A number of years ago...
Illustration
A number of years ago, a movie was made about a college professor who took advantage of his summer breaks from teaching to go out and work with his hands. He felt it gave him a much needed perspective on the life situations of his students to go out and experience the world apart from the college campus. One of the jobs he took was as a dishwasher in a diner where factory workers usually ate supper. He found that he really enjoyed the earthy humor, the pride in a job well done, the gripes about the bosses, who were too removed from the realities of working "on the line" to understand why things didn't go as the production controllers had predicted. He related to these people well, although they looked at him with some suspicion at first, because his manners and vocabulary told them that he was not uneducated, and he was reluctant to talk about his past. Most of them decided he was probably a recovering alcoholic, or had wound up in jail somehow.
But then something happened the professor hadn't anticipated. One of the waitresses and he began to fall in love. They went out to dinner, saw a few movies, and began to talk about themselves. But when he told her what he did for a living, she became furious! And he couldn't figure it out, until one of her friends said, "I suppose you thought it would be easy with a girl like her. You have all the advantages, don't you? What did you come here for, to lord it over us all?"
It took a lot of talking for the professor to finally say, "You know, there's a lot of snobbery on your part here. Apparently, I'm too educated to be acceptable. You liked me when I was a nobody. So what's changed?"
Of course, what had changed was not the man, but the perception of the people around him; and not just their perception of who he was, but who they were in relation to him.
--Herrmann
But then something happened the professor hadn't anticipated. One of the waitresses and he began to fall in love. They went out to dinner, saw a few movies, and began to talk about themselves. But when he told her what he did for a living, she became furious! And he couldn't figure it out, until one of her friends said, "I suppose you thought it would be easy with a girl like her. You have all the advantages, don't you? What did you come here for, to lord it over us all?"
It took a lot of talking for the professor to finally say, "You know, there's a lot of snobbery on your part here. Apparently, I'm too educated to be acceptable. You liked me when I was a nobody. So what's changed?"
Of course, what had changed was not the man, but the perception of the people around him; and not just their perception of who he was, but who they were in relation to him.
--Herrmann
