One of the drawbacks of a curious and imaginative mind is that you’re constantly thinking that the places you visit and the people you meet will defy your expectations. I have been living in DC for three weeks now, just enough time to have made the acquaintance of some of the people I share my workday with, even enough time to meet some strangers, study the eccentricities of my landlord, and contemplate the cracks and bumps of the sidewalk on my way to work. When I’m confronted by some person acting in an ordinary way, as for instance, when I was told by an office manager that I must use Internet Explorer and forbidden to use Mozilla Firefox, my reaction was one of shock, shock at their playing so perfectly the part of some imaginary character approximating the performance of an office manager rather than being the chaotic and unpredictable human that they truly are. Why should I be stunned? That ordinary people advancing to positions of power would prefer caution to freedom, corporatism to expression, and obedience to zeal should not surprise me like it does. And once again I am made aware of a dangerous and perhaps childish naïvité, to expect people to behave freely and respect freedom. I pray that I never meet their expectations.
“Orphaned Expectations” is shared by Aharon N. Varady with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.
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