Just a Random Thought

I was just sitting here at home thinking about life in general.

And I don’t know about you, but in my time over the years,

I have certainly had a lot of different jobs. I had factory work

after serving my hitch in the Army. I’ve held clerical jobs,

done those dirty manual labor and blue-collar gigs. I’ve man-

aged and directed. Why hell, I even owned and ran my own

businesses a time or two.

Got to thinking, what was it all about? Sure, I made a living;

in the long haul it helped me get to where I am today, old,

alone and gray. But seriously, did any of it make a real differ-

ence, I mean in the universal scheme of things? It’s not like

I solved some mathematical quandary which helped man-

kind make it to the moon, or came up with a miraculous cure

for the gout. No, sir, that was not me. But nonetheless, by the

grace of God, sheer luck or simply fate, here I am today.

Got to thinking about one time in particular, about a product

I had a hand in making: Somewhere out there on a dusty metal

shelf behind a record-keeping, storage-room door in a 150,000

square foot concrete block warehouse located on a remote

drive in a sprawling office park near a congested six-lane Inter-

state highway which lies on the north-end of a large metropoli-

tan city in an industrial Midwestern State, there is an operations

manual, a single, spiral-bound, procedural compilation piled be-

neath a hundred or so copies of the same which I assembled

while working at a copy center (which I refuse to name).

I do recall at the time inadvertently transposing pages 106 and

108 before binding that book together. I thought about fixing

my mistake at the time, but it was late and my shift was nearly

over. So, I figured, what the hell, and decided to let it slide. And

to this day, more than 15-years later, retired drawing my monthly

Social Security, I am struck with this not-so-profound but mildly

plaguing thought, I wonder if anyone ever noticed?

Chris Hanch 2-10-17