I’m on my rocker.
Well, not yet. My rocker awaits me in my office when I return from my summer travels. It’s my 25 Years of Service Award from my employer, the Pennsylvania State University.
Yep, started in ‘98, the pre-tarnished days of Paterno, Sandusky and Spanier. The Jordan Center still had that new arena smell.
I inherited slide carousels from my predecessor and supplemented them with transparencies that I showed, upside down, as often as not, on an overhead projector. I handed out printed syllabi on the first day of class and blue books at exam time.
I walked to campus through massive snowdrifts. OK, I still do that, except we hardly ever have massive snowdrifts anymore.
I published a sufficient number of academic journal articles that were read by a total of 27 people (not counting my parents) who picked them up after they got bored watching paint dry, and so was granted tenure in 2004. The children of Pennsylvania taxpayers and obscenely rich foreigners have been stuck with me ever since.
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We 25-year folk are offered a choice: rocker or captain’s chair. Black, cherry or “chair:” The captain’s chair that isn’t black or cherry doesn’t have a color name attached to it, but it looks brown, which is to say, chair-colored, apparently.
I chose the cherry rocker because, well, after 25 years, the R-word has entered the conversation and the rocker is its totem, though every retiree I talk to says they’re busier than they’ve ever been.
I think what this means is that by the time one retires, one is so addled that one frequently performs the same tasks over and over, having forgotten that one has just done them. If you keep thinking you need to go to the store to buy peach preserves, as my dad did, bless his heart, you’re going to feel awfully busy.
After a gratifying year of teaching in 2022-23, I decided I’m not ready for the rocker yet. Doubtless some of my students would disagree, but then, I probably had students in 1998 who, if asked, would have told the university to banish the old natterer to his front porch right then and there.
I’ll know it’s time to retire the day a student informs me that I taught their mom or dad. Bound to happen.
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If you’re one of those people who think artificial intelligence is poised to usher us academics into early retirement anyway, I offer two explanations for the idiom “off your rocker,” as in crazy as a bedbug, nutty as a fruitcake, not playing with a full deck, etc.
The first comes from ChatGPT:
“The phrase likely comes from the phrase ‘rocking chair test,’ which was a slang term used by psychiatrists to determine if someone was sane or not. The idea was that if a person was able to sit in a rocking chair without rocking, they were considered to be sane. If they couldn’t stop rocking, it was thought that they were ‘off their rocker.’”
There are two problems with this derivation. The first is stylistic: “The phrase likely comes from the phrase?” Awful.
Then there’s the historical accuracy question. With the authority vested in me as a 25-year man at a top football school – I mean, research university – I googled “rocking chair test psychiatry” and found no evidence of such a test. There may have been one – the history of psychiatry is not my area – but on the face of it, the ChatGPT explanation sounds like it was made up by someone playing the Dictionary game.
For a more plausible explanation, I invite you to go to San Francisco and ride a streetcar – as opposed to one of those little cable cars that climb halfway to the stars (RIP Tony Bennett). SF’s streetcars, like other trolley systems around the world, are connected to overhead electric lines by a rocker arm. When the rocker disconnects from the powerline, as sometimes happens, the streetcar (one’s brain, in the analogy) comes to a dead stop.
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I don’t need another chair in my life: We 25-year folk tend to be at that stage when we think more about divesting than acquiring. I’ve heard that some silver anniversary Penn Staters sell their chairs on ebay.
Curious, if not tempted, I went to eBay to see what 25-year chairs go for these days, but didn’t find any for sale, which probably speaks well for how longtime Penn Staters feel about their place of employment.
I did find a State of West Virginia 25-Year Service Award Lapel Pin ($25); a State of Maryland 25 Year Employee Service Award Pin Tie Tack ($27); and lots of Penn State tushy cushions for those accursed Beaver Stadium bleachers.
If you’ve read this far, you may have concluded that this ol’ trolley has lost all contact with reality. You’re probably right. Good thing I’ve got my rocker to retire to. Although, come to think of it, I’d better go buy some peach preserves.
