The Accidental Bureaucrat
a short story by Charis Emanon
In the grand traditions of Franz Kafka, Camus, and more comes this absurdist short story detailing the misadventures of one person’s bureaucratic journey. What makes it all the more unsettling is you could almost—if you close your eyes real tight—imagine it happening. And maybe it would actually be better.
The Accidental Bureaucrat
By Charis Emanon
I was once accidentally elected Secretary of Education in my state. I can think of no story that better illustrates the virtues of democracy.
In fact, the whole thing came about because the prior Secretary of Education had been removed from the position forcibly and ignominiously. There was a court-ordered psych evaluation and threats of incarceration. Put simply, our state needed an immediate replacement.
That explains how there came to be a mid-term, off-year election in the first place. How that bit of misfortune became my opportunity is slightly more complex.
The Mid-Week 6 AM Faculty Meeting At Bob’s Bar & Grill
The trouble for me began—as it often does—after my 6th tequila and whiskey chaser at the mid-week morning faculty meeting at Bob’s Bar & Grill. I should explain that there was a time when I didn’t drink alcohol with my coworkers, and, when I first started out, I did not imbibe before—or during—the school day.
Also, once I was nearly 7-foot tall with a long mane of golden hair that shone in the summer sun like a field overflowing with wheat; I had a wife, a quick wit, and a winning smile. Seven years of teaching 8th grade history, however, had taken a toll. Seven years is 2,555 days or 61,320 hours, many of which had been filled responding to student questions such as “What did you just say?”, “Will this be on the test?”, “Can I use the bathroom?”, “Do you have a pencil?”, “How do I put out a small electrical fire?”, and the like. In fact, every time I heard a query along these lines—which I approximate occurred some 33 times a day—more of my hair fell out, my spine shriveled a bit, my metabolism slowed to a glacial pace, and my desire to consume alcoholic beverages, so as to kill each and every memory cell in my brain, increased.
As a result, after 7 years of teaching, I was utterly bald, lucky to measure up to 5’ tall—on a good day, with much of my height having shifted to weight so that I was more around than up. My hands shook, my eyes twitched, my wife left me and then my goldfish, too, ran away. I had lost a good portion of my will to live. Which brings us back to the mid-week faculty meeting at Bob’s Bar & Grill.
My teaching partner, Janice Holbrooker, said, “Hey, Charis—look at who’s running for Secretary of Education! It’s Charis Emanem. His name looks just like yours!” Emanem, of course, is a famous politician in our state, he’s also the child of famous politicians, and he seems poised to do great things. None of those statements applies to me but, as Holbrooker had correctly pointed out, my last name, Emanon, looked pretty close to his—especially after 6 tequilas and whiskeys at 6 in the morning.
After another couple of drinks, Holbrooker had another funny idea. “You know what we should do? We should get your name on the ballot to be Secretary of Education!” We then giggled uncontrollably, as drunks often do, with no real recollection as to what had set us into fits of hysterics in the first place. That moment of rational decision-making, plus a “sick day” for both of us—spent filling out a bunch of forms at the elections office while somewhat succeeding in attempts to both stand and sign our names legibly with a pen—explains how my last-minute campaign for elected office began.
Now, here’s the kicker: This election was the unimportant midterm, off-season kind, and the office I was running for is what political hacks call the “down ballot” type—the ones nobody really pays all that much attention to. Rising political star Charis Emanem was a shoo-in for the position. His political handlers had spent record amounts of money to guarantee that he had positive facial and name recognition with the voters of our state.
What they failed to do, however, was to account for the spelling abilities of the average citizen. For a myriad number of complex reasons, most of which can be reduced down to a coin toss, my name wound up first on the ballot. Suffice it to say, Charis Emanem carried the election in a landslide but, due to a quirk of spelling and the positioning of my name, I wound up taking home the top prize as the new Secretary of Education.
I did hear from my opponent on election night, as I woke up in a stupor when my phone started ringing. That other Charis was entirely gracious, saying, “I am going to sue you for everything you’ve got, you sniveling little S.O.B.! You weren’t born to lead the way that I was. No way will any low-life teacher end up holding the reins of power in our state’s Education Department!”
My first response was of the guttural kind, as the contents of my stomach began defying gravity and I was reduced to a kneeling position in front of my porcelain John while I continued the celebration of my victory. The news got worse as more calls came in. Because it was a “special election” I had to start right away—the very next morning!—there in our state capitol.
The Sex Education Conundrum
My first task was to head up a hearing on the sex education initiative which had been shepherded into law by my predecessor before she took up building her popsicle models. One of the many blessings of drinking to solve your own problems is that you miss out on most of the latest news. I didn’t even know that our state had passed a law requiring sex education to be taught at all grade levels. More than that, I was shocked to discover that sex had become controversial.
They handed me a gavel, propped me into a very comfortable leather chair, shoved a microphone in front of my face, and told me that I was presiding over a meeting of “concerned citizens.” I asked if someone could bring me a small tumbler of Everclear—just a bit of the hair of the dog what bit me. My new chief of staff said, “no problem.” I was pleased to discover that us elected officials are in a job where early morning drinking isn’t frowned upon. In fact it has a noble heritage—Jimmy Carter was plastered when he sat down with Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat at Camp David, and so was Benjamin Disraeli every time he sat down. The various liquor advocacy and lobbying groups made sure we all had access to fully stocked bars. Alcohol certainly puts the fun into cabinet meetings.
I don’t think I could have survived that first meeting without it. My head was yo-yoed back and forth. First one parent would stand up and yell at me that kids today need to know about safe sex to avoid passing on STDs. Then the next would holler at me that our kids need to be protected from smut. Both sides made good arguments, or—at least—they were loud.
I thought my head was going to split right down the middle. Plus my pickle and anchovy sandwich on a week-old bagel was starting to seem like a poor choice for breakfast.
Ultimately, it dawned on me that both sides had committed to yelling before they had thought the issue through. For one thing, the ones who seemed to think it was important for sex to be properly taught in schools also seemed to underestimate how little of what is taught generally actually takes. Just ask any kid to tell you the name of the capitol of our state, to draw the equilateral of a right quadrangle on the incline of an inverse slope, to name the parts of speech, or, better yet, just ask, “So, what did you do in school today?” and you’ll see exactly what I mean. On the other side, the horse already seems to have left the barn, so to speak. The kids already have 24-hour access to sex education, seven days a week, paid for by their parent’s data plan, maintained on networks funded by our government, and then there’s the fact that it’s pretty much impossible to separate these electronic devices from the young people. Try taking a kid’s cellphone away—I have, hundreds of times, and it is NOT easier than taking candy from a baby.
The only connection I have to teaching sex comes from the time when I showed a video called “The Family Farm” so that I could devote more time to grading—i.e. sneaking drinks from my portable snifter. One scene showed a calf being born. I remember it vividly because of the ruckus it caused. The students took to hooting and hollering and one even yelled out, “Did that cow just poop a baby out of its @$*!?”
Then it struck me. The perfect answer. “I hereby order that every school in this state will be required to house and maintain farm animals on their football fields and outdoor play areas.”
This was a stroke of genius! Actually being around animals all day, every day, as generations of farm kids once did, helped to accomplish the sex education that the one group of parents wanted in a manner that the other group found acceptable. After seeing a sow give birth to a litter, or a mare go into heat, many of the biological questions no longer needed answering.
There were multiple side benefits to my decree as well. Nobody did any studies but, if they had, they would have found that teenaged pregnancies were reduced in our state, as cleaning up a barnyard all day leaves you too tuckered to do much else while at the same time making everybody else so smelly as to be undesirable. All the kids became more muscular from baling hay and school cafeterias served up fresh pork, eggs, and milk regularly to boot.
My Next Miracle: Standards
Of course, I had immediately to address the “standards” issue. It appears that each year, in every state, every school gets farther and farther behind in meeting standards. Every single election cycle the situation becomes all the more dire. It also seems that the prior generation was both smarter and higher-achieving, while the one coming up is in for desperate times because workplaces keep getting more and more complex while those pesky businesses just go on upping the ante on high-technology, and the upshot is that our kids will never be ready for the jobs of the future.
Even in my state of perpetual drunkenness I knew about this one because it had been an alarming issue for my own teachers back when I was going through school. Besides, they made us cancel the mid-week 6 am faculty meeting for one month out of every school year so we would all focus on getting the students ready for the state tests.
Here again my experience in the classroom paid off. I had noticed that if you tell a kid to do something—“Go get a book off of the shelf!”, “Start writing!”, “Stop throwing paper at Becky!”, “Take out your earphones!”, “Stop putting gum in his hair!”, “Put away your cellphone!”, “Don’t throw knives when I’m at the board!”—they never listen to you. In fact, they pretty much do the opposite of whatever any parent or teacher says, and often times set out to do even more of it when asked to stop.
The solution was simple. I ordered that every student in the state was forbidden to study for the state tests. That did the trick. Kids started studying in secret. They manufactured little practice booklets with sample questions and passed them illicitly from child to child. They arranged secret “cram” sessions in public libraries. Since the sports fields had been taken over by animals, all of the athletes spent their new-found free time smuggling textbooks in from other countries—textbooks from Mexico and Central America were particularly valuable as contraband.
All of it paid off. When the state tests came around that spring—as natural as any other season that God has created—our schools achieved our highest results ever, and not a moment of class time had been wasted in prepping.
I applied this new technique to solve all sorts of other issues. I ordered kids to stop reading books, start dressing like they were members of a hip hop band in a music video, and to only consume candy and cigarettes. In one fell swoop I increased state literacy, solved the dress-code issue, improved dental health, and increased the life span of all of our state’s citizens. The money that used to go into those “cool” anti-smoking campaigns was used instead to buy more books, as the kids kept demanding them.
My Trial
Of course, I still had to face the lawsuit brought by Charis Emanem against me. He claimed I had fraudulently won the election by virtue of my parents having chosen a name for me at my birth that nearly matched his own. As evidence of my guilt he produced my birth certificate, which sent a gasp through the gallery. I am much younger than I look.
My staff at the Education Department—having grown attached to me since I rarely pointed rocket launchers their general direction—urged me to hire a lawyer. This attorney urged me to “please act normal and don’t pop open a can of beer while on the stand.”
Even though I hadn’t really expected or wanted to be Secretary of Education, once in the position, I found that I had begun to relish the feel of a bit of power in my hands. Plus drawing a monthly salary that was three times my annual recompense as a teacher helped. So I tried to tone it down a bit, to act more like the sort of leader to which the voters had become accustomed, and to fit in.
This proved to be my undoing. “I am disappointed,” the judge ruled. “I’d expected you to be different than the other politicians, but you’ve become just like the rest of us! How boring!
You’ve started doing and saying all of the things I’d expect of anyone else. You’re just like Charis Emanem now, the pair of you are interchangeable.”
So he swapped me out for that other Charis and that was that. I was ordered to pay damages to my opponent, back pay, legal costs, hair dresser fees, provide feed and housing for all the unemployed schoolyard animals, and to stay away from institutions of education, education department meetings, and political events. It seemed my life served to teach all of the wrong lessons.
I have never been happier! Now the mid-week 6 am faculty meeting at Bob’s Bar & Grill can go on for 24 hours every day.
Life in my state has returned to normal. I hear they’re fixing to do something about standards again. It seems schools are back in crisis, all of the politicians are shouting at one another as they pin the blame for the decline, and so everything has turned up roses once more.
Meet the Author:
Charis is a world wanderer who lived in Trinidad as a child, resided in Hong Kong as an adult, but always winds up home on the Columbia River. They maintain a wildlife refuge for words that prefer the underside of life at ElectricSoupfortheSoul.com. Charis’ writing is in the Strangely Funny IX Anthology. Their novel, 51 Ways To End Your World, is available now. Charis experiences the underside of life in libraries on the wrong side of town, the kind that lend out The Decameron and the 1816 edition of the Farmers' Almanac that was too hot for the general public.