Them’s Good Eggs

I make good eggs. Of course, I ran a bed-and-breakfast for a year. Making muffins and, yes, eggs got me hired. But that’s not what I mean.

I make good eggs. A year and a half ago, I put up a Brick that toward the end included my daydream that family and friends just humor me about my cooking, that it’s not that great, because it beats their having to cook and wash up themselves (I’m a cook who cleans the kitchen as he goes). But this is not what I mean.

I make good eggs so they let me keep my job. This is in the Woody Allen sense:

This guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, ‘Doc, my brother’s crazy. He thinks he’s a chicken.’ And the doctor says, ‘Why don’t you turn him in?’ And the guy says, ‘I would but I need the eggs.'”

Here is an attribution. Google is right when it points to this being a line in Allen’s movie Annie Hall and that his character goes on to say men and women persist in love because they need the eggs. But I feel sure that it was a joke he also used in his stand-up days as well as being in one of his books of short pieces like Without Feathers or Getting Even.

Most of us keep our jobs because our companies need the eggs. Mine tend to be Grade B Medium, not A, not Large or purity white or country brown eggs. But they cook up like uniform glowing eggs from the grocery.

My doing eggs for a paycheck, eggs that don’t exist in any manual labor sense, is allowed because of the usual circumstances: My work is competent where excellence is not needed or not worth the expense, I’ll do when there are vacancies in the department, I don’t complain as much as others — that sort of thing.

What They don’t tell you in high school or college. Well that could fill a book. But here I can say with hindsight, one of the things They don’t tell you is that sometimes there is a difference between the skills you enjoy and the skills you’re good at. During a career one should be careful — we may not have a choice, but recognize this — that you may find and get trapped in a series of jobs due to the skills you’re good at. The skills you enjoy performing, you also may be good at and even great at, but They are looking for the skill set for the job.

I’ve made good eggs in several recent roosts. When They realize — or admit — men do not lay eggs and men are not chickens — well, then, I am toast. -30-