Taking stock, part 1: a miller’s tale
It’s pretty warm in my apartment right now. It’s a 3rd story loft– a big open space– so it’s hard to keep the temperature consistent. When I turn the heat off, all the warm air tends to drift to the top. A fan would probably do the trick, but I haven’t figured out how to rig one up. Haven’t given it much thought really, to be honest. It rarely gets this cold in Bellingham. It’s been below freezing now for nearly a week. Jet predicts that it’ll snow soon. But anyway, I’m comfortable.
We’ve been busy at the mill. A lot of people dust off their cookbooks around this time of year, and that means a lot of extra demand for good flour. I’m happy to provide.
I’ve had two jobs in my life that I’ve really enjoyed. The first was my I.T. internship at Oakland CC in Auburn Hills, but that was mostly due to the laidback work environment; I loved the comraderie of hanging out in nerd central with the other I.T. guys, playing Unreal Tournament on the college LAN and waiting around for trouble tickets to roll into the queue so that we could swoop in and save the day. When it came to the actual job though– fixing finicky PCs & printers– meh, it was fun but it got boring after awhile. I didn’t feel like I was really doing anything, just maintaining other people’s tools so that they could carry on with their day.
I never get bored of making flour, though. Mostly because my job is so easy. I feel as if Kevin– the miller, or in other words, the mill’s owner, my boss (I find it an interesting statement about 21st century life that all of my friends know what an I.T. guy’s job is, but I have to explain every facet of what a miller does for a living)– I feel as if Kevin has the hard job, talking with customers & suppliers, making business decisions on what grain to buy & what prices to charge for our flour. Making the flour (my job) is the easy part. It’s so simple that there’s nothing to get bored *of*. Hell, making flour is something that hunter-gatherer societies had figured out. Using electricity to do it makes the machines more complicated, but it tends to save on labor. And since we only use organic grain purchased from trusted sources in WA, the nearby states, & Canada, I have complete confidence that the flour I make every day is at least as good or better than the flour made by every other miller’s assistant in the entire history of humanity.
So, in other words, I like my job. It doesn’t pay a lot but it pays the bills, and it helps pay my debts, and gives me a little left over on the side to have some fun and a lot of extra free-time to enjoy it. Sometimes, in moodier moments, I come down a little hard on myself for living as a modern-day peasant in a world where wealthier people have access to such incredible things– books with electronic ink, cars that run on cooking oil or get 200mpg, hiking gear made out of space-age materials, routine travel on intercontinental airliners, …. But then, I look around even within my own circle of friends and also see a lot of people who are currently looking for work & having a stressful time of it– most of them better educated & more hard-working than I am– and I feel supremely fortunate that I’ve lucked my way into such a lovely lot in life.
Though that doesn’t mean that I expect to be a miller for the next 40 years. I’d be content to do that, sure, but I have other things in mind.
More on that next time.
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