We Were Robot-Engineers

In preschool I would walk out of the classroom and go in search of Mr. Petzke. Mr. Petzke wasn’t a teacher’s aide or a speech therapist or an audiologist; he was the janitor.

In a classroom equipped with a special chair where I sat and cut grapes in half using child-safe scissors, I sought out the company of the school janitor.

So when Jack yanked my hand down beckoning me to settle down to his eye level, I didn’t hesitate. We were at school but really we were staring into another dimension in more ways than one. A dimension that turned us into robots via a glass door of a pitch black internet server room. The component lights flickering through our reflections like R2-D2 humanoids.

When we weren’t robots, we were audio and visual engineers. Crouched in the doorway of a lighted and darkened bathroom within arm’s length of the light switch. Testing the acoustic differences of how a shower door angles in or out.

The newspaper captured a photo of me running through a crowd of teachers and students hugging Mr. Petzke on his last day before retirement. Before a limousine whisked him away on a ride around the city of Racine. I wasn’t about to deny Jack his janitor moments.

So frequently this realm’s Dumbledores take away mirrors from Harry Potters, fearing a wasting away in front of storyboards that may never be understood. As a robot-engineer, I knew what isolation meant as I grew into an introvert between junior and senior highs.

Now much older, I was struck with an inability to escape the nomenclature of what one expects in a society run by time constraints. The social worker side of me would use words like ‘elopement’ to treatment plan the janitor searching genius out of someone not yet equipped with this vehicle of writing, to show the masses what they needed to see and hear in their linguistic understanding.

So there I squatted in the trenches bending to the whims of a fellow robot-engineer because age and education had almost taken the janitor kid out of me. Almost.