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The piles of books, butts and bills atop my desk would
have caused apoplexy in an accountant or safety inspector,
and the sidewalk outside desperately needed some attention
from a shovel, so I was excited when I saw that Take
Your Daughter To Work Day
was coming up last week.
Within moments, I had the Ms. Foundation-approved excuse note written and I was handing it to Abby, our only daughter left in this country, to take to school.
Dad, I read about it, too. It's not for fathers who
need a kid to stay home and clear the walk before sorting
through piles of paper. It's for mothers, so their
daughters can see the wide variety of careers available to
women.
She must participate, I thought. Someday she, too, should be in the position of simultaneously complaining about glass ceilings and the high price of good domestic help. But I responded to my daughter's objection.
Well, your mother works here too,
I countered,
and her computer needs a full back-up, and she's got a
bunch of notes to type up for an article she's working on.
I'm sure she'll be able to keep you busy all day, even into
the night.
Abby thought for a moment. Girls from 9 to 15, the
article says, and I'm 16. Besides, it's 'Take Our Daughters
to Work Day,' not 'Make Your Daughter Do Your Work Day.'
And anyway, I'd rather go to school. It's a lot easier than
working.
That's a problem with kids. As my father often observed, by the time kids get big enough to be of some real help, they're too smart to get hustled into it. But other people probably had it worse on Take Our Daughters To Work Day.
For instance, how would you like to explain to your daughter just what you did all day if you were in charge of writing the Advanced Purity Regulations for Aspen?
My job is to protect the health of people who hang
out in bars, so we're banning all smoking in public places.
Then to make sure that they don't overload on cholesterol
and salt, we'll make it felony to sell or possess Slim Jims
and Beer Nuts.
And after that, we'll go after alcoholic beverages,
and if people switch to coffee bars, we'll hire somebody to
come up with dreadful numbers on caffeine -- balance of
trade deficit, unnecessary toilet flushes that strain
sewage plants, stimulated people who get their work done
promptly and thus hurt the self-esteem of non-achievers who
deserve the same workplace respect that a humane society
would offer to all its members. We'll show that caffeine,
like all alkaloids, is addictive and that coffee companies
have been deliberately adjusting the amount of this
substance that they put in their products. Then caffeine
will be banned and we'll all live forever if we do our
aerobics regularly.
Or suppose you were a computer programmer at MicroSoft?
Basically, I put hidden hooks inside the Windows
execution kernel so that if you run a non-Microsoft program
out of Windows, you keep getting arcane Stack Overflow and
General Protection Fault errors that lock up the computer.
Then we make the supplied documentation so cryptic that
people have to buy expensive books from MicroSoft Press;
that way, we keep them paying and paying.
You know, my job's kind of hard to explain, so why
don't you go see my sister, who's got a job over in
customer support? Last week, somebody actually waited on
long-distance hold long enough to talk to the Next
Available Service Representative, and so she's got to fix
the system to insure that never happens again.
Some parents must be employed at the Bash Hillary Corporation, and explaining their work to their children nation could get tricky.
Basically, our clientele consists of wealthy
corporate lawyers. However, the job here is to convince
everyone that it was evil for Hillary Rodham Clinton to
aspire to wealth while working as a corporate lawyer.
That's not the hardest part, though. You want a real
challenge? Try spinning New York Sen. Alphonse
'Wedtech-HUD' D'Amato into an avatar of governmental
ethics. But it's worth it if we can keep her busy
explaining commodity trades so that we can preserve our
current health-care system, the finest in the world, if you
happen to be a wealthy corporate lawyer.
And if you were a campaign consultant in Colorado, working on the gubernatorial race, what could you say when your daughter came to work with you?
We've got to persuade the voters of this great state
that it's important to elect one well-connected rich white
guy in a suit as opposed to the disaster that will result
if by some mischance the other well-connected rich white
guy in a suit gets elected.
So it's probably better to send your daughters to school
instead of taking them to work with you. If teachers get a
question which requires a troublesome explanation, they can
always say Ask your parents.
What can parents
say?
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