Nuts?

I thought it was Bartleby the Scrivener, but maybe it wasn’t.

It was one of those short stories (this particular one written by the esteemed Herman Melville) that we were made to read in high school.

Actually, on second thought, it must have been middle school. I remember my best friend gleefully suggesting that when the sour Mrs. B. (our 8th grade English Class teacher) next gave us an assignment, we should respond with a Bartleby-esque “I would prefer not to.” The idea struck me as hilarious, though neither of us had the courage to follow through with it...

Anyway, I think that Bartleby must be the character that jumps into my mind occasionally, though the summary of the story as related by Wikipedia does not mention the part that I remember him for, and I am too lazy to look up and read the whole story.

The theme of the story concerns ‘the futility of our best intentions,’ or something like that, but the part that made an impression on me is how the main character had a passion for a simple, boring task- the work of copying documents (by hand- this was before Xerox). He had a spell-bound fascination for this mind-numbing job, so much so that he was a nut-case.

I think of Bartleby whenever my job requires me to engage in mind-numbing, monotonous tasks. You’d think, in this day and age, that technology and delegation would have removed such tasks from the ‘to do’ list of a highly paid professional, but in my career that is not the case. There are several especially nit-picking, time consuming jobs that either have to be done by a registered pharmacist, or overseen by one.

The scary thing is that I am drawn to these tasks.

It’s not like... I have a passion for them, but... I suppose I get some sort of unusual satisfaction from seeing them done properly and on time... and so I’m always the one that ends up in charge of them.

But I’m not nuts.

Really.

*laughs insanely*
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