And then Pinochet got mad

I used to think that jobs weren't stressful. (I also have this illusion that 25 is a stress-free age because you have figured life out, but I'm not letting go of that yet.) I imagined that some jobs could be stressful-- for instance, being in charge of something, or having your pay based on sales commission or working in a dangerous enviroment-- but somehow, despite all evidence to the contrary, I thought the majority of jobs were pretty stress-free.

One of my friends who works for a certain government agency happily confirmed this. She said she left her work at the door every day at five and didn't think about it again until she came back. She told me this during a particularly stressful part of senior year, and I think it was supposed to make me feel better. It weirded me out. I still can't really get my head around it.

It's crunch week at Swarthmore (isn't it always?) and I can report that so far, my job commands fewer all nighters and much less racing to meet deadlines than college. However, I think there's a different kind of stress. Although extracirrcular and interpersonal duties may impact other people, a major part of stress-in-college is about stuff that only affects yourself. It won't impact anyone else's semester much if your paper is in late (except in seminar, but that's a seperate tangent) With most (all?) jobs, anything you do poorly then impacts other people, which is a different kind of pressure.

I started thinking about this because last night I had my first work-related nightmare. It started when I dream-woke-up to discover I had twenty more endnotes to write in an afternoon that we'd somehow forgotten about. In real life, I'd substantially changed an endnote about Pinochet because I felt that in trying to be neutral, we had wound up sounding too sympathetic. In my dream, Pinochet was very angry with the changes I had made. How dare I change "modernize the economy" to "liberalize the economy!" Only "some" critics accuse him of human rights abuses, not "many!" He refused to ever be interviewed by us, and was starting a law suit. I tried to remember what I had learned about public figures and libel but I wasn't sure whether we'd be tried in Japan, the US, the UK or Chile. In the meantime, my list of endnotes had grown, spanning several pages, and all the while, Pinochet was marshalling his evidence. (In my dream, he definitely didn't have Operation CONDOR at his disposal. That would have made it a much worse nightmate.) It was all my fault!

I woke up, hugging my knees, to remember that Pinochet had died on December 3rd, 2006, four days before Jeane Kirkpatrick, UN ambassador and Reagan advisor who advocated US support for authoritarian governments so long as they were anticommunist. My Latin American politics class may have been briefly inspired to hum "ding dong the witch is dead" upon discussing the 91 year old Chilean dictator's death, but I promise that didn't make it anywhere into the endnote. Back to sleep.