Kris: “Merry Christmas, Murphy. Still got your job?”
Murphy: “No.”
Kris: “What?!? What the [deleted] happened?? I haven’t seen any departmental closure or dismissal notices, and the furloughs are only a threat, against which the union is screaming. And rightly so, I might add …”
Murphy: “I’m not waiting for notices. I just got back from getting my stuff out of what used to be my office. I stuck my resignation letter on the office door. If the university’s accountants can’t figure out what’s happened on their own, they can ask the janitor. Wait. No, they can’t!”
Kris: “Uh …”
Murphy: “They sacked the custodial staff months ago. The so-called service they hired to do the building cleaning won’t show up again until after New Year’s. Not that there’s much cleaning to do, since the building last saw students last April. Apart from the mess I left them.”
Kris: “What did you do? Take all your records and dump them in a pile on the floor?”
Murphy: “No, but I should have. I dumped this instead.”
Kris: “These scraps you’re showing me?”
Murphy: “Yeah. They’re proof positive that everything I’ve done in thirty-five years committed (dammit) to tertiary education is totally [deleted] worthless!!”
Kris: “Ow? You want to tell me what this was, besides evidence that you really lost your religion over it?”
Murphy: “They’re the residue of glossy pamphlets spewing anti-vaxx propaganda lies. They were plastered all over the windshields in the parking lot at Costco yesterday. And the morons behind the broadsides were all over the road, blocking traffic, at our Speaker’s Corner while I was trying to get my ass home from Costco. And people were honking their horns and shouting approval at them! I came this close to plowing my car through them. Which was my first hint that I’m done.
“Then I came home and did some research. Whatever that is any more, no one seems to know or care about any searches that don’t confirm their own stupid prejudices. And I discovered that, after millions of hours and billions of dollars spent in a panicked effort to save us from ourselves, only 44% of our citizens are prepared to take the COVID vaccines that this massive effort has produced. The rest are screaming about ‘their freedoms.’ That’s when I decided that my career is o-ver, and my efforts, and those of this university and every other institution of higher trash in these Untied States, has amounted to, at best, exactly nothing. So now my office is empty, and I am staying home.”
Kris: “What about your pension situation?
Murphy: “I quit. What pension?”
Kris: “But what are you going to do?”
Murphy: “Who cares?”
Kris: “I do. I’m calling your physician.”
Murphy: “Good luck with that.”
Kris: “Oh. Right. It’s Christmas.”
Murphy: “That’s not the half of it. Medicos get the same whiff of this that I’m getting, they’re downing tools. If this is what university education begets, we can do without universities. Or modern medicine. Since what the people want is to cure themselves by screaming, let ’em do so. Maybe as they die, someone can play them the witch doctor song and they can perish to the tune of Oo-ee-oo-aa-aa.”
Kris: “And you’ll be sitting on the dock of the bay?”
Murphy: “It would be a less exhausting way of wasting time.”
Hear Hear! I am comforted by your angst…. thank you…
Maybe I can get a job as a witch doctor and make millions. or I might end up on the stake, with these crazies….