JOB SATISFACTION, NOT LEMONADE AND PERFECT RAINBOWS

It turned out to be an odd evening, really. Not exactly an evening of “miracle and wonder” as the songs might have put it, but a decidedly odd one nevertheless. Small incidents combining to weave a textured web, you might say, or perhaps just nothing very much at all.

If life gives me lemonade...
I'll still manage to turn it back to lemons

In the first instance I went to the supermarket to do the weekly grocery shop for my mother and did my usual trick of grabbing a sandwich and a drink, which we might just have to call my evening meal. No miracles there, and my Cajun Wrap was never likely to have to be called upon to feed the five thousand, but my usual lemony drink, “This Water”, had sold out, so I reached for what seemed to be the next best thing, the “Still Lemonade” and popped that into my trolley instead, and went on my way.

A few minutes later, I was at my mother’s house and the groceries had been put away, and I had settled and devoured the remains of that helpless spiced chicken, and drunk my lemonade and, because it’s the slightly more interesting thing to do sometimes, I started to read the label to my drink bottle. I was rather surprised to find out that what I thought was clearly a bottle of still lemonade was actually “A refreshing blend of apple, sweet grapefruit and lemon” which all sounds rather lovely until you remember that the pills I take every day expressly forbid the drinking of grapefruit juice and that I have avoided that particular citrusy delight for more than two years now.

I made a point of hanging on to the bottle, after all, you never know what information might be useful when you keel over and they’re whisking you away to the emergency room, do you? Perhaps, I thought, I would be dying of ignorance and mislabeling (Although that couplet from “Horrible Histories” did start to echo around my brain: #“Stupid deaths, stupid deaths, they’re funny ‘cos they’re true. Stupid deaths, stupid deaths, hope next time it’s not you! He-heh!!!”#) but, in the end, there was, rather naturally, nothing to be really alarmed about, and so that was a tiny miracle of sorts, I suppose.

In the car later, still wondering whether that strange feeling in my gut was the result of impending grapefruit-related doom, or just indigestion from eating my sandwich too quickly, we swung into the car park of the local D.I.Y. Superstore to look for a few bits and pieces because there is, after all, a bank holiday weekend about to occur. The talk was of H.R. departments and annual appraisals and how the “bean counters” nowadays like to streamline departments into areas of speciality and, in the process, somehow remove any and all of the variety and interest in an otherwise mundane way of working away your years on this planet.

Sometimes, I decided, it is worth reminding these people that some people do actually try to get some kind of job satisfaction from the work they do, and if you remove all the interesting bits, you might just end up losing the person who so willingly does it and find yourself scrabbling about looking for a more reluctant somebody to take it on instead. Then, of course, I rolled into the D.I.Y. place which was full of  people looking precisely as if they’d rather be working anywhere else and realised that this was where many of those “streamlined” out of their interesting jobs had ended up.

“At least”, I mulled over to myself “They are not the children currently coming up with “brilliant” ideas like having the elderly be prompted to take their pills via their smartphones…” My mother had mentioned hearing about this rather ludicrous sounding idea on her radio whilst I was reading my “killer” label, and it seems to be the kind of suggestion that could only be made by a tech-savvy youngster about a lifestyle they will know nothing of for another fifty years when trying to cut costs and make savings.

Many, many years ago, I used to do a bit of cartoon work for the Department of Age and Cognitive research at the University of Manchester, usually trying to demonstrate how young engineers and designers seldom designed their shiny new devices for use by the elderly, despite them being a growing sector of their potential market for these goods. For example, back in those days, video machines required the operator to crawl around on the floor and adjust the tiniest of buttons and read tiny little text in order to follow complex routines and programme them, at a time when the biggest potential sales group were precisely the kind of people most unlikely to want to crawl around on floors and deal with tiny, fiddly buttons and suchlike.

Maybe another miracle will happen when someone finally realises that those grey haired folk currently shuffling around the aisles of the superstore might be better off working in the think tanks because they know a few things, and the whiz-kids should spend a few weeks cruising the aisles and learning a little about life in the real world.

Anyway, I left the D.I.Y. Store and was greeted by another miracle, something that, in many ways, became the quintessential symbol of a miracle as, beyond the car park which has a perfect panorama of the entire town, the perfect full arch of a rainbow had formed, picked out perfectly against the dark skies beyond, and, at that precise moment, a beam of sunlight picked out an aeroplane on final approach. This time, instead of savouring the miracle, I was merely left to wonder why I never seem to have my camera with me at those moments.

Later on in the evening, a (relatively) huge spider had a miracle escape of its own when my foot just caught it as it crossed the kitchen floor. Wondering what I’d trodden on, I looked down to where it had been, only to see it scuttle off towards the bin. Happily, I was able to trap it in an old soup carton and deposit it outside, and I was left once more to wonder about the complex web of incidents making up my evening.

At least it didn’t bite my toe.

Images from old comic-books of radioactive spiders nibbling into unsuspecting innocents and turning them into night-time crime-fighters flooded my brain  (#“Spiderfoot, spiderfoot”#), but when I woke up I found that I was still unable to climb the walls with my suddenly adhesive fingertips, or swing  from a thread of my own making. On a happier and (possibly) more realistic note, I hadn’t developed eight legs either, and more importantly, hadn’t found my toe had swollen up like a grapefruit, so that’s another miracle escape, if you want to think of it like that.