Of Mice and Men until the end: "General: Unskilled" by Ryan Eric Dull

Ryan Eric Dull pulls off something rare in his short story "General: Unskilled." Many stories have images, metaphorical language, or bits of dialogue that are central to understanding the themes of the work, but Dull goes one step further: he actually provides a key within the story of how to read it. Mikey H., the central character, is going about his day industriously picking up as many odd jobs as he can through the app "Taskr." He's the fourth highest-rated freelancer on Taskr in the "General: Unskilled" category, and he's working as hard as he can to move up to third. 

The reader is already expecting something to go horribly wrong. We've been set up for it from the opening paragraph. He's carrying around an incredibly delicate statuette of a saluki that he's got to keep safe throughout his day of running around, meaning the reader has to sweat out the whole story knowing there's a Chekhov's gun on the table. Also, he listens to podcasts of questionable validity telling him to be positive at all times. He's a true believer in the notion that you can make your life better through hard work, which means, we've all been taught to believe, that all his hopes are about to get dashed. I was actually reciting the line about the best laid plans of mice and man aft ganging agley as I was reading. I was expecting an angry treatise on the impossibility of making it in American capitalism for the working guy stuck in the gig economy. (Karen Carlson does some interesting things with the saluki as symbol in her reading of this story.) 

A saluki. I had to look it up. 

One of the jobs Mikey takes is a research subject at UC Irvine. He's got a bunch of electrodes on his head, and he's supposed to say lines given to him, things like, "I hope that we will work together in the future." Only when he says the lines, he's supposed to imagine he's talking to people suggested by the researcher. Pretend he's saying it to a thirty-five-year-old man identified as Pacific Islander. Pretend he's saying it to a veteran. He asks the assistant what they hope to learn from the experiment, and she replies, "We don't know what we're going to find out...That's why we're running the experiment." 

The words Mikey has said might show you one thing and they might show you another, but you have to let the experiment work itself out before you know what they show you. Which is exactly how to read this story. The same opening might be setting you up for a commentary on capitalism and the futility of the bootstraps dream, but it might also be telling you something else. You have to read and delay your judgment until the end to find out. 

Because at the end, it's not Of Mice and Men. Mikey never gets his comeuppance. Instead, the story is something of a paean to the kind of worker we don't think of much, but who is a critical part of everyone's life at some time. It's a Whitmanesque ode to the laborer, in this case, the one-gig-at-a-time laborer the modern world has created. 

The narrative celebrates Mikey's resourcefulness. It compares him favorably to doctors and lawyers, who are capable of pulling off dollar-a-minute quickie consults in their portion of Taskr, whereas allegedly "unskilled" jobs tend to take a lot more time to complete. (Actually, it's usually Mikey himself who has to sing his own praises, but since he proves himself right and nobody else is going to notice his merits, nobody could fault him for this.) 

Mikey is disregarded by the world. Taskr policy tends to dehumanize him, not allowing him to accept handshakes from clients, which forces him to deflect the naturally offered handshake with a thumbs-up. When he discovers that the research assistant has picked the top-rated people from "unskilled" for her experiment, he asks whether picking the top-rated people might not throw off the data, but she just shrugs and says she doesn't "think it's relevant." To the assistant, being a top-rated unskilled laborer doesn't show any real ability, and therefore it's not even worth considering when looking at the data.

Mikey returns the world's disregard by pitying all of us working stiffs. He congratulates himself for how well he understands human nature, One of his clients has asked Mikey to help him practice for a job interview by asking him standard interview questions. Mikey can't help feeling sorry for "...these supposedly ambitious people, these credentialed, meritorious people, believing they had to beg unworthy largesse from the polished, perfumed Big Time." Mikey tries to help the guy to be more confident, but he runs out of time. 

So our experiment is this: the world sees Mikey as "unskilled," not worthy of treating with respect, not worth considering much at all, really, and likely to get chewed up by the system. Mikey sees himself as free, as highly skilled, and on his way up in the world. Which is the right hypothesis?

I kept assuming the world was right, but just like in sports, where they say, "That's why they play the game," here, there's a reason to actually finish the experiment. In the end, Mikey gets a callback from the guy who did the mock interview with him. The guy's having some kind of a breakdown. Instead of it turning into a disaster, Mikey handles it like the decent stand-in for a therapist he believes he is. Mikey has proved his own thesis: "I know what people want...I have spent over 980 hours helping people. I have studied human psychology. I have a 4.6-star weighted rating and in excess of 115 positive written reviews. Can you get in excess of 115 positive written reviews if you don't understand people?" 

Mikey might eventually be proven wrong. He might get sick, and his lack of quality health insurance may ruin him. He might get in an accident driving all over town. He might get attacked by a lunatic he has gone to help, or his rating might get ruined by an impossible customer. The story's not about how all the promises of capitalism are true. It's about showing the people who are forgotten or overlooked by capitalism their due respect. The advice Mikey listens to might be suspect, but I think we all know people whose positivity really does make up for a lot of other shortcomings. It's not a completely unrealistic portrait. 

Dull couldn't have known, of course, that this story would be read at a time when we've all, I hope, come to recognize how essential many workers we've overlooked are. But no story in the three big anthologies (Best American Short Stories, O.Henry, and Pushcart) this year is more immediately relevant to the society reading it than this one.