Not Exactly What I Had in Mind Read Online Free PDF Page B

people are asking, “Will I be able to make it as a yuppie in the real world?”
    Fortunately, most of you have had the foresight to equip yourselves with Greek. The real world is basics. In the real world the key thing is to get off a Greek allusion at the right moment.
    Your department head buzzes you:
    “Why the bejabbers haven’t you pulled together that report on the substantiational aspects of that widget?”
    You know what widget he means. The widget that your firm’s new slickware floppy, the QUASi-2000, enables customers to visualize, in high-definitional three-dimensionality, on their cozily greenish screen.
    “On the one hand …,” you reply, as you used to reply in seminars on Roots of the Renaissance to buy time. But time does not come so cheap in the real world. The intercom crackles. “I want to see both your hands on deck in about half a New York minute,” snaps your crusty superior.
    On your way to his module you pass the break area for employees who did not attend college. They are eating crude pastries from a machine and saying, “When you think of how bowling’s changed in the last … it’ll scare you.” It is the job of a friend of yours in Human Resources to interface with these employees. “Don’t ask,” he has said.
    With a smile virtually indistinguishable from the smile on your ID badge, you pass security and enter the highest corridor you are cleared for. There are no windows here, and the ducts are veiled by heavy mesh, but the air is ionized, so as to make you feel coiled as you never felt in halls of ivy. You enter the boss’s module through his portico — an effect created by photographic enhancement, as he is only upper-middle management, but imposing just the same. His administrative assistant, Lavonna or Jeff, moves noiselessly, sinuously, into an alcove, where she or he takes care of certain nuts and bolts.
    “For corn sakes-a-jumpin’-mighty!” expostulates the Old Man, who is staring moodily at his screen, presumably at the widget in question. (He always keeps his office console situated so that only he can see the screen.) “We know it’s highly defined. We know it’s three-dimensional. We know we can cathodically cause it to rotate through three hundred sixty degrees on any of its five construable axes, or to go inside out and back again and inside out and back again and inside out and back again, foop f’lup, foop f’lup, foop f’lup. But what is it? It looks like a, oh, what am I thinking of? A …” For the first time he cuts his eyes at you.
    “Self-slicing zucchini?” you hazard.
    “No! That’s not what I was thinking of at all!” the boss exclaims. He dashes a mugful of Hearty Fella Mock Cheese Soup across your shirtfront and ID badge. This is one way in which the real world differs from academe. Professors did not throw soup on you for wrong answers. Because your salary did not come through them. The situation was almost vice versa, in fact. Sure, your professors had their own research deal with the American Better Lipids Council. (“There Are Lipids, and Then There Are Lipids.”) But if your parents had not been ponying up $14,000 a year for your education then your professors would have had to be directly employed by the ABLC, on a salaried rather than a funded basis, and would have lost their independence. ABLC department heads would have been throwing soup — and fatty soup, frankly — on them. So your professors took a professorial, which is to say a crypto-truckling, tone with you.
    Not so in the real world. Here it is all what-are-you-packing and hey-nonny-nonny. Your boss can roll you up in a strip of carpet and whale the living daylights out of you with a length of technological cable if he so elects. He is interested in one thing — performance and performance only.
    Because, remember: his department has to perform if he is to get the bonus that will enable him to pony up $14,000 a year for each of his offspring to attend college for