You have /5 articles left.
Sign up for a free account or log in.
Every year, we do a “meet the administration” gathering for new employees. It’s one part of their new employee orientation; the idea is that being able to put faces to names will make it easier to navigate the institution.
Each year the session has some sort of hook or gimmick. This year we broke into smaller groups and played Three Truths and a Lie, in which everyone else had to guess which one was the lie.
Almost nobody got mine right.
I offered:
- I’ve discussed Miles Davis with the punk rocker Henry Rollins.
- I once caught a foul ball at Fenway Park.
- I once tracked a lost dog for weeks in two states.
- I worked in an ice factory before college.
Longtime readers can probably figure it out by process of elimination. Although I’ve been to games in Fenway Park, I’ve never caught a foul ball there.
The most popular guess was the ice factory. I don’t know how much of that was due to how I come across, how much was due to the unfamiliar concept of an ice factory and how much was due to the plausibility of the other options. But yes, I worked for $3.50 an hour—about $9 per hour in today’s money—stacking bags of ice on pallets in a freezer in 1986. Going almost directly from the ice factory to Williams College led to a sociocultural case of the bends. “Jarring” doesn’t begin to cover it.
Working in an ice factory gave people time to think. One co-worker had developed an elaborate theory to the effect that the musician Phil Collins was a space alien. He expounded on his theory at length in the break room. (“Abacab? What is that? Space code! Sussudio? Space code!”) Another used to give disturbingly detailed play-by-play descriptions of his favorite scenes in the Brian DePalma movie Body Double.
In my first week at Williams, we did a poll in my “entry” (or what most places call a hallway). Eight out of the 23 guys there never had to work a day in their lives if they didn’t want to. (Obviously, I was one of the other 15.) If you’ve seen ’80s movies with James Spader, you get the idea.
Having lived in those realities consecutively, I learned that economic class is real.
The advantage of having worked in the ice factory is that my worst day on most subsequent jobs beats my best day there. It offers perspective. As grim as grad school got sometimes, at least it was usually at room temperature.
I don’t know how folks at the session interpreted the ice factory, or if they even paid it any mind. I offer it as partial explanation for my sustained focus on—some might say minor obsession with—fairness. People are just people, with all of the beauty and flaws that implies. Working in an ice factory is hard, and the people who do it should be able to have decent lives. Community colleges are all about helping folks build decent lives; they’re the bridge between the ice factory and the indoor career. That matters.
Someday, though, I still hope to catch a foul ball.
