"Where do you go, Yooveeyay?" In Virginia, where I live and work, this is a vague insult to one's virility.

"No! I go to, uhm,...Harvard."

"HARVARD!!! Well, I'll be damned... You know, I heard everyone up there was faggots and commies."

"Oh, really?" I say, edging towards the nearest blunt instrument, "I hadn't heard that."

"Nuthin' personal or nuthin'. I mean, that's just what I've heard..."

Usually, this person will not say another word until the last day, when he shuffles up to me and growls "You may be real good with them books and tests and stuff, but you ain't shit with a weedeater."

While many would consider factory work "educational," I am living testimony to the fact that the Tolstoyan concept of the warmth and nobility of the working class, doesn't always apply to their treatment of "college boys." In fact, in my case, it was a bunch of stinkweed.

Although the majority of people I worked with do not lounge decadently behind a desk all day or drive expensive, decadent cars and take even more expensive, decadent drugs, nearly all of them expressed a strong desire to do so if they could afford it.

This is not to say that the atmosphere was completely hostile; in fact, I have met a great number of benign and even friendly people, some of whom were actually eager to talk to me.

Unfortunately, the presence of such people cannot soften the impact of another harsh lesson one learns on an assembly line. Manual labor is not edifying, and it does not bring one closer to God or nature. It destroys the mind.

If you've ever wondered what life must seem like to a tree, assembly-line work will give you a very good idea. There is a certain atrophy of the brain which sets in after about a week of working a hole puncher, one which makes things like breathing and blinking seem like complicated, fascinating processes.

After a month, you can feel your hairs grow, second by second; after two months, you notice when one of your cells dies.

I have tried a number of things to combat the all-encompassing boredom which attacks the mind, such as thinking up novels or trying to unlock the primordial secrets of my brain through meditation, but such things usually resulted in stapling my hand to something or accidentally working through lunch.

After a while, the mind becomes desperate for any diversion--mistakes, accidents, wars, etc. Like a drowning man clutching at straws, it reaches for anything, any stimulus to keep it alive.

IT IS AT THIS point that one makes the fatal mistake of asking if anyone knows a good joke. In such an environment, the response can be devastating.

In fact, one of the most difficult aspects of my summer jobs has been making myself laugh at horrible jokes. A random assortment of suicide notes would be far more amusing than anything I have heard. Although the majority of them are so ethnically and sexually offensive that even printing them would touch off a series of riots, it is possible to convey a little bit of their essence.

One day, counting cases of jock straps in a warehouse, I heard this gem. Next to a story about three nuns and an exercise bike, it is the worst attempt at humor I have ever seen. It goes as follows:

"Thar was three bars--Mama Bar, Papa Bar, and Baby Bar. They was all sittin' on a block of ice. Mama Bar said 'I got a tale to tell.' Papa Bar said 'I got a tale to tell.' Baby Bar looked up and said 'My tale is told.'"

Although it seems horrible enough, I guess there is a positive aspect to the torture which I go through each summer. After about a week of bolt-grinding, I begin to miss the shuttle bus. After a month of ditch digging, I could sit through a English 10 lecture without screaming, and finally, by the beginning of September I love Harvard, and can't wait to be back. Even the Lampoon reads well after a summer with Baby Bar.