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Did you ever think much about jobs? I mean, some of the jobs people land in? You see a guy giving haircuts to dogs, or maybe going along the curb with a shovel, scooping up horse manure. And you think, now why is the silly bastard doing that? He looks fairly bright, about as bright as anyone else. Why the hell does he do that for living?You kind grin and look down your nose at him. You think he__ nuts, know what I mean, or he doesn__ have any ambition. And then you take a good look at yourself, and you stop wondering about the other guy_You__e got all your hands and feet. Your health is okay, and you make a nice appearance, and ambition-man! You__e got it. You__e young, I guess: you__ call thirty young, and you__e strong. You don__ have much education, but you__e got more than plenty of other people who go to the top. And yet with all that, with all you__e had to do with this is as far you__e got And something tellys you, you__e not going much farther if any.And there is nothing to be done about it now, of course, but you can__ stop hoping. You can__ stop wondering_Maybe you had too much ambition. Maybe that was the trouble. You couldn__ see yourself spending forty years moving from office boy to president. So you signed on with a circulation crew; you worked the magazines from one coast to another. And then you ran across a little brush deal-it sounded nice, anyway. And you worked that until you found something better, something that looked better. And you moved from that something to another something. Coffee-and-tea premiums, dinnerware, penny-a-day insurance, photo coupons, cemetery lots, hosiery, extract, and God knows what all. You begged for the charities, You bought the old gold. You went back to the magazines and the brushes and the coffee and tea. You made good money, a couple of hundred a week sometimes. But when you averaged it up, the good weeks with the bad, it wasn__ so good. Fifty or sixty a week, maybe seventy. More than you could make, probably, behind agas pump or a soda fountain. But you had to knock yourself out to do it, and you were standing stil. You were still there at the starting place. And you weren__ a kid any more.So you come to this town, and you see this ad. Man for outside sales and collections. Good deal for hard worker. And you think maybe this is it. This sounds like a right town. So you take the job, and you settle down in the town. And, of course, neither one of __m is right, they__e just like all the others. The job stinks. The town stinks. You stink. And there__ not a goddamned thing you can do about it. All you can do is go on like this other guys go on. The guy giving haircuts to dogs, and the guy sweeping up horse manute Hating it. Hating yourself.And hoping.