Onlookers Stunned: Area Man Doesn't Quite Know What His Wife Does for a Living

It was the type of cocktail party – they’re all like this now – where at some point some young person mentions that he’s over in cloud computing on the data analysis side – not the social media aggregation side, the data analysis side – then this other young fellow at the other end of the room says he had always meant to get into that, had got his degree in it in fact, but then got sidetracked into setting up fractal databases for the financial industry using Monte Carlo simulation analysis for foreign exchange outfits mainly.

It’s at about that point that you realize that you have no idea what these fine young people are talking about. 

They do something for a living, it is clear, something important and advanced, but that is as far as you can go.

You may wag your head warmly as you wish in response, signifying ‘thought as much,’ as if from the moment you walked in you would have wagered a drink on the whole cloud computing and the Monte Carlo simulation thing just by looking at the two of them, but to judge from the kindly but non-lingering looks they give you you’re not fooling anyone.

Still, what are you to do?

You may as well bleat out “now tell me again, what are these ‘computers’ that everyone is talking about? Are they like big calculators?”

It’s a long way from youth, when by all accounts there were only seven different jobs in the world to be had.

You either worked on the line, you were a cop or a fireman or a mailman, you worked at the railroad, you were a mechanic, you worked at City Hall or the Board of Public Utilities, you owned a bar or a liquor store, your worked at K-Mart or the grocery store or some warehouse, you pumped gas, or you were a teacher or librarian.

That covered the waterfront not only of all the jobs that you personally knew of, but all the jobs in the universe that could possibly be known.

There simply weren’t any more, and any society that had any more would have seemed frivolous or overdeveloped to the point of instability, like a society out of a science fiction future meant to show what happens when you mess too much with the unchanging fundamentals of human nature. 

If you had gathered us all into a group brainstorming exercise, the ones where you are assured there are no dumb ideas, to speculate on what other jobs that there might be in the world, and you had someone standing at the front of the room at the blackboard ready to capture all the ideas on the fly before they got away, it would have remained a pretty blank blackboard no matter how long we locked ourselves in.

We might have come up with nurse and doctor, we knew they existed because we had been to them for our vaccinations, but they were the parents of no one we knew. 

One fellow might have said “office manager,’ because his uncle in Chicago was an office manager, but if you had asked him to describe what an office manager actually did you may as well have asked him to explain particle physics.

Offices as such were rare, for one thing, unless they were of the glassed-in and grease-stained variety and they were attached to an entire radiator repair shop behind them.

Simpler times, but back to the present, where the whole theme of not knowing what in the world people do for a living that I’ve worked so hard to set up for the reader, finds further demonstration.

These cocktail parties are good for one thing, and that is for revealing once and for all that you don’t really know what your spouse does for a living and for that matter never did.

You might be talking to an interesting gal and you bring up that your wife does this or that, with a special emphasis on this other this or that, and she’s been going down this other even further specialized this or that path, and it’s a field that’s really going somewhere these days, what with all the this and thats happening in society right now.

You cannot comment on your Varied Vocal Inflection or your Effective Use of Hand Gestures as you learned in eighth grade speech class, but you have stuck pretty closely to the original theme you think, and based strictly on the accuracy of the content, you would have to give yourself somewhere between a B+ and an A-. 

Then they finally meet and the woman tells your wife that she understands that she, the wife, is into this or that, and she, still the wife, says to the lady with a chuckle, “oh, no, no, he always gets that wrong, what I’m really doing is this.”

Then the first woman, who had seemed so nice – well, she’s still nice, but just wait till you hear what she says about me – she says, “well, I couldn’t really imagine that’s what it was all about while he was talking, it just seemed so, so… unlikely.”

And it doesn’t end there.

Because now listen to what the wife says back, she says, “oh, I just tell him that because it’s the only part he understands. If I told him anything more he would just get even more confused.”

It’s that ‘even more’ that cuts like a knife.

And then this other woman nods as if she had been wondering that all along, that explained a lot, she had just picked up something, something a little unusual in how I was describing it, and she couldn’t imagine that I really understood what I was saying, and now she realized that I really didn’t, and that explains a lot.

Well, there they stand, comrades in arms now, nodding away in perfect agreement, putting the universe in order, glancing over my way with looks that are not unkind, and not exactly pitying, but I’ll tell you what, they’re not exactly non-pitying either. They’re not exactly that at all.

And here I was thinking that she had found me interesting! She had seemed so nice! Goes to show.