In the meanwhile, a friend of mine was most kind sending me a printed copy of ‘The Scarlet Letter’ which is a way more comfortable media than printed sheets and computer displays. The Custom-House section, while seemed to be finished, continued with an extra chapter. It didn’t seem to carry a new lesson for me first – it's the part about how does public office degrade one’s character because of its firm and powerful support – but there was one point that took my attention, however. Mr. Hawthorne mentions it's a significant cause of the effect that as a surveyor, for example, you aren't really doing anything useful.
Then, it came to my mind how usual this kind of jobs has become nowadays. In the last century, people's attitude to their jobs has changed as much as their attitude to their lives, and it probably has something to do with the above mentioned problem. These days, there are loads of jobs without the faintest hint of serving common interests. Some of them clearly serve strictly the companies' profits – since modern industry, instead of serving the demand, tends to raise demand first – and some of them are for perfectly obscure purposes; hence the saying ‘I believe in our department, since I’ll never understand what it is for’.
Perhaps this is why it became an art to earn money and feel being useful at the same time, and this is how it doesn't seem that useless anymore to be a customs officer.
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