“Hello, I’m a mac.” That guy doesn’t make mistakes. He’s smooth with the ladies, he works in perfect harmony with everything else, and he looks good doing it– he’s a machine. Mac-guy represents the cyborg takeover. Try as I might to emulate his perfection and foresight in myself and in my work, I cannot. I am a PC.
I make mistakes, and I feel I shouldn’t be criticized for it. I tried to get a job at the local video rental store when I was a teenager. My friend worked there at the time and got me the interview. He drove me to it, and before going in, he asked me “Will you make any mistakes while you’re working here?” Dutifully, I lied and said “No, of course not.” He said “Tell her that, and you’re not going to get the job.” “She wants her employees to try and prevent mistakes, but she also wants her employees to not get down on themselves for messing up. Everyone makes mistakes. It’s unintentional.” Little did he know, but I’ve carried that mentality with me for a long time past that interview.
In college, I switched from computer engineering to communication. Had I stayed the path of an engineer, I’d likely have a job in the field and be making decent money. Instead, I’m filling pint glasses with ice, tequila, sour-mix, and triple-sec, shaking it, and pouring it into a salt-rimmed glass for some stranger to achieve inebriation. The words I use to describe it make the work of a bartender seem trivial and disconnected, but the truth is, those people reveal more of themselves to me than they do to their closest friends. To me, they can be exactly who it is they want to be, not who they’re expected to be. I’m the overpaid party host and the underpaid anthropologist. I listen to your soul and I calculate your prescription. The poison in I’ve concocted turns the eyes outward and focus inward.
My choice in this profession is not to proceed, but I have not wasted my time in practice. The real mistake would be to coast day-to-day learning nothing. To assume that there are energies are wasted and that no value can be converted from any experience is to assume that things perish on this earth without giving rise to another. It’s hard, though, to raise my head everyday and feel the shine of the sun and not just the burn of the rays. Things are not as one-dimensional as they sometimes seem. It’s easy to sting over the birthdays we forget, but then not radiate over the ones we remember. Singing the happy birthday song is more important than nailing the notes. Sometimes I focus too heavily on the negative.
There’s an ongoing struggle in my own mind about mastery. My interests change, and they change rapidly. Say I want to play tennis professionally– well, I’m already as old as some of the current stars and they’ve been fixated on the sport for their whole lives. Do I stand to compete? Was my potential wasted when I started diversifying myself? I’d like to think not, but I grew up learning of hero’s, both real and imaginary, that were born for a certain task, trained their whole lives, and become the best there ever was. People remember that story and retell it. These amazing people are the perfect beings. They are the isolated elements. They are the building blocks and the examples for all others to strive to be. However, I think their stories are boring. I left the world of engineers where kids would practice day in and day out. They brought presents at the end of each semester to all of their beloved teachers whom they made their most meaningful relationships with the kids learning other trades in their general education classes. That’s fine, but it’s not for me. I got bored. I moved on. There’s more out there. A lot. I don’t even begin to know what, but I just know it’s there, because I’ve seen it.
Maybe PC should learn from Mac. They are machines, after all, and we like our machines to function properly. However, maybe we have something to learn from PC. They have been evolving and evolving and evolving past their initial functionality of being a networking system, yet they meet the collective needs of the world each and every day. They have adjusted themselves over and over to meet our needs. Mac constantly retunes itself to be exactly what it is intended to be, a personal computer. It’s slim, intelligent, and efficient. It’s a machine. I am not. I am a PC.
