“The Job Makes the Man”. It’s a very familiar phrase, a popular saying, a wiseness from ancient times, already. As they say in TXT, baobnabniarbnjafbboihbnaboadjbfnmnanagn, know what I mean??? I know, right? Word. Apart from the Royally Offensive Masculine tense of “Man” meaning “everyone”, it’s very true, and it applies powerfully well to Bodhisattva Training.
In your Great Work App (that’s you in a nutshell — the nutshell being the human part of you), the Work App will guide you, mold you, make you more useful, effective and efficient at your task. You’ll need to be, because there’s far more work than workers to do it.
It really doesn’t do any good to try to accumulate spiritual skills if you don’t know the job, and it’s quite impossible to hang those skills where there are no hooks to put them on.
What exactly are those special skills? Are they things like flying, skywalking, telepathy (tele-pathic, meaning violently fearful of the telephone, haw haw)…Uh, oh…I better explain my joke. A telephone is…well, it used to be the way we…um, lessee….oh, I know how to explain a telephone! It’s a smartphone with a cord plugged into the wall, and it weighs more than a medium-sized dumbbell. What’s more, it doesn’t belong to you; it belongs to Ma Bell (the phone company) and you didn’t even have the right to change its location inside your own home, let alone buy the instrument of your choice. It came in black, period.
So what has the early bakelite plastic dial telephone got to do with the job making the man, anyway?
You’re absolutely right, and I apologize for the side-trip.
However, before I let the subject go, I want to point out that the very first phones available to the general public were not dial phones or table instruments at all. Your telephone was a mouthpiece mounted on a wooden box, hung on a not-particularly convenient wall. Your ear piece was a heavy chunk of soy plastic with electronic parts in it, connected by a cord to the wooden box on the wall.
You turned a crank on the right side of the box to alert a LIVE operator not too far away — phone signals had to be pumped up to go farther than the next block — and she connected you with your party (the person on the other end, not a group of carousing rowdies).
Overseas and cross-country calls could be made, but you might wait 3 days for a place on the line. The overseas voice communications cable laid in 1956 carried a very limited number of calls on its 48 voice channels.
Even more limited was the telegraph communications channel that had been completed August 16, 1858, just before the American Civil War. It failed after only 3 weeks, but faulty workmanship would have taken it down soon anyway. The second cable, laid down in 1865, did better. The SS Great Eastern repaired the 1865 cable, and the 1866 cable lasted pretty well. Both were single-channel, which meant only one message went across at a time.
There was no telephone at that time, but there was the telegraph. It send bursts of electrical energy across a wire. You could make letters by combining “dots” and “dashes”, meaning short and long buzzing sounds on the small electromagnetic buzzer nearby the telegraph key.
You made long and short bursts by pressing down the telegraph key.
An example of Morse Telegraphic Code, a=short, long, represented as: .– or “dot dash”. B would be “long, short, short, short” or — . . . , see???
Speed of signal became important. The massive resistance of the cable reduced the speed of transmission down to a painful crawling wait between every dot and dash. In an attempt to increase the speed, electrical engineer Wildman Wildhouse tried applying more voltage. The cable blew up, which was the cause of the need for repair.
The 1870s brought quad multiplex cable, which meant four messages could go across at a time. It wasn’t until 1955-56 that a transatlantic voice transmission cable could be laid. It ran between Gallanach Bay, Newfoundland and Oban, Scotland, and carried 36 channels. There were 687 calls placed on the first day of operation, at an average cost of about $3 a minute, with a wait of only two or three hours to get the call placed.
There had to be a receiving operator at the other end who knew how to handle the call, see?
Today, the cables run from New York to London, and they’re strictly lightspeed, meaning fibre-0ptics. Why? They’re slightly faster than satellite and cell-phone, and in the financial district, a split-second can mean the difference between triumph and disaster.
The thing is, if you were a stockbroker in the early days of telegraphy and radiotelegraphy, you had to know and understand how to make a transatlantic call. In some circles, a phone call across the Atlantic Ocean, in the days when it took three weeks or more to get a message by packet steamer across the ocean, looked like strange, inexplicable MAGIC.
If you were an international banker, stockbroker or insurance salesman, you wouldn’t be overly impressed at the news that someone you knew had called London that morning. On the other hand, if you were part of the Great Unwashed and knew nothing of the existence of the transatlantic cable, and even less of the Stock Market, you’d be wondering how in the world it had been done, and most of all, you’d be wondering WHY??? And there’d be no way in the world that an explanation would make things any clearer.
Ordinarily, in the world of organic things, you come in knowing nothing, and are soon filled with total nonsense representing the population’s current beliefs about the world around them, and they’re always wrong.
Oh, gosh, there’s my snack…I guess I’ll get back to this subject at the upcoming Work Relationships Workshop this coming VALENTINE’S DAY weekend, Saturday & Sunday.
I hope it’s enough to just mention that the work shapes the worker in much the same way that a glass jar holds thousands and thousands of ordinarily disconnected jellybeans. The difference is that the jellybeans retain their shape long after the glass jar has disappeared.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby