Nuts and Bolts and Cups, oh my.

I've had these two ideas simmering in my head, and all thanks to my lovely job at Ball State University. I'm a painter, meaning that from 7AM to 3:30 PM I work in Park, the Stu's, Dehority, Noyer, and Woodworth, painting the hallways and dorm rooms to make sure they look just dandy. With this monotonous job (which I am thankful for since it offers me a guaranteed 40 hours each week) I've had two simple, but nevertheless interesting, observations:

1. The lid represents Man's greatest achievement. Everything else that we have invented has of course been useful, undeniably so. However, the lid in all of its glory represents a pivotal conceptual leap for the developing social mind of humanity: the public acknowledgement of our own fallibility and capacity to outright fuck up. The lid's function is to keep contents inside a container instead of splashing out of the top. It doesn't directly abet the container in any way in actually containing what is inside; its sole function is a preventative measure in the event of something going wrong. The bucket turns on its side, the bottle is dropped, someone spills an item over it - the lid is the purest manifestation of Man's anticipation of his own failures. It is humility and practicality perfectly blended.

2. People do not respect 'blue collar' work because it is too close to an actual reality. For a few days before I was switched to the paint crew I was put on maintenance work in Woodworth. It was my job to make sure all of the bed posts were properly secured, all the closets opened and closed, all the lights turned on, none of the desks would collapse, etc. It was during this part of my activity that an idea occurred to me: what was I doing? Sure one could simply say that I was just fixing shit, but a key higher level aspect of my job was that I was carrying out Ball State policy. When Ball State creates standards such as the functionality of its rooms, or systems like "Fix My Home," it was referring to me and what I was doing. Just my two hands working at their own pace, manually working through everything. Just one brain, running through a checklist devised for it to ensure consistency of standards.

People hold the grand institutions in lofty esteem. They look towards the policies and reforms these organizations devise as the pinnacle of societal function. Everyone looks up, trying to push higher and higher into the upper strata of policy and bureaucracy. I think that, implicit in these complex layers of social constructions lies an almost unspoken predicate of foundational meaning providing the support for these constructions. People aspire upwards through these constructs because their worldview takes for granted the notion that these constructs were built upon some high level of meaning.

The reality is that all of these institutions and powers with their sweeping agendas are actualized by nothing else other than the simple hands and minds of the workers at the very bottom of those systems. For all of the lofty minded ideals about which they can spout glowing praise, they would be sad mockeries of development if not for the much baser persistence of direct manual inspection.

People find comfort in the laws and regulations set up around them, oblivious to the fact that those laws and regulations are not enforced by some magical corporate geist but by people who operate under similar assumptions. The whole system of society and commerce is held up ultimately by the belief of the people constrained by that system in its power and inevitability.