A Single Tear or a Jubilant Whoop

Here's a nugget of wisdom gleaned from my two years of work in this privileged enclave: if your secretary does it for you, it's no longer a meaningful gesture. You might think that this is something so obvious that it doesn't need to be pointed out, but you would be wrong about that. Imagine this: your child is "graduating" from fifth grade; there is to be a ceremony. You have volunteered to put together a photo slide show of the kids in your child's class, showing them first as babies and then as fifth-graders. This is sure to be a moving, sentimental journey through the tear-soaked halls of Growing Up. Right?

Well, not really. Because you suddenly realize less than twelve hours before it's to be shown that you haven't done it yet. Worse, you recognize equally as suddenly that you actually don't have any skillz for preparing said slide show using PowerPoint, Photoshop, or any other digital imaging software. So what do you do? Admit defeat? Certainly not. You outsource that shit to your secretary, who puts together a slide show for you. Maybe I'm being overly harsh here, but I'm pretty sure that once you assign somebody who has never even met your children to make a beautiful statement about the passage of their respective youths, the touching-ness of it completely vanishes.

I feel confident that globalization did not come into play here. I think that the secretary in question actually works for a firm here in town, and was not, say, in Bangalore. However, if the secretary was in Bangalore, the story changes dramatically. That would be such a towering feat of parental negligence that it goes from being sort of a sad commentary on our times to being an outstanding story of spectacular bullshittery. If the secretary is in Minneapolis, my hat remains firmly planted on my head. If the secretary is in Bangalore, my hat sweeps off, my nose brushes the ground ever so daintily, and I can be heard whispering over and over to myself, "damn, that's good."