 supermarket cards.

Unfortunately for America the average response from our ruling class is:

"My garage is heated."

"I've never bought my own groceries" or "I haven't bought my own groceries since college why the hell would I remember the clerks name?"

"None, my driver carries the car keys and some black guy opens my door when I get home."

Then the black guy serves the potatos.

As for wacky job interview questions, my favorite is:

Youre in a boat with a rock, on a fresh-water lake. You throw the rock into the lake. With respect to the land, what happens to the level of the water in the lake goes up, goes down, stays the same?

The answer is goes down. Why is due to bouyancy. The mass of water displaced by the craft is the same as the mass of the boat and every thing in it. The rock goes out, the boat gets lighter and floats up which causes the water to lower in relation to the shoreline. Do not confuse the mass of the rock with the volume of the rock. Density and bouyancy are not unrelated concepts but they're not the same. I'd like to see George Bush try to answer that question.