You know you’re on a farm when you hear a horse whinny on the TV and your first impulse is a glance towards the barn to make sure the real horses are okay.

Anyhow, this blog normally brimmeth over with festive good cheer at the delights of learning to farm. However, it would be dishonest not to chronicle a few of the less festive moments.

I just killed a few chicks. You’re not supposed to do that. You’re supposed to let them grow big and fat and then kill them. This is doubly true when the chicks belong to the kind soul who let you loose on his farm in the first place.

One more rule I’ve broken. I did it by accident, of course. When the day-old chicks arrive by mail, you must teach them to drink and then move them from the shipping carton to their new home. Here, their new home was a big black plastic tub that sat outside with sheets of plywood and a tarp either on top or not depending on the weather. When they got big enough, they graduated to the party shed that would house them for the teenage weeks before they could move to the Authentic Coops Proper for Mature Poultry.

This graduation involved the upheaval of placing groups of chicks in a dog cage (without the implied dog) and carting the cage over to the new dorm. I volunteered for the job. The farmer gave me instructions, understandably assuming I had a certain sense, inherited or acquired, for when a dog cage is full. Unfortunately, I didn’t know such a sense existed. I have not found it in the Great Books. Nor was it covered in the curriculum of my Bachelors Degree in Communication Arts with a Radio/TV concentration.

So I put 170 chicks into a cage that normally holds 30 or 40.

When the farmer came and helped me cart the cage over to the shed, he was pleasantly surprised they had all fit. When he opened the cage to unload them, he was surprised again. He yanked the chicks out as fast as he could, but at the back of the cage they were four deep.

Only two had already died. Others lay on their sides and panted. The farmer put them on their feet, and some stayed standing. Perhaps they’ll make it.

What’s the equivalent for this in cubicle life? A shoutdown from the boss? (My boss was quite nice about this.) Messing up a big project? Tipping over the sole office plant?

Looks like when the ups are so great, the downs have to be a bit harder. The one nice thing about doing something that doesn’t matter for a living is that when you mess up, it doesn’t matter. A botched report doesn’t lie on the desk and pant for its young life.

But that’s a problem. Mistakes here are dramatic, whereas the real mistake in a paler profession is the gradual fattening, dulling, and depressing of the employee. It’s weird to feel a really lousy consequence for something I did on the job…and isn’t that weird?

So I’ll be back tomorrow.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled good cheer.