Horseshit!

Many years ago, but what feels like centuries ago, the agency where I worked had two secretaries.  Their job responsibilities differed with one taking on more substantive tasks than the other. 

At some point, the professional world retitled them as "administrative assistants" and the old title was discarded.  "Secretaries Day" now became even more a mouthful to say as "Administrative Professionals Day."

Once I got my footing in the workplace and town, which took me a couple of years, I figured that I would treat the secretaries, er, administrative assistants, to lunch sometime during that week.  And that is what I did.

My only favorite restaurant in town was only a couple of blocks away, and we walked.  I'm sure I would have ordered one of the only two dishes I always ate there: Penne puttanesca, or the chicken picatta.

Anyway, back to the secretaries.  I walked by the side of the road, and the two secretaries--women--walked on the sidewalk.  That's when the younger (relatively speaking) secretary commented that I was being a perfect gentleman by being in between them and the traffic.

These were women who were highly capable, but were working as secretaries as a result of the social mores in which they (we) were born and raised.  So, it never surprised me when they made insightful comments like any thinking person would.

The one who complimented me on being a gentleman continued about the origins of such a practice.  It was to shield the women from horse manure and farts from back in the day when horses were the mode of transportation in cities.

Whether or not that was entirely true I didn't care.  But, I had never before thought about the possibility that the way we walk on the sidewalk could have been influenced by the city transport of the past.

Before cars and buses and trucks, cities depended on horses for transporting goods and people.  Well, in the old country it was not horses but bullocks.

Big cities were, therefore, full of horseshit everywhere.

For a recent telling, you can turn to SuperFreakonomics, the best-selling 2009 book by economist Steven D. Levitt and journalist Stephen J. Dubner. The authors describe how, in the late 19th century, the streets of fast-industrializing cities were congested with horses, each pulling a cart or a coach, one after the other, in some places three abreast. There were something like 200,000 horses in New York City alone, depositing manure at a rate of roughly 35 pounds per day, per horse. It piled high in vacant lots and “lined city streets like banks of snow.” The elegant brownstone stoops so beloved of contemporary city-dwellers allowed homeowners to “rise above a sea of manure.” In Rochester, N. Y., health officials calculated that the city’s annual horse waste would, if collected on a single acre, make a 175-foot-tall tower.

Gradually, and then rapidly, horses gave way to streetcars and then to cars and trucks and buses.  We don't care about the real horseshit anymore, but only about the metaphorical ones that come blowing out from the mouths of politicians, especially of the Republican variety.

Now, a significant percentage of administrative assistants have been replaced by the likes of Microsoft Word,  Google calendar, and Siri.  And Siri does not care about Administrative Professionals Day either, nor does Siri care about horseshit. 

Heck, rarely do people go to the office and to restaurants in a world that has been upended by a damn epidemic!