While in a funk the other night, I decided to watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” in an attempt to improve my mood. At some point I fell asleep (OK, I passed out) and when I awoke, my own guardian angel had come down for an intervention, to show me the impact of my not being born, just like in the movie. This struck me as quite odd because, unlike George Bailey who was contemplating suicide, I was just mildly bummed and just needed a quiet evening at home. Boy was I in for a surprise,

Anyway, he took me back to Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, circa 1962 and gave me a glimpse forward from my birth at what the world would be like if I had never been born. It turns out I had minimal impact through the 60’s and 70’s, as well as the 80’s; absolutely nothing was different in my absence. There was one incident, back in 1967, when my Mom ran over our neighbor’s cat because I wasn’t there to say, “Look out for the cat, Mom.” Since the feline had already been neutered and our neighbors didn’t really like the cat anyway, this didn’t change anything.

I started to get kind of bored and a little depressed and asked my guardian angel why we had to go back so far, if nothing was going to be any different. He told me it was real technical and I wouldn’t possibly understand it. That is just the way it works, he told me, and commanded patience. Then he muttered something under his breath that sounded to me like the F-word.

We then came on the 90’s. Turns out, my big mark was left during my years working as an Engineer, after a Japanese company bought our plant. During the start up, when several technical problems cropped up on the manufacturing line, without me to mishandle them, another engineer quickly figured out solutions. He resolved these issues, instead of sweeping them under the carpet as I had so skillfully done. Avoided, in my absence, was the resulting financial freefall that had so mercilessly hit the company like a drive-by lawn dart attack, claiming its life and all of our jobs.

Instead, the start up of the new plant succeeded, production was ramped up, and revenue surpassed even that of the sister site in Japan. Profits were humungous; the Japanese venture was an instant success. There was never any need to cut the cubicle walls down, and moral was sky high, even though many of the overhead fluorescent lights were burned out. Not only was photo copier paper so plentiful that there was no requirement to use both sides, but once a month there was bonfire day where reams were burned in the parking lot while employees chanted company slogans and mission statements. At Christmas time, everyone was given not one, but two certificates for a Ham or Turkey as well as a free poinsettia.

I began to get a little miffed at my angel for showing me all this, because it didn’t bode well with my personal feeling that I somehow have contributed to the world. Again, he told me to be patient, and asked me very sarcastically why I would necessarily have had a positive impact. Just to mess with him, I told him it was too technical and he wouldn’t understand it. This pissed him off royally and he did that limp-wristed slapping thing at his chest, calling me retarded.

He fast forwarded a few years and much to my shock, the entire site was now one huge blast crater, total destruction. How could this be?

Well, it turns out that during a company Easter egg hunt, I had unknowingly deactivated some kind of long term self destruct mechanism behind the plant when I tripped and fell into a ditch going after an especially well crafted egg. I asked my guardian angel where in heavens name this armed nuclear bomb had come from. He told me to “shut the hell up.”

Yup, you guessed it. Without me there to abort the self destruction bomb, the entire site, successful as it was in my absence, was blown to kingdom come around the turn of the century, claiming hundreds of lives. So, I had made a difference after all.

Then my guardian angel told me it had been ‘real’, and it had been ‘fun’, but it had not been ‘really fun’ and gave me some papers I was required to sign. I told him I didn’t appreciate the constant attitude and he swore at me again. I prefer not to repeat what he said but I will say that it was a rather nasty compound swear word.

Signed papers in hand, he told me he would now restore me to the couch where I had been sleeping and that everything would return to normal. I asked if I needed to click my heels together three times, or something like that, and he said, very rudely “Yea Dorothy, click your fucking heels together.” Ready to go home, I clicked my heels; he called me a moron and added that he was only kidding about the heels thing. Instead, he punched me, and then snapped his fingers. The last thing I remember him saying before all went blank, is that he had only needed to snap his fingers; he had punched me simply because he didn’t like me.

I awoke on the couch with a warm and fuzzy feeling that my life really has had a meaning: down where I used to work years ago was an abandoned and shuttered factory, rather than a blown up plant, and hundreds of lives had been saved.

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