Do you often wonder what might have happened if you had chosen another route in life? I do… quite often.
I graduated from the University of Illinois in 1971 with a fairly useless degree in liberal arts. I hadn’t really made serious plans for earning a living because… well… I was going to be rich and famous soon. How? That wasn’t quite clear.
Following graduation, I moved in temporarily with my first wife’s family so that I could look for a job in Chicago. This proved to be a nightmare. Every night at the dinner table, I was required to relate my job hunting adventures of the day. I retreated into the bedroom as quickly as possible to hide out from my father-in-law. He had taken my father aside the day I got married to tell Dad:
“I’m not going to support that bum. You’re going to have to chip in, too.”
I was always completely self-supporting, albeit on a minimal level. Struggling to find a job while my funds dwindled as the father-in-law looked on in smug contempt was sheer torture.
Surprisingly, employers didn’t find me an exciting prospective employee. I’d read all those novels! Played in the school orchestra and jazz band! Always on the Honor Roll! Didn’t that account for something? I was rejected for numerous jobs on account of my lack of direct experience or training. I considered this outrageously unfair. I was a genius! If they would just give me a chance…
After weeks of looking, I found a job in the want ads that paid a surprisingly high salary. The job title: “Diener.” I had no idea what that was, but I applied anyway out of desperation.
I was interviewed by a very nice middle aged lady at a hospital on the North Side. She read my resume, looked up at me and said:
“Do you think you can handle the job?”
“I’m ready to do anything. I really need a job,” I answered.
“Do you know what a diener does?” she asked me.
“Well, I’ve got a pretty good idea.”
“The diener takes the dead bodies to the morgue, washes them and prepares them for embalming or autopsy.”
I was dumbstruck. But, I wanted out of the in-laws’ house and I was running out of money.
“Yes, I can do that,” I answered confidently.
I waited a couple of days in dread for the phone call from the hospital. Washing corpses! My God, what had my life come to! My in-laws thought that it was a perfectly good job, and the pay was twice what I would make at another entry level job. I was worried that my wife wouldn’t want to sleep with me when I came home from a day of handling the dead.
Finally, I got the call, and much to my dismay the hospital offered me the gig. I reacted without even thinking.
“No, I’ve taken another job.”
“I didn’t think you really wanted it,” the woman replied.
A couple of weeks later, the University of Illinois called and offered me an administrative job in a computer research center. I took it immediately, fled my in-laws’ house and returned to live in Champaign-Urbana.
I often wonder how my life would have developed had I become a diener. For some reason, the idea of job advancement wasn’t too clear to me when I was 21 years old. I didn’t think that one job might lead to a better job, and that specific technical education might lead to something even better. I was ignorant.
I can see how that diener job might have led ultimately to a coroner’s job at a Chicago hospital or a municipal morgue. I’ll bet that job pays very well.
Instead, I decided several years later to hit the road and to live the life of adventure and romance in San Francisco and, later, in New York City. Often, I look back at those missed opportunities, like the job in the hospital morgue, and think that I might have been much better off if I’d taken that route. I’d be richer… no doubt about that. My life would have been more stable. Maybe I’d have those six kids and a dozen grandkids visiting me in a big, luxurious house on the North Shore.
Woulda… Coulda... Shoulda...
Recent Comments