I’ve been quiet on this blog lately, because in a fit of trying something completely different, I decided to become a certified massage therapist. And since I do nothing tentatively, I threw myself into a two-week, 100-hour intensive program. Think of it as immersion for massage.
The class was awesome and life-altering and I’ll blog about all of that as I get the time. For now, though, I wanted to just blog about the very last day of class.
The end of the program was an 8-hour course on “Business, Ethics, and Hygiene,” which sounds like three things you’d want your massage therapist to know about, right? I mean, they’re having to tell the general public that handwashing is a good idea, so I guess someone somewhere thinks this is critical information to impart. Awesome.
The bulk of the class was about setting up a business. Which makes sense; for a lot of the people that pass through the school, this is a vocational move, and the dollar is still the bottom line. So we talked about Business for Massage a lot. And sportsfans… I was horrified.
The instructor, who was a sweet, older woman who’s been helping people who really, really need touch therapy for over thirty years, spoke about permits. And licenses. But in California, at least, the situation is not clear, and in the Bay Area, where I can bike easily across four cities and two counties, to practice “outcalls” (where you go to the client’s home rather than making them come to you) you’d need something like one business license, and four permits. That’s if you could get a straight answer on what you really need. You see, massage, tainted by its long-time yet wholly inappropriate confusion with prostitution, is sometimes covered as a business, so by the folks who cover commerce, and sometimes by… brace yourself… the vice squad of the local police department (I’m not making that up.). So essentially, the instructor was telling us to get on the phone, call, call, call some more, and try to figure out what we had to do to be legally compliant where we live and where we’re planning on working.
Wait for it…
I spoke up. “What’s in it for me, to be compliant?”
Security, apparently. If I give various city, county, and state officials my money, they will then allow me to try to work.
I spoke up again. “But what’s the penalty if I don’t do this?”
The teacher looked like I’d slapped her. No one had ever asked about that. Apparently, even though thousands of people have taken that class, no one had yet asked about what the penalty for noncompliance actually was. She spoke on a bit about being more comfortable with being compliant, and suggesting strongly that we all do so.
You know I couldn’t leave it alone.
“So you’re saying that even though they provide you no protection of trade, they provide you in fact nothing whatsoever that I can figure out, including security that you’ve paid off all the right people, you feel better giving them your money, than you would, say, standing up and telling them that until they got their act together and made the process make sense, included you in the civics of the place (chamber of commerce, etc.) and in all other ways made it worth your while, you weren’t going to pay?”
Silence. Naturally. The other students moved away from me just a little bit.
Apparently noncompliance is dangerous, radical talk. The idea that government, even on the local level, is there to serve us, not to penalize us and charge fees based on someone’s wild guess as to what they could get out of us, is so incredibly foreign, that even in a room full of folks who are massage therapists fercryingoutloud, with an assortment of outward signs of rebellion (tattoos, lip piercings, rude t-shirt slogans), the very thought that we should fight the system is somehow stepping over a line.
I don’t know where to start, with this. I could blame public school for churning out people who are so used to complying mindlessly that the very act of questioning is unacceptable. I could blame society for making people soft and lazy. I could blame their parents. I could blame the church(es).
But really, when it all comes down to it, if even this crowd is incapable of simply asking “why?” and “what happens if I don’t?”, then this culture is more deeply doomed than I thought.
Tags: compliance, massage, massage school, question authority