> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://thinsections.pub/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # So Easy a Monkey Can Do It - URL: https://thinsections.pub/so-easy-a-monkey-can-do-it/ - Published: 2026-08-14T17:41:09.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-22T00:23:34.000Z - Description: They say a monkey could do this job. I would like to introduce myself. - Author: Jerry Clarin HT ASCP - Tags: News They say a monkey could do this job. I would like to introduce myself. You have probably heard the line. It gets said in break rooms by people who have never floated a ribbon or fought a fatty block before the coffee kicks in. So easy a monkey could do it. I have heard it more times than I have changed blades, which is saying something, because I change a lot of blades. And yet here I am. Goggles on. Coat buttoned. Mid-block, until someone decided this was the moment for a photograph. If the insult needed a face, I suppose it now has mine. We can talk about the cigarette later. Environmental Health and Safety already wants a word, and I have learned that some conversations are better had after the rack is finished. The cigarette is the least interesting thing about me anyway. Here is what the people who repeat the line have never understood. The motions are not the job. Turning the wheel is easy. Pressing tissue into wax is easy. Laying a section onto warm water is the easiest thing I do all day. If the work were only its motions, they would be right, and I would be insulted on principle rather than on merit. But watch me for an hour and the theory falls apart. Every block that reaches my bench arrives with an argument already prepared. Fatty tissue behaves nothing like colon. Skin ignores my section angle out of what I can only describe as spite. Bone settles the matter of who is in charge, and it is not me. Tiny biopsies vanish if I look away at the wrong second, so I have stopped looking away. Somewhere in a tray of two hundred routine specimens sits the one that cannot be recut, cannot be replaced, and has a person waiting on whatever it holds. The skill they cannot see is that I know which block I am facing before the blade tells me. I know when the edge is the problem and when the tissue is lying to me. I know that a pathologist asking for one more level, on a block I have already cut to twenty-three, is a request the tissue may not survive, and I decide in the length of a breath whether to spend what little remains. None of that shows in the photograph. That is the part I find funniest. The hardest thing I do all day is decide not to cut, and a decision not to cut looks exactly like sitting still. When I hold back on the irreplaceable block and turn out to be right, I produce nothing anyone can hang on a wall as proof. My best work disappears the instant it succeeds. So the insult survives, protected by the very thing that makes it wrong. I do not take it personally anymore. If a monkey at a microtome is what the profession looks like from the outside, then the profession is in better hands than the outside imagines. And if you have ever watched a veteran go quiet over a difficult block, reading it before touching it, you already suspect the resemblance runs closer than anyone wants to admit. The job asks for patience, a steady hand, and enough stubbornness to talk a few micrometers of wax into behaving. The rest, judging by this photograph, was only ever a question of who evolved in the right direction. I have my own opinion about that, but I have a rack to finish. --- Thin sections written by Jerry Clarin HT ASCP. Views are his own.