Too Late the Microwave

BY W. F. MIKSCH

I have the uneasy feeling that, like Rip Van Winkle, I’ve been asleep for twenty years, and that if I want to be practical about things, I might as well go back to sleep for twenty more. While I was sleeping, someone upset the employment market by inventing a profusion of baffling new jobs, and now I shall have to stay on at the laundry. It is still too early to collect my social security and much too late to become a microwave tunnel diode engineer.

I have no idea what microwave tunnel diode engineering is. The only word that rings a bell is “tunnel,” which I know to be a hole through a mountain, and I’m afraid that has nothing to do with it. But it seems to be in great demand, along with such other mysterious vocations as thin film and molecular electronics, weapon systems analysis, collision processes, and exotic propulsion.

If you happen to be good in any of these subjects, then you are the darling of industry, privileged to “phone collect for an interview,” enjoy “generous benefits plus profit sharing,” and have “reasonable relocation expenses paid.”

On the other hand, if you believe, along with me, that a semiconductor engineer is a sort of Casey Jones who leaves his locomotive cab now and again to help punch tickets in the day coaches, then better plan for some bleak, unprivileged years ahead.

It is not that I am wholly dissatisfied at the laundry. But once in a while I grow restless. How nice it would be at a cookout or cocktail party if my hostess, for once, could introduce me as “Group leader for inertial devices and infrared horizon sensors at Grimalkin Labs” instead of her usual “He runs a mangle at the Niagara Wash Wizards.” I think my wife would like it too.

Just the dream of switching jobs (without actually doing anything about it) used to spice my life, only now even the dream is gone. How can I dream of being an expert in transistorized megacycle pulse circuitry when I can’t even spell it without referring to the Help Wanted ads? How can I sit and wish I were a space environment studies director or a senior programmer when I don’t know what they are?

One thing though — I’m not assuming full responsibility for my dilemma. If I was asleep, then so was Miss Switzer, who conducted a weekly class in vocational guidance back in my freshman year in high school. She was a sort of oral tip sheet on the opportunities in store for us. According to Miss Switzer’s inside dope, law and medicine careers would hold firm, teaching and journalism were in for a boom, but engineering of any kind was a bust. “There are already many more engineers than there are jobs for them,” Miss Switzer told us. I recall accepting her counsel gratefully, since the engineering and science course would have involved me in higher and higher mathematics, and where math was concerned. I had already exhausted my talents back in fourth grade. So I became a fine arts major, and here I am — not even able to read the Help Wanted ads!

I suppose, if I really applied myself, I could still become a reliability engineer (because I am reliable; ask anyone down at the laundry), or a director of defect studies (we have a lot of such studies, mostly on tablecloths), or a logic designer (I am often logical), or a simulator engineer (I can pretend very capably). But I could never qualify for a job in high-speed memories. I keep forgetting things, such as umbrellas.

As for a human factors engineer — well, there’s a job they can keep. Because I happen to know (or happen to think I know) what that is. A human factors engineer is the fellow who, alter all those other engineers have figured out means of blowing up the world or replacing our jobs with push buttons, has to be called in to administer wet packs and soothing words to us poor, frightened nonengineers. It may be a bit steamy down at the Wash Wizards, but I sleep well nights.

Put it down to nostalgia, but I long to read once again a column of Help Wanted ads I can understand. As long as I’m just reading, let me read of glassblowers and sailmakers, whose crafts suggest not only usefulness but poetry of action. Who, today, will ever write “Under a spreading chestnut-tree/The nuclear physicist stands"? And isn’t there something slightly wrong with a labor market where weapon systems analysts are in greater demand than bagel bakers? It’s almost enough to make one want to run off and be a beachcomber (riparian engineer, they probably call it now).

I’m not sure we can ever get those Job Opportunities ads back in balance. But we can try, starting with the new generation. The next time Junior says he wants to grow up to be an analogue and digital transmission researcher, thump him sharply on his stern and say, “Shut up — you’re gonna be a cowboy!”