stevesbets

For the last few days my life has been consumed with my Sister’s graduation from Penn. She has always enjoyed the stage and thusly demanded attendance at all graduation events.  The first such event was her “major” graduation ceremony (communications). After a plethora of speeches about how at Penn’s Annenberg school of communication students were taught to be leaders of the 21st century in all things news and information related, a woman took to the lectern to read the names of the graduates. As she read the names it became clear that she had no right to be reading complicated, or even simple, names aloud. In fact I’m not sure she had the right to read a book quietly to herself in the corner. She botched or stumbled over just about every name on the list to the point of absurdity, pronouncing “Michael” as “Michelle” and making other even more greivous errors. halfway through the whole auditorium was erupting in laughter. The woman stopped reading the names and slowly took a sip of water, then proceeded so stumble even worse than before. She was about 2/3 of her way through the list of students when she started crying and ran off the stage much to the amazement of everyone in attendance.  The most amazing part of the debacle is that she was representing the school of COMMUNICATIONS and could not communicate a list of names in a way that perhaps a 3rd grader could.

What really irks me about this display is that I’m quite sure if I or any other competent poker player applied for a job at the School of Communications I would be promptly denied. This woman was clearly gainfully employed and respected enough to have the task of reading the names at graduation. How on earth did she get to that point? I was told that 90% of doing basically any job on earth just requires showing up for work. I truly hope this isn’t true and what I witnessed was a fluke.