Am I really this educated?

On the heels of my earlier post about college, I feel like mentioning how nothing can make you feel worse about your degree than actually being out in the real world.

Maybe it seems sort of ungrateful to say this, but I was never really that proud of my degree. The truth is I didn’t have to work that hard to get it. That’s not a swipe at my school or the classes I took, though certainly there were harder classes and more difficult schools. But it just always seemed inevitable. I never considered not finishing college. So finishing wasn’t that big a deal. Plus, let’s be honest, how many people graduated from college in 2002? I did. And a lot of other people did, too. Unfortunately, Google isn’t helping me out with any specific numbers right now, though. Google does tell me that the 2000 Census found that 24% of the over-25 population claimed to have at least a bachelor’s degree. Which seems like a disturbing low percentage but is still a really hige number of people.

Now, where I work you have to have a bachelor’s degree. They don’t much care what it’s in, but to have a job that’s at all above clerical work you have to have a four-year degree of some kind. Let me tell you: Nothing is more depressing than knowing that. This isn’t a shot at my co-workers in particular. Most of them are genuinely intelligent, and really you need to be able to think to do our job. (Really, it’s all you have to be able to do but that’s another story.) But it’s not just people in subrogation – everyone here has to have a four year-degree. Claims representative, accountants, underwriters, everyone. And yet.

Now, it’s not that I don’t make typos or occasionally misuse grammar. And I don’t expect everyone who works at this company to be an encyclopedia of knowledge about all things in the universe. But you should at least know about things that have to do with your job. For instance, a “tenet” is an opinion (or the former head of the CIA when capitalized). Tenets have nothing to do with insurance. But a “tenant” is a person paying rent to live in someone else’s property. We deal with tenants in insurance all the time. So it’d be nice if you could learn to spell the word. I find examples of ridiculous things like this literally every day. To wit, “plumbers” fix water pipes in homes; “plummer” isn’t a word, except that when capitalized it’s the quarterback for the Broncos. A pipe has never, not ever, “bursted.” Or “splitted.” Or “failured.” And, I promise, no matter how strong the wind blows, trees never get “blowed” over.