Funeral Customs of Our Bureaucracies
My neighbor Jill was working down at Labor and Industries and since I needed to get a contractor license so I could install my stained glass in a state project for two whole days, I ended up with Jill. The whole process took half an hour so we covered subjects ranging from dogs we have owned to retirement strategies for us geezers. Jill’s main point was the necessity ‘to keep moving’ when you retire. She herself wanted to establish her post-retirement interests pre-retirement.
“I used to work at the Casino,” she said, something I didn’t know. “Lot of people spent their whole day sitting on a stool playing the slots. You didn’t see em for a few days, you could figure they probably died. The Casino was their whole life. We even provided funeral services. Why not? Half their friends were us casino workers. You have the funeral in-house, we didn’t take half a day off to go to a funeral downtown.”
I said it was something I never imagined. Maybe scatter their ashes under the crap table, one stop shop. Jill muttered ‘why not?’ and kept stamping my documents, checking stuff against her computer screen read-out, asked an occasional question. “Lot of those folks,” she said, “they thought of retirement as dying. Kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Kind of like filling out this endless paperwork, I thought. “Uh-oh,” Jill said after half an hour and I thought here’s where you return to jail, do not pass Go. She asked a few questions, made one small change on the form that warns NO CHANGES PERMITTED. Casino work, I thought, might not be as far removed from government bureaucrat as I thought. I bet L&I might even provide funeral services for those of us who died in these long lines … but I was hoping I wouldn’t find out today.
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