(I thought I had already posted this here but apparently it was overlooked. So, now, just because I wanted to, here it is.) I had completed a task at my job yesterday (October 2013) and I was silently admiring my work when irony descended upon me. Damned irony and its smug ass self! I began to laugh one of those big belly laughs but I knew it was simply a ruse to keep the tears at bay. The company owner had ordered some marketing postcards to send to her list of contacts in honor of Thanksgiving. Along with the obligatory marketing catch phrases, she had included her family recipe for pecan pie. The fallibility of Spell Check notwithstanding, when her recipe came to the point where the recipe directed to “pour the mixture into a prepared pie crust,” all 250 of her postcards read, “ . . . pied crust.” In toying with different plans to rescue the project, I discovered that the printing was fresh enough to sit gingerly on top of the heavy card stock and could simply be scraped off: brilliantly simple, right? Plus, the finished repair job was so effective that one would have to really look closely to even notice that there was anything at all that was ever amiss. Doing so however, required a very sharp knife or razor blade, a steady hand, and a gentle touch, so as not to mar the card stock. One little mis-scrape of the blade, and there went the darned e at the end of pie. So I had sat for two days scraping my big fat ass off and I was so proud that I had salvaged what would have been either a waste of the company’s marketing dollars or worse, the damage to the image of the company that couldn’t even spell pie. Yep, it was a job well done, no doubt. Then . . . irony, damn you! Not so very long ago, I remember a time when being proud my work or having a sense of accomplishment about my job meant something very different. I have always taken pride in my work. Back in the day though . . . if I had done a really good job it meant that someone’s family was made to feel more comfortable, or a really sick person’s pain was relieved, or that a critical change in condition was reported to the doctor so that the right treatment could be given. Dammit, I literally saved people’s lives!!! I made a difference in someone’s life because I kept a mother from dying too soon or I gave someone another five years or ten years with a loved one. Good God, my work was an extremely meaningful contribution to the world and to humanity. So I laughed because I was proud of scraping a “d” off of 250 pieces of what most people were going to consider junk mail. How horribly pathetic is that?