Killing Time

Any philistine with a camera can photoblog. It takes a philistine with paper, pen, a juice can, a 150 ml beaker, a book of matches, three nickles, a dime and a ruller to draw it out.

As one may guess from the plethora of links in my sidebar, I've been reading web-comics alot lately. Clickig through batteries of witty, amusing and well drawn comics about the lives of young, interesting people has made me wish that I'd kept practicing my drawing. The above drawing is of my new watch, which my grandparents gave me for graduation. Its battery is charged by a solar cell in the face and I consider it to be the finest watch that I will ever own. Viewed as a whole, the drawing is a reasonable facsimile, but when one looks at the individual details, it is highly inacurate. For example, the mode dial is actually set to 'kill' and the 24 hour dial doesn't match the time shown by the watch's primary hands.
I consider this drawing to be much like my job as assistant collections manager. When viewed on a resume it looks like a fairly good job. I can even bulster it up to sound like a prestigious academic position. If however anyone actually asked me what my typical day was like, I'd either lie or have to tell them that I perform menial tasks so mind crushingly boring and tedious that I'm actually dumber for having accomplished them. For instance, for practically two weeks straight, all I did each day was make cardboard trays that would fit into bankers boxes. Today, after transcribing the information on the individual labels of a new collection of corals, I spent the rest of the day putting stickers on boxes. These particular stickers were barcodes that need to be assigned to boxes of drill core. There are roughly ten thousand boxes. Each box already had four previous forms of identification on it, such that there is hardly room to put on the important new stickers. Each box is in order within a subsection, but each subsection of the collection is in an order, the logic of which may only be known to my boss (currently on a three week vacation) and certain necromancing mystics. I didn't realize the futility of trying to correlate the barcodes with the numbers allready on the boxes until about 400 boxes into it.
Einstein said that he appreciated his job as a pattent clerk because it gave him time to think. I think about how much I hate menial tasks or hating the fact that I'm isolated where nobody can appreciate how zen I am for having the patience to do them. Like the drawing, the job could be done better, faster and with greater enthusiasm by a souless piece of electronics. I on the other hand have set about this new and gargantuan task with all the vigor of a snail on fire.
I don't envy the cartoonists mentioned above because they are talented, but because they are actually using their skills. They have creativity which they put to work. My collegues in the department (for the most part) have problem solving skills which they put to work. To paraphras Napoleon Dynomite, skills are important, but it's frustrating when you're never called on to use the skills you have.