Adventures of a chronic underachiever.

Remember the good old days when success meant just getting a job and not getting pregnant too soon or out of marriage? Ok, so I may not agree with the pregnant thing but the job issue I can understand.

I will admit that I have not lived up to my expectations. I may have not lived up to the expectation that others had for me either, seeing as how the majority of them thought I would end up as a drug dealing, alcoholic, STD carrying, lesbian, prostitute – sorry to disappoint, folks – but damnit I have an ok paying job [at least for my lifestyle], and my personal situation isn’t so bad as to warrant any drastic changes. So why do I feel lower than worm turd whenever I have the misfortune of meeting up with people I knew?

Lately I’m being haunted by people I went to school with. I last saw these bitches over eight years ago and since I never really kept in touch with anyone I blissfully thought our paths would never again cross; so much for blissful thinking. Between then and now, some names kept popping up – who passed the bar, graduated from medical school, became a veterinarian, entered politics or became an IT professional – and I could deal with all of that. I’m not hypocritical enough to say I’m happy for them, but I could deal with that. What I pisses me off though is when they lord their successes and achievements over me.

So I’m at work, rowing with the other slaves when I am approached by a customer. In the middle of my attempt at rendering assistance, he would ask “Hey didn’t you go to _ ?” Now usually my response would be “No. Do I look like someone who would go to that school?” That sometimes shuts them up. But this guy I remembered. He was pretty decent. Which is why what transpired next bowled me over:

“Didn’t you do the languages?”

“Yeah…”

“So how you’d end up here? As a __ ?”

“Mmmmm. So what do you do?”

“I work for a consultancy firm.”

“Oh, ok…. well that’s the end of your business here. Have a good day eh!”

See what I’m talking about? It’s the same thing with goddamn strangers sometimes. People I don’t even fucking know! I remember ending up in a similar situation with a supervisor once. There she was yapping about how happy she was that her son had graduated from Howard because she didn’t want him wasting his youth working in some low-pay entry level position like her subordinates, and here I am telling her to go fuck herself.

My father always lectured to me about book sense vs. common sense. He used to say you could have the world of degrees under your belt but once you have no idea what’s going on around you and how to handle the shitty situations life throws at you then you’re nothing more than an educated jackass. Honestly, I used to think papa just said that to justify his lack of tertiary education but now I can appreciate the truth to his statement. I realise what he meant whenever I ask one of these supposedly intelligent people their thoughts on the crisis in Sudan and they look at me quizzically: “There’s a crisis in Sudan?” Or when I ask them their thoughts on the political situation in Zimbabwe and they have no idea who Mugabe is. Hell I’ve even asked them about shit that affects us locally, Martin Joseph’s three year crime forecast, the Unions’ call for a nationwide day of strike action; and these university graduates would just gape at me.

Now I know I’m giving the impression that I’m anti-university or something, but I’m not. I just get the impression that tertiary level education is used in our society purely for financial gain. It seems to me that people enroll in these institutions just to get that expensive piece of paper that somehow deems them to be superior in intellect to us lesser mortals. I remember encountering a newly graduated dentist who couldn’t spell the word ‘thousand’; man, I should have made the effort to remember her name.

We in Triniland here like to talk about education. We like to say how we or our children just graduated “with Honours you know” from the University Of Wherever, and Some Big Company is already courting us/them with a nice salary, vacation perks and a pension plan. We like seeing those letters behind our names. And this is good. Really. I mean it. But I think that in the quest for the almighty dollar we have forgotten that higher education is just that – higher education. I mean, if you already have the privilege of being accepted into an institution of tertiary studies the least you can do is actually learn.

Another problem lies with our education system itself. We’ve already eliminated science and social studies from the S.E.A exams resulting in whole generations who know the lyrics to every Rhianna song but not the words to the national pledge. In addition to renaming and caribbeanising G.C.E to C.A.P.E, we’ve also dumbed down those exams, yet secondary schools countrywide celebrate their heretofore unprecedented astronomical pass rate. Thus we end up with a pile of graduates some of whom don’t know how to represent fifty cents as a fraction (yes I’m serious), those who can’t string a sentence together without using ‘like’ every other word and others who find difficulty in grasping the concept that life exists outside the student guild.

I swear, with the present degree craze that’s sweeping the country, I won’t be surprised when Triniland turns into an Orwellian nightmare without the revolution of course. We’re way too complacent for that.