A Picture (i.e. Imagery) is Worth a Thousand Words

I’m the appointed-cheap-labor-editor for Fritz’s Purdue text (would you believe a kindly treated and well appreciated, but UNPAID LABOROR). Yesterday I completed edits on his chapter 5, which happens to be all about budgeting principles used within the construction industry. Most of the content was reasonably straightforward, although of course significantly more technical than anything I’m used to reading or writing.

I learned (a little) about project budgets and company budgets; annual budgets and periodic budgets. Or more honestly, I had minimal exposure to these things, like standing in an open doorway and feeling a breeze blowing through, briefly, without leaving much of a mark. I wondered if word combinations like profit-to-earnings-ratios, return-on-investment, before-tax and after-tax should be hyphenated, but I made notes and I guess The PhD Author (to whom I bow with all due honor) will figure that out later.

So anyway, picture this. I was humming along (not verbally humming a song, like Heard It Through the Grapevine, but just humming in the way a car engine hums on a long and boring trip down the straight interstate where there’s nothing of interest to break the monotony - lalalalalala), reading and reading and reading and reading, and marking and marking and marking technical blah-blah so it smoothed out a little – no orange cones, no road crews to slow things down. This formula tells you this, and that formula tells you that, and blah-blah-blah, and oh yes, remember the gold nugget: MAKE SURE YOU USE A BUDGET. Then in the midst of so many jet-streams of budget-information and budget-numbers and budget-computations, I came across the one-and-only artistically worded sentence in the whole chapter:

“Without a direction, the company drifts with the ever changing economic and political currents of society.”

I lifted my mechanical pencil as if it were a torch. “YES!” Fritz looked at me with eyes that said wow, she’s really getting into this chapter. “THIS SENTENCE is your best yet!” He was definitely impressed – feeling, I’m sure, like I’d finally seen the light, like now budgeting made all the sense in the world and I would run to Dollar General within the hour and buy a ledger to record - and later forecast - all my grocery expenditures. “You’re FINALLY speaking my language!”

“Read it to me,” he said cautiously, with a wistful look on his face.

And so I did. With inflection. And with pauses in just the right places.

“Without a DIRECTION (pause), the company DRIFTS (pause) with the ever changing economic and political CURRENTS (pause) of society.”

“It’s beautiful,” I sighed. He laughed his crinkly-eye laugh, the one he inherited from his mother, and scratched his (balding, professor-ish) head. We both wondered (and marveled) at his momentary lapse – his divergence from the analytical into the creative. “This is all the payment I need.” It was a glorious moment, a time when our octopus tentacles connected via literary means, which simply never happens.

Drifting amid currents. I could see, feel, and remember these images. I don’t remember anything specific about all the rest.