Attention Paid

For a little more than a week, I have intended to write about the relationship between employer and employee in terms of a job being paid attention. Simply, that the employer wants an employee’s full attention in exchange for the wage. Some of the motivation for this reflection was thinking about working as a busboy for a family-owned restaurant in Duluth.

When the restaurant was busy—crazy busy at times—all of us were in constant motion. Waitresses, bartenders, cooks, dishwashers, and busboys. We busboys were attentive to cleaning off tables and replacing tablecloths, moving collection tubs to the scullery, running errands for more butter, more ice, more dishes for the kitchen, and more and even more.

I remember tapping beer kegs down in the cooler as a mixed blessing. On the downside, if your area of concern was hopping, you would fall behind in the rush of work to be done. Of course, when hot and sweaty, going to the cooler provided relief for a few moments. The next trick was to slip through the kitchen without being tagged for a chore and get back to the work you were expected to stay on top of for a buck-thirty-five an hour (We did get a share of tips).

Inevitably, as the evening wore on, the stream of customers would slow, and on weekends the busboys might take a moment to stand and chat or even horse around some—okay, more than some sometimes. Now when one of the managers saw 2 or 3 of us idling for a bit, we could count on a scowl at least, at worst one of us was punching out and heading home.

Either we were getting paid, or the business was. Got it, the bottom line.

But, as so often the case, this mulling over one thing stumbles into another.

The past few weeks folks I know as friends or former colleagues and students or family have exchanged their time—money, too—for my first published book. They have chosen to pay attention to my effort. Of course, spending their money is part of the exchange, but time is the commodity expended that I find most generous in this case.  

Given all the options that define our culture, all the forms of entertainment, the varied media—well, of course I’m humbled by their choice.

And yet, another rerouting—how the mind works—and so I offer up this observation from Parker J. Palmer: The human soul doesn’t want to be fixed, it simply wants to be seen and heard.

Thus, a bottom line of a different sort, attention paid.