This one goes out to all those folks working summer jobs during their break from high school or college.
From her outpost in the Bookworm Room, a blogger writes:
The whole AIDS anniversary thing reminds me of where I was 25 years ago. I was working as a secretary one summer for two virologists in an urban hospital. They were busy writing a paper about a bizarre spectrum of rare diseases appearing amongst New York's gay population. My contribution was photocopying articles and typing — lots of typing. The article got published about three months before someone figured out that the diseases all resulted from an immune system failure that could be traced to a single virus.
My name actually shows up in the article along with many others ("with thanks to Ms. Bookworm"). The thanks were merited because, without me, they wouldn't have gotten the article published. (Of course, had they waited a bit longer, the article would have been written with AIDS in mind, and not just been written as a "hmmmm, why is this happening?" type of article.) You see, these researchers had a secretary before I came on board that summer. She was terrible — completely unproductive. Unfortunately, because of union rules, they couldn't fire her. What finally got her out of there was her maternity leave. I needed a summer job at the same time, and that's how I came to work for them. In that single summer, I helped them get published five separate articles that had been languishing, sometimes for years.
So you never know the good you might be doing, or the bad you might be preventing. A job is a powerful thing — even a silly little summer job.
