The Curse of the Overachiever

“Yeah. I guess I gotta find my own way.” – Luke, ‘Cool Hand Luke’

My mom tells the story of my very first day of public school as one of a stubborn kid insisting that he go it alone. The rest of the kids were escorted by their mothers into the school which is as much about the parents as it is about the kids. Apparently, I refused my young mom the opportunity and demanded she stay outside as I entered the world of institutionalized education solo. She even took a picture of my tiny frame defiantly walking through the doors.

Scanning through those early years I took on a dichotomy that defines my work life today: the overachiever who rebels against the rules; the kid who goes it alone. It was never enough in school for me to get the good grades, to ace the test, to do the extracurricular activities like a race car on the Bonneville salt flats. I had to do all of that while continuing to assert that I would also break every rule presented in as many ways possible. I would not be placed in a box of conformity while, at the same time, conforming to the standards in place before I bothered to stroll in.

At some point (and in that inevitable way that the human glue sets and becomes solid and unchanging) this approach became who I would be in the adult world. I strove to achieve the standards of society while being an outlier socially.

I came to Chicago and was hired as a public school music teacher. I made that day-to-day my entire life at the time (which is why I suspect I burn through jobs like a professional gambler goes through Lucky Strikes) yet still ignored the required curriculum. I decided that I would be a great music teacher (and, no boast, I was) but that I would teach it my way. The principal who hired me loved this faux trailblazing approach and in the decade I taught, I pushed any and every envelope I could to do things differently than everyone else. Then she left for bigger and brighter and the new guy wanted me to fall in line, to practice that particular craft just like the rest. I lasted less than a year and quit teaching altogether.

I started a theater company designed to be weird, anti-commercial, yet succeed for its very weirdness. The first show we ever did, comprised of sketches and scenes and odd musical experiences, was dubbed a "non-revue of unimprovisation" as if we had discovered the great secret of how to use the revue format and stand out for our phenomenal insight. It was a fun show and the bones of it reflected in nearly twenty years of shows but that first show was a failure. Later my determination to create without the boundaries of taste or production values embraced by the rest had collaborators comparing me to Ed Wood, the infamous worst movie director in history. I wore that comparison like a badge of honor.

The curse of the overachieving contrarian.

Similar to the public school experience, I was hired for public radio to be that rule-breaker. To be out-of-the-box, a nonconforming maverick for the good of the company. I was insanely successful until the guy who hired me left and a bureaucrat came in. She didn't want the rogue element and represented a lesson that has taken me decades to comprehend: salespeople make the very worst managers. When the singular goal is the bottom line, the end of the year bonus, the size of the commission, all garnered through personality and manipulation, people no longer represent human beings. They represent a means to the self interested financial end. She and I danced around each other for a year and finally it was time to go.

I now find myself in a unique but completely familiar place. Hired by a corporate entity a thousand miles away with the agenda of taking a dinosaur and retrofitting it with GPS and modern approaches to the industry but the salesman/bureaucrat in charge of the office here in Kansas is not really into changing his success strategy from the eighties.

For the past two months, he's either avoided me or simply couldn't give a shit. The few times I knocked on his door, he looked annoyed that I'd interrupted his viewing of Ellen or basketball scores. He is a bit like talking to Drax the Destroyer, the character in Guardians of the Galaxy who doesn't understand metaphor.

"I've put together my schedule tabling at concerts..."

"What?"

"Huh? A tabling schedule."

"What's that?"

"A schedule...?"

"No. Tabling. What is that?"

"Uhm. When we show up to a concert and put out a table. A table skirt. Giveaway crap. Branding and all?"

"Why do you call it tabling?"

"...the table?"

"I don't get your public radio references. Is that your update?"

"...Sure."

Later...

"I've been looking through some of the software that corporate wants us to use more and they spent a ton of cash for this one. We hardly use it all. It's like they bought us a Lexus and we only play the radio."

"What?"

"What, what?"

"What does a Lexus have to do with it?"

"Oh. Uh...I was comparing the software to an expensive car that we only use for the radio?"

"What are you talking about?"

"Nothing. We just need to use this software and its features more."

"Why don't you just say that?"

After two months,. he holds a meeting about an upcoming event that I thought was mine to plan. It is not. He uses the meeting to put me in my place and I'm reminded of my first ex-wife's grandmother. She didn't like me. She made it abundantly clear that I was not her choice for her granddaughter. For a while I tried to get on her good side but she was a monolith. She died hating my guts and I never truly understood why. I had theories but sometimes the sauce doesn't mix well with the fish.

"What?"

"The sauce isn't a good flavor compliment to the fish? Like chocolate-based gravy on perch?"

"What are you talking about? Fish? Sauce?"

"Never mind."

If I had to guess, the guy likes to be the cock of his tiny block, a tinhorn dictator, a really important figure in a hayseed town. I'm Coach Norman Dale landing in Hickory with my newfangled ideas at the twilight of my career and he is the men of the town looking to push me around or vote me out if it comes to that.

Now that he has publicly dressed me down the scuttlebutt has started to fly. He is known, both by my co-workers as well as people in the larger community of Wichita, to be a bully. The tales of people who have come in to his sphere that he has run out on a rail because their ideas didn't fit his tiny world come at me like Montezuma's Revenge. I'm told that the best way to deal with him is compliance. Unfortunately, in fifty-seven years, no one has ever used that word to describe me.

So I remind myself why I am here. I'm in Wichita to help my parents and to spend as much time with my family as I can. This is not a job that I see, like Norman Dale, as my last chance at some sort of dream of stability. I like this gig. It's better than most and I'm good at it. It isn't a dirty business like the casino or the copywriting for a digital data poacher. I have an office and a lot of room to do the job I'm hired for. There's no time clock and, aside from the boss, the rest of the crew are genuinely nice but compliant folks.

A younger me would go to war. Push my agenda, overachieve in my contrarian manner until I decided to split or he decided to boot me off the island.

"Island? What?"

"Reality TV reference."

"What?"

Wrestling with my worst tendencies seems to be the primary task as I sit in my solo apartment without a life partner. Pragmatics over ego or emotion. I know that this gig is a paycheck. Cash to pay rent in Kansas so I can be with my family for a year or two.

"What we have is a failure to communicate."

Next up? Can I eat fifty hard-boiled eggs in an hour?