Dee Hock
"It must be a lost deposit. Go down to the basement, look through the garbage, and see if you can find it." Speechless, I descended to the basement visualizing a single can of crumpled paper. There, neatly in a row, were eleven fifty-five-gallon cans stuffed with far more than paper-cigarette butts, ashes, chewing gum, rotting remnants of leftover lunches, and other disgusting detritus.
My neck grew hot with anger. This ripped it! After managing businesses since the age of twenty, this was preposterous! Language learned working my sixteenth summer in a slaughterhouse poured out. Damned if I was going to spend the night grubbing though garbage for a lost deposit, and double-damned if a snotty bank teller was going to order me about, and tripledamned if I was going to spend another day at the #*X*X#* National Bank of Commerce. They could take this job and "put it where the sun don't shine."
At the worst and the best of times, the ridiculous has always tickled my funny bone. As anger and expletives diminished, in the dismal basement, laughter came pouring out. Sure, I'd been climbing the corporate ladder for sixteen years, but before that I'd done stoop labor, picked beans, thinned sugar beets, mucked out dairy barns, cleaned offal, and dumped slop. I'd been proud to be a boy able to do a man's work, and never felt demeaned by a minute of it. Hell, I'd worked for sadistic bosses who made this woman look like the tooth fairy. Words spoken a thousand times to employees came swinging back to clout me in the back of the head. "There isn't any poor work; there's only work poorly done, poorly recognized, or poorly paid."
Off came coat, tie, and shirt as I upended the first can. If there was a lost deposit I would find it if it took all night. Then, they'd learn what they could do with this job. The more I worked the more I laughed. Pride is pride. This work was not going to be poorly done. I dove into the garbage.
Within minutes, Old Monkey Mind took me happily into the magical forest of questions without answers, only more fascinating questions. What is pride? How can there be such a thing as pride without humility? How can there be such a thing as humility without pride? Humility would be impossible to conceive without the notion of pride. One defines the other. They are integral, one and the same, different faces of the same coin. Were not both pride and humility dancing simultaneously, seamlessly through me? What made me think of them as separate? What made me want to choose one and deny the other?
Was someone shuffling papers alone high up in a luxurious building at an expensive desk in a large room with a sign reading President a superior form of humanity to someone sorting trash in the basement? Whence came the craving for one rather than the other?
Where did all this superior, inferior nonsense come from? By what method could one possibly know — by what possible measurement and what standards could one judge the value of climbing a ladder of power, wealth, and fame, other than the pronouncements of those who lust after them? Could such desires amount to no more than a basement of trash? Isn't all life a seamless blending of all opposites? If so, why do we think to separate one thing from another and elevate it to the status of a deity? On and on the questions whirled and swirled as time lost all dimension.
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