The Light Bulb Changer

A long time ago i was this skinny kid with a Bernard Sumner haircut, i was cutting grass for the city of Parma, drinking myself silly and smoking dope, playing hoops after work and then going out into the wee hours of the morning, this would be the last summer i would ever live at home, basically it was the last time i would ever call that place my permanent residence, being that the next summer started those beautiful years known as the Ocean City saga but back to now or more correctly then i was the young college kid with a smart mouth and i worked with a bunch of blue collar guys who did this shit for a living and supported families and the last thing they wanted to hear was the opinion of some hot shit basketball player who perpetually smelled of booze and weed...

Of course most of these guys had barely escaped high school and were just happy to be pulling in a decent wage but the Joker had a degree in engineering and it took me years to figure out that he just didn't give a fuck, i remember sitting around asking him as we smoked grass at the end of our shift why he didn't use his degree, why he worked this shit job with a bunch of morons and he'd usually just shrug and smile and say who needs the hassle, looking back on it i'm guessing he was either cooking up blotters of acid in his basement or growing some wicked pot in a closet but then fast forward fifteen years to our hero the post modern light bulb changer aka me...

If i've learned anything at my time at the Big World Bank Machine it's that sometimes if you want to really get ahead you need to blow a lot of people and suck a lot of ass, something i've never been quite good at, see there were alot of complete morons promoted into positions based on politics and ass-kissing, some i think were promoted based on the dirt they had on supervisors but in the end what did it matter to me? i was the fucking light bulb changer and like the Joker before me i was happy making sure everyone could see because in the end, who needs the fucking hassle?  but at some point it slipped out that i had a degree and since i spent a lot of time reading books everyone just assumed that degree was in English, though it wasn't, and when the admin's would piss me off bitching about light bulbs not working or furniture not moved i'd print off their emails and correct them in red pen, walk them back to their desk and kindly state that if you want to berate me please do it in a grammatically correct fashion...

Of course if you have concrete evidence of people being stupid and drop it like a warm, steaming dog turd on their desk you'd be surprised at how nice they suddenly become, hence how the Light Bulb Changer suddenly became proof reader and grammar checker for half the fucking bank and as anyone who reads this run-on sentence knows what the fuck do i know about grammar?  really? but soon i was getting all sorts of emails and the really sharp ones would basically just ask in a round about way if maybe i could just like fucking write it for them but instead one fine day i pulled the three biggest culprits into a room and sat them down as i stood at a dry erase board and gently smiled at them, i then wrote out the words: they're, their and there and began to explain that though you wouldn't know it by anything these three wrote that these words are not interchangeable nor do they mean the same thing, now i believe this is like fucking freshman English and when i say freshman i mean high school but since they all stood THERE gaping at me like dundering morons i then proceeded to break down the finer points of you're and your and much to my amazement i noticed that they were taking notes, one of these people easily made double what i made and all of them had fancy titles, much fancy than light bulb changer/ furniture mover/ shithead and could only giggle as i watched them scribbling away...

Now i didn't want to get shit-canned so i did all of this in the most sarcastically polite way possible and closed with the fact that i really didn't get paid to think and from this time forward would not be doing any thinking for them, (cue Superchunk's Slack Motherfucker), i then wiped the board clean and wandered back to my desk, it was at that moment i realized i had become the Joker, my burning lack of ambition had made me just ambitious enough to teach a short seminar on grammar cuz i didn't need the fucking hassle, i probably should have paid closer attention to his lessons, i can still see him in his straw hat riding around the parking lot of the public works dept. on a bicycle he garbage picked, i smiled as i put my feet up on my desk and went to sleep.