Mitty and me

With my hands buried deep in the bowels of the printer, scrabbling desperately after the wrinkled scrap of paper jamming up the works, I glance at the clock and see that I need to dash upstairs to teach a class in 30 seconds, which doesn't leave any time to wash my ink-stained fingers.

Today I've been struggling to make things work--clearing a stubborn paper jam from the printer, fumbling with a so-called fillable form that resisted my efforts to fill in the blanks, transcribing a url incorrectly and leading students to the dreaded "404 Error." Somehow, though, all this mechanical incompetence seems appropriate on a day when I'm teaching James Thurber's story "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty."

For Mitty, too, is bedeviled by machinery, so incapable of putting chains on his tires in the winter that he resolves to put his arm in a sling so the garage mechanic won't view him with contempt when he asks for help. The milquetoast Mitty bows to his wife's warnings--he's driving too fast, he ought to be wearing galoshes, he can't be trusted to buy the right brand of puppy biscuit. Even a revolving door whistles at him derisively.

Which is why Mitty takes refuge in a fantasy world in which he exudes authority, knowledge, and competence. The real Mitty can't park his car without assistance, but in his fantasies, he can pilot a "hurtling eight-engine Navy hydroplane" or use a fountain pen to replace a faulty piston in a complicated medical machine, and if the fantasy Mitty, accused of murder, had his right arm in a sling--well, he testifies, "I could killed Gregory Fitzhurst at three hundred feet with my left hand."

What would Walter Mitty do with a paper jam or a faulty url? If he struggled to remember to buy overshoes or the right brand of puppy biscuit, how would he handle the many passwords needed to survive modern life? Today as the printer tried to consume my whole hand, I kept waiting for it to say "ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa" and I wondered what kind of fantasy scenario could make my technological struggles appear heroic. 

In the end I determined to face my students with the kind of stoic nonchalance Mitty displays at the end of the story, "Walter Mitty the Undefeated, inscrutable to the last," tearing off the blindfold to look squarely at the firing squad.

Oh, shoot--there's still ink on my hands.