One summer in college, I worked for the state roads commission in Maryland.  If you like being outdoors, getting a lot of exercise, driving around in the back of dump trucks drinking beer it was the perfect job.

The average day went like this.  Each morning we’d report to the facility at seven, and sit around for an hour as the supervisors received their assignments for the day.  It would take another hour to gather the tools needed to complete whatever project we were given.  On the road by nine, the two full-time employees inside the truck, my friend and I laying in the back on burlap bags..

By ten, we had unloaded the tools, and scoped the work.  Most days we’d forget one or two tools needed to complete the work, radio back to the facility to have someone deliver it to us, and practice sitting on our shovels until we were fully outfitted.  It didn’t make sense to start the work knowing lunch was only thirty minutes out, so on most days we would simply wait until after lunch.  By one o’clock, our bellies full, we began our assignment—fix a guardrail, shovel some gravel, install a road sign, scoop a dead deer of the road.

The foreman, Butch, knew the location of every liquor store in the county.  Happy hour in the dump truck usually began at three—one case of beer for the two men in the front, one case of beer for my friend and me in the back.  We’d lay there with our shirts off as the supervisor chauffeured us around the county trying to kill time until we could return to the service bay.

I wonder if they need any help this summer.

One of the things I remember about that summer was a job posting in the service shed.  The posting was for a supervisor/foreman.  The single qualification was the requirement of having completed education through grade five—the “Are you smarter than a fifth grader” test.

I have no segue.  I am wondering if there is a posting in the ONC service shed for an EHR Czar.  If there were, what would be the requirements?

WANTED: EHR Czar—Fourth graders need not apply.

Count me in.