A Not Entirely Hypothetical Question

Let’s say you’ve labored long & hard on the outskirts of a beleaguered bureaucracy, a place where years of scarce resources and lousy decisions have piled up on each other to produce an environment in which smart, passionate, dedicated people are regularly chewed up and undermined by the very system that is supposed to support them.

Now let’s say the forbidding, awkward entrance to the butt-ugly building this bureaucracy has decided your kids should go to school in has disgusting black slime mold growing all over it. Let’s note for the record that you are well aware that a few moldy bricks are the least of the problems this beleaguered bureaucracy is facing, but that for you they have come to symbolize a brutal indifference to aesthetic concerns that you feel is detrimental to the mental and emotional health of the children and teachers who spend their days in its clutches.

Let’s say that when the principal e-mailed the maintenance department to check up on the pressure-washing work order he had submitted back in February, he got a one-sentence response: “We have not received this work order, so it is not on our radar.”

And let’s say that when somebody a little higher up the food chain suggested that “someone look at the work order and possibly change the status to get this work done” (implying, I can’t help but point out, that the default status for work orders does not actually involve getting them done), the response was, “Maintenance is in a budget crunch right now so we are doing primarily paid work to keep us going.” Which at first blush sounds like maybe the department had previously been prone to wild fits of volunteer maintenance which are now alas out of the question, but which actually means that they would only be willing to undertake the work if the principal could fund their wages out of his school budget. And let’s say that the principal of this particular school had already squandered his budget on things like teachers and books, and couldn’t really see his way clear to cutting back on those things in order to entice the maintenance people to drop by and get some ugly but otherwise harmless black goo off the bricks at the entrance.

Let’s say, further, that you were griping about this state of affairs at the coffee shop one day and you happened to be overheard by a guy with a pressure washer tucked away in his garage, and let’s say you took him up on his kind offer to lend it to you.

So let's say this is how you found yourself in a rain suit and goggles on a Saturday morning, dodging flying globs of black slime mold and wondering why you hadn’t adopted the policy – looking wiser and more reasonable by the minute -- of sticking with paid work. Especially after you had erased the black goo from the bricks, and stepped back triumphantly to have a look at your handiwork, and realized that while you had succeeded in making a filthy brick wall into a clean one, it remained at its heart a butt-ugly brick wall.

And let’s say that, even as your sense of accomplishment drained away before your eyes, you randomly aimed the pressure washer at the adjacent concrete wall (this would be the one in between the butt-ugly bricks and the double layer of chain-link fence, for those of you following along at home), and discovered that it was covered with a nice even layer of dark grime, through which the pressure washer sliced like a light saber, leaving a blazing line of clean concrete. And that even though it wasn’t exactly a precision instrument, with a little concentration you could achieve something like this:


Now if all of that happened, and then you packed up the borrowed pressure washer and peeled off the rain gear and went home feeling secretly, sheepishly, thoroughly pleased with yourself, and on Monday morning people actually noticed what you had done, and were visibly cheered by it...

Would that qualify as creative maladjustment?

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