My plump, semitic tukhis is attached to a swivel chair in a cubicle, itself in a cubicle ocean, a cubic-acre beehive of cubicles, for eight hours a day in a leafy town north of NYC. While my usual work schedule is, shall we say, chronically unhectic, I've been assigned 'busy work' which has required my drowsy semi-undivided attention over the past two days. The purpose of this work is to make sure someone else is actually doing their own job, which they probably aren't. You see, politics are so pervasive in large corporations (as they are in a small company, classroom or three year old play group) that people fear confrontation. Even the most minute of confrontations are to be avoided at all cost. So instead of asking someone directly if they're completing the task they're paid to do, they avoid even the whiff of confrontation by getting someone else (in this case, me) to do the work too, to make sure the job is complete. This sort of 'busy work' is only the latest example of the plague of waste of time and money rampant in my large company and most probably throughout corporate America.
In short, its wonderful to know that the value of whatever I do and will do here at work will amount to exactly gurnisht, efes. I know, I know...anything is better than the four (or was it five) layoffs I've endured since 1998. And as I'm fond of saying, its also much better than leprosy, or venereal warts, or one of those diseases once can read in detail about in Tazria-Metzora. In stark contrast, winning at least third place in the 'work that outlasts one's life' contest, let me introduce the subject of the present edition of...
...Today in the life of the Jews: Abraham Mapu was born near Kovno, Lithuania on this day in 1808. His books served as the ideological basis of the Zionist movement. Mapu introduced the first Hebrew novel in 1853. Until then, only Hebrew translations of novels from other languages were published. His masterpiece, Ahavat Tzion, was eventually translated into Yiddish, German and English. He died in Konigsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia) in 1867, while writing a book about Shabbtai Tzvi.
