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I weathered years of being an intellectually gifted child. I endured the travails of the Special Progress in Education syllabus. I survived Honors classes. I persevered through a BS/Chemistry cum laude. I did my four years of doctoral studies at Stanford. After twenty years of quality education, after having consistently surpassed what so many others vainly sought to achieve, I was a created accomplishment. I was ready!
I was chronically unemployed. Folks with IQs in excess of their body weight in pounds are sculpted and honed to be drones. Frat boys party, drink, and whore. They establish lifelong bonds with their kind. They pull Cs in their simpleminded courses in advanced arithmetic, business management, and golf. They are destined to become the bosses. For what else are they qualified?
The deck is not only stacked - it is glued solid, yet a man must eat and occasionally upgrade his motherboard or install another GB of RAM. Thus it was that I and all the letters hanging onto my surname came to join a group of aerospace engineers, ADA programmers, hydrodynamics specialists, and semiconductor designers in a County extension job retraining course on animal counseling. The lucky among us were to become a few points of light among the thousand.
Irvine, CA is a major crossroads of duck migration. Drawn less by shrinking putrid swamps than by a growing abundance of brain-damaged groups like Earth First! and Green Hadassah, they muddle along cement-lined streams in apartment complexes and freeway cloverleafs in an avian snit of insufficient volunteered charity. Just as the LA rioters were rewarded with cornucopian unmetered cashflow for their naughtiness, so do the birds obtain in profusion what the homeless are honorably denied.
A befuddled duck is rescued by CHP emergency teams who will shut down an entire freeway to gently capture it, causing minor but unavoidable inconvenience to about 12,000 commuters. It is transferred to Fish and Game along with twenty pounds of hardcopy documentation. Fish and Game is lush with funding thanks to a generous surcharge levied by the State upon every awarded traffic citation. The duck is cleaned and prettied, gorged to waddling repletion with the finest Purina Duck Chow, and then submitted to counseling to straighten it out. That is where I now come in. I wear a badge that says "Avian Perceptual Counselor."
Twelve weeks of intensive video instruction, a homework assignment, and even a final ungraded qualification test had prepared me for my solemn and serious duty. As a certified Avian Perceptual Counselor it was my task to over five sessions convince the duck that it should wing its way to its winter foraging grounds, and verify that any post-traumatic stress syndrome or disaffective behavioral afflictions were talked out. Ten of us occupied little cubbyholes each complete with a metal folding chair (for us) and a basin of mineral water (for the duck). The hushed tones of perceptual counseling filled the room, punctuated by the occasional "Quack!"
Our last duty was to band the duck. Any Avian Perceptual Counselor whose discharged charges were recovered after again being naughty was counseled by one of the fifteen Avian Perceptual Counselor Supervisors. It was not a pretty sight. Our office also had dozens of very expensive civil servants constantly compiling statistics for prolonged storage. The slightest of our failures would persist for all to see, for centuries! Perfection was our goal.
Most ducks were open to reason. Each of us had independently and rapidly discovered that quietly delivered physical violence while forcibly holding the thing's beak shut soon convinced the duck to remove his little duck tail and everything attached as far away from us and as soon as possible. Our counseling times shrank dramatically. Soon complete perceptual rehabilitation was being effected in 90% of the subjects in as few as two sessions. Our statistics were fantastic!
I look back upon those happy days as I clean out my desk. So great was our success that we will now be charged with the perceptual rehabilitation of LA gangbangers, as soon as we finish our twelve week intensive video instruction, a homework assignment, and a final ungraded qualification test. I can well imagine kicking some 6"9" 300lb tattooed homeboy around in my cubicle, my hand pressing his jaw shut to keep him hushed.
I can also imagine the 10% rehabilitative failures discreetly reappearing upon my dining room table, NOT!
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