Steamed

there.
    We’d been handed massive notebooks full of graduate school information. Mine included my schedule of classes, which ran Wednesday through Friday, and the contact information for my “field placement,” social work speak for internship. I’d forgotten about that. Monday and Tuesday were designated “field placement” days on which we were thrown into the trenches and expected to put into use the skills we were learning in the classroom. I’d been given a placement at the Boston Organization Against Sexual and Other Harassment in the Workplace and was to call Naomi Campbell (I swear that was her name) before Monday. Why was everything social work related required to have the longest possible title? And it was in downtown Boston, which probably meant I’d have to take the T, since parking downtown was either impossible or too expensive to do on a regular basis.
    I spent the hour from one to two seated with three other students in my advisor’s office. His name was Dick Dickers, and I passed that hour wondering what kind of parents do that to a kid. So his name was probably Richard, and Rick Dickers wasn’t much better than Dick Dickers, but with a last name like that, the kind thing to do would have been to avoid anything that sounded remotely like Dickers. There were millions of names out there for parents to choose from: James Dickers, Adam Dickers, William Dickers... although Willy Dickers would probably have sent grade-schoolers into whoops of laughter. I was sure he’d been called Dicky Dickers by children throughout the public school system. Parents should name their children responsibly. Like, if my parents had had a son, they clearly couldn’t have named him James, a choice that would have resulted in a baby Jimmy Carter crawling around. But poor Dick Dickers had been doomed to a life of students being too distracted by his name to hear any of the important information he had to impart regarding his availability as an advisor to overworked social workers. As I was leaning against the back of the hard wooden chair in Mr. Dickers’s office and not listening to what he was saying, it occurred to me that when it came to naming babies, the parents of the United States had collectively lost their minds and didn’t want to find them. In particular, no one wanted advice on what to name a child, as my sister Heather could attest. When she was pregnant with her first child, her friend Ruth had rejected every name Heather had come up with because it had reminded her of some celebrity. Donald had made Ruth think of Donald Trump, Theodore had led to Ted Kaczynski, and she’d even gone from Jennifer to Gennifer Flowers. When Heather and Ben had finally decided on the name Walker, Ruth had immediately said, “Oh, like Walker, Texas Ranger ?” Heather had been totally fed up by then and had shouted back angrily, “Yes, EXACTLY like Walker, Texas Ranger !” Ruth was not consulted or informed about baby number two’s name until after the birth certificate had been signed.
    I made a minor attempt to focus on Mr. Dickers until eventually my ill-named advisor wound up his spiel on future course selection and started clamoring about plagiarism and its consequences. When he finally wrapped up his warnings, my school chums and I shuffled out of his cramped office.
    From two to four that afternoon, I was supposed to attend the Peer-to-Peer Networking Social, which as far as I could tell was yet another opportunity to socialize, this time with advanced graduate students who’d share their wisdom with us newbies. I was irked enough at having to be here in the first place to bag the social. My plan for the next two years was to go to class and go directly home, and there was no way I was hoping to network with serious academic types who’d try to suck me into joining repulsive-sounding clubs such as, incredibly, something called the Social Work Student Class Spirit Committee. As I scampered out of school, I was already dreading the classes I had coming up over the next three days.
    Correctly so. The following day I discovered that the main similarity between my social work classes and the classes I’d had in college was that the first day pretty much consisted of being handed piles of papers with monstersized syllabi and listening to professors regale the students with proclamations about impending workloads. My Social Policy course was taught by a frizzy-haired guy in his late sixties, Professor Harmon, who