"So You Are A Big Shot"

My paternal grandfather was a Norwegian immigrant.  Arriving in the States with a small bag and the address of a farm in rural MN he worked for seven years as a hired hand, glad to have work.  After retrieving his wife-to-be from "the old country" he rented land and farmed.  The birth of no sons and the third daughter brought the proclamation "you can't farm with girls" and he moved his family to town.

For thirty years he worked at Wilson and Company.  At the center of the photograph is a six-story ramp that led from the stockyards to the killing floor.  Without fail for all those years he drove livestock up the ramp all day.  He was in pretty good shape but retired at 70 and lived to 100.

When I was first starting in my professional working career he asked me what I did.  At the time I wrote reports, did statistical analysis on crime data and dabbled in the computer world.  None of this seemed relevant to a guy whose first trip across the ocean took 21 days and who's life's work was at the fragrant end of some exhausted horses or panicked beef cattle.  Finally I said that I did "book work" and sat in an office.  "So you are a big shot!"  I think, in his Norwegian stoicism, that he did care a small amount about me but really I think he thought my work was pointless and a waste.

For most of the next 40 years my "work" became increasingly digital and abstract in nature.  In a big corporate move in 2001 we moved to a new corporate headquarters.  My input to that plan was broad but specific to the nature of storage and work stations.  "We don't need to buy very many file cabinets.  Our world is going digital."  By 2008 we were giving away scores of thousand dollar file cabinets and three thousand dollar architectural plan tables. During the eleven years I spent in that office I put total of about five file folders in a file cabinet.

Were I having that conversation with him now I could not really even claim to do "paperwork" and I'm not sure how to explain "digital" other than saying it's "electronic" and that's no better explanation.  Broad multi-dimensional applications that integrate systems, resources and real-time and future-time and imagined/conceptual/virtual (pokemon) systems are the new "big shot" jobs, I guess.  Here I am trying to put that in words.  My almost three-year reprieve from that "big shot" job world  has been good.  I'd like to go chase some cows up that ramp to reflect on his real work but the building is gone.  Beef-processing technology has changed.  Gravity is not as important a factor as it once was.