When Will My Dream of Becoming a Pencil Pusher Come True?

I'm 34 years old, and I'm fighting a lifetime of lazy. I never enjoyed "work" in any of its many forms. I knew from the age of eight that, were I to be forced to have a job at all, I wanted a high-paying one that required little or no effort on my part. I remember once hearing my dad - himself a hard-working, blue-collar, bootstrap kind of guy - use the term "pencil pusher" in a derogatory manner.

"Pencil pusher, eh?" I thought. "Now that sounds like a rewarding enterprise."

From that day forward, I never used that term in my dad's presence, because I knew how much he reviled pencil pushers; yet, that was the very thing I most aspired to be.

At school, while I was supposed to be diagramming sentences or reading about plankton, I would drift into a blissful daydream staring at my beloved #2 Ticonderoga.

Mr. Rasco stood gazing through the full-length windows in his office.

"Ahh, another beautiful day," he thought. "It's almost embarrassing how much I get paid to do my job, which I happen to love. Life is good."

He enjoyed his moment of quiet reflection, and then decided it was time to get to work. He slid his expensive blazer off his shoulders, and with a jazzy hop-step, launched it toward the coat rack in the corner. The collar caught a hook and the coat swung gently into place - Rasco never missed.

"Well, I do have my work cut out for me today," he said, sitting at his large, hand-carved mahogany desk. The broad surface of the desk was mostly covered with pencils of various makes, colors, lengths, and degrees of sharpness.

With a smile, he began sliding them into order. Mr. Rasco grouped the pencils first by color, then by size, pausing to sharpen each one to precisely the same level of sharpness. He put the mechanical pencils into a bin at the side of his desk. They required a different technique, and he preferred to push them separately. Later today, Rasco would be giving a seminar on "The Pragmatics of Pencil-Pushing" to a group of local hobbyists. He liked to give back to the community. Yes, Mr. Michael Rasco, Chief of Pushing Operations at Pencils International, was truly in his element.