“Man, you
work hard!” my neighbor yelled out as he passed by.
Immediately,
two thoughts struck me. First: wow, what a compliment. Second: wow, what an
idiot.
OK, maybe
idiot is too strong, but come on, man. You know me! I don’t know what I
was doing at the time – maybe pulling nails from a board or something, but
working hard, I was not. I do not do.
Not ever.
I made a
career out of doing radio. Maybe, had it been talk radio, where you
should at least know what you’re talking about, you could accuse me of
‘working’. But I spent my time at music stations. Play a few
tunes, say something stupid, play a few more songs, repeat.
Here’s how
hard it was: when I started in radio, we played records. Records became
CDs, CDs became digital bytes. By the time I finished my career,
music was simply a computer file. Touch it with your finger and it would play.
Further, when it finished playing, it automatically triggered the next
file (song) to play. It was - and still is - a
process that would continue running itself until it
was time for me to interrupt the flow and say something stupid again. I
got paid for that.
That job
required getting up early in the morning, but hard work? Hard-ly.
If you
want a hard worker, I’ll introduce you to my workaholic
wife. She will not sit still and constantly has projects going. Drive me
nuts.
Before her
retirement, she oversaw the Georgia
But times
being what they are, nowadays, when kids go off course, parents must be
notified, counselors and administrators work overtime, and in some cases, cops
must be called. Societal changes dictate that.
She also
was in charge of staffing county extension (county agent) offices
during a period when state legislators were slashing budgets. She dealt
with deep budget cuts.
That meant deciding which counties would have agents,
which could go without, and which could share agents. Egos were
being bruised.
I won’t forget
the evening a legislator approached her, asking when his county would be
getting a new agent.
“You keep
cutting my budget,” she said. “I don’t have enough money.”
“You’ll
have even less if I don’t get a county agent soon,” was his response.
Feel free
to take a moment, and consider that logic.
That stuff kept her up at
night. Even as we both have retired, remembering that stuff is the reason I
still roll over in bed and put an arm around her. Sometimes I toss a leg over
her, too. Then, a kiss on the neck. Then, she throws me out of bed, thinkin’ I
wanna be starting something, got to be starting something…
That I give
up so easily means I won’t even work hard for that.
I think,
though, I’m going to hold on to this.
This one time someone accused me of working hard. In fact, I’m going to
own it. When the day finally comes that I stand before my Maker, and he
asks how I would define my life, I’m going to say, “I worked hard.”
Then, I’m
going to hope he has a pretty good sense of humor.