There is spring and change in the air at Bandmeltun. Well not a whole lot of actual changes, but a list of projects that we’re going to take on before the nice weather hits and we don’t want to be indoors. Recently we knocked off another room painting atrocity courtesy of the F’s. This time we changed the kitchen from Reese’s peanut butter cup brown to a blend of butter pecan/ tropical lightning/antique yellow (i.e. slightly darker than white). I don’t know who at paint companies comes up with these names, but they need their thesaurus revoked. So far we’ve painted a room that was camo-green and blood orange to a single shade of yellow. We made a pink room (with feather stencils) blue, a brown room (with a brown ceiling) blue, a blue room became antique yellow, and another brown room (with leaf stencils) is now red. There’s only one painting project left that I know of and we can consider the transformation complete. While I was at it, I noticed the fridge was leaking some water. I called up Mr. Go-to for some advice and he recommended making sure there was enough room underneath to circulate air to evaporate water around the condenser. Sure enough, I cleaned about 5 years of cat hair from underneath the fridge and miracles happened. Two more projects off the list.
Even when I’m not on the road, I spend quite a bit of time commuting, so I get a lot of introspection done while I’m trying to ignore my fellow commuters on the train. Lately, I’ve been looking around, wondering what these people all do for work and deciding if I would do their jobs or not. I’ve come up with the working list of job choices below:
Commuter rail conductor – yes. This has got to be one of the easier jobs out there. And I am sure there is a sweet sweet compensation plan set up when the railroads had a lot of pull and their union struck these contracts. They probably don’t make 6 figures, but they’re not getting too stressed out every day. And I suspect the job security is high, given the $5 gas that’s coming. Aircraft carrier tailhook cable monkey – no. M and I have been watching a PBS series about the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier. They show what 5,000 people do on an aircraft carrier and 99% of the jobs are not good. These particular guys reel in the cables that aircraft tailhooks grab on carrier landings. Then they grease up the cables so they don’t snap. This is all done in a small pit underneath the deck with no air conditioning. It’s not just a job, it’s an adventure.
Driving range owner – yes. Charge people $5-$13 to hit crappy golf balls out into a giant field? Yeah you have to mow the grass and drive a truck covered in armor to retrieve the balls, but the second one looks fun. Again, you’re not going to be a millionaire, but there are worse things to do than hit golf balls if you’re bored.
Corporate litigator – no way. Despite what John Grisham says (he’s started off as a lawyer, why do you think he writes all those books?), being a lawyer is not a sexy job. A lot of kids get brainwashed into thinking “I’ll be a lawyer because they’re on TV and they ‘make a lot of money’ ”, or maybe daddy was a lawyer. Who knows what would possess someone to willingly do this. Of course there is always the noble D.A. or small town lawyer handling estates for old ladies and bailing Jimmy out of his latest DUI, or the ‘Environmental Lawyer’ with dreams of taking down big oil. On the extreme other end of this is the corporate litigator, where you spend years! sending briefs back and forth and filing motions, basically looking for ways to bill more hours. Of course your adversary is doing the same thing, so there’s not a lot of urgency. There’s no Matlock moment, no Perry Mason cross-examination, no OJ-style drama with corporate litigation. You always settle and go back to donating another 8 years to another case so you can make partner and get those fat paychecks to pay for the divorce and child support you had to get because you were trying to make partner in the first place.
Taxi Cab driver – yes (depends on the city). In a big city, I think this would be fun. You’d get a lot of random party people and the occasional steam –cleaning would be needed, but I think the variety would make up for it. The pay stinks, but if you only did it for a change of pace or screenplay information, I think it would be great.
Food Critic – yes. Absolutely. I don’t think the pay is great here, but there’s a huge variety factor and the sheer enjoyment of all the different food you’d get to enjoy (or not) is astounding. Plus you don’t get a lot of food critic critics out there, unlike the talk radio guys who spout opinions and then have to deal with irate callers afterwards. Food critics get to fire and then walk away.
BBQ pit master – yes. Smoke, fire, meat, slow pace, non-strenuous outdoor work, experimentation, some travel. I don’t see where there’s anything wrong here.
Policeman – no. You get to see people on the worst days of their lives, usually while they are not of a stable state of mind and possibly armed. And now police are filmed nearly 100% of the time, so any mistakes you make are posted immediately on the internet. No thanks.
Firefighter – yes. You spend 99% of your day not doing your job, which isn’t bad. When you do get to go, people are always glad to see you and generally agree that you perform a valuable service. It is somewhat dangerous, but in a non-urban area, I think the risks are much better quantified and manageable.
Sportswriter – no. Watching professional sports is something I do for pleasure. Having a deadline or angry losers writing me hate e-mail from their mamma’s basement would take a lot of the joy out of this. While I find what athletes do to be physically impressive, they appear to tend to be less than intelligent and display some marginal personality traits. There are a lot of good hearted, grounded individuals playing professional sports out there, but for the most part when you give 20 year old males millions of dollars and train them to be as aggressive as possible with no fear of consequences, bad things come out. I will take a pass here.
Some of this has come out of the Carrier show that we watched. There are several segments on a fighter pilot squadron. These guys and 2 girls get to tool around in $60 million jets with flames pouring out of the afterburners all day long. I guess after a while even that gets monotonous. They were complaining about how they do all this training and never get to ‘work’, i.e. kill things. I don’t think anyone in the Persian Gulf has a workable air force, so these Navy guys were looking to drop some bombs. On this cruise they didn’t, so it was a lot of hurry up and wait. I think every male someday dreams of being a fighter pilot. I can’t think of a more alpha thing to do. I’m sure a lot of football players or bond traders would trade their jobs to fly fighter jets, but I don’t know what a fighter pilot would trade his job to do instead. It’s pretty much the best job in the world to say you have. I can imagine being at a party where the guys are standing by the bar and asking around at what they all do, sizing each other up.
#1, pouring scotch: “So what do you do?”
#2, sipping pinot grigio: “I’m a plastic surgeon. I work on the occasional model, but most of the time I do Botox injections and suck fat out of thighs. You?
#1, clinking ice cubes: “I’m an Investment Banker at Old Money and Starched Collar. I just spent 90 hours this week managing a team crunching debt quality ratings for this big deal we’re doing. Y’know, same ol same ol’”
#2, sip: “What about you? How’d you get that scar? I can probably do something about that if you want to give me a call”
#3, bites top off Budweiser bottle and spits cap into ashtray 10 feet away, rubs 6 inch scar and smiles: “Ah.. you see I was doing a night landing on a carrier in my F-22 during a sandstorm after a 20 hour sortie over the Gulf. We just finished doing some close air support of a SEAL team and dropped a few thousand pounds of ordnance on this village. Blew those *&%$ back beyond the stone age. I caught the tailhook a little rough and I didn’t have my mask strapped on, smashed my face on the stick and got this little scrape. Pretty dumb, huh?”
#1 and #2 wet pants and run for cheese tray.
None if this is to say that I do not enjoy what I do. Sometimes I’ll try explaining what I do, and it’s never as clear cut as any of the above. I get to my second sentence and people start looking behind me or into their drink. I say I travel to this bank or that and perform some technical-sounding task and I guess it sounds interesting, but I rarely have a work anecdote that is remotely relatable to anyone outside my business. There are days when I figure out a big problem and it’s really quite satisfying. Not blowing up a village satisfying, but it beats doing taxes I guess.
2 other things:
1. Go see Ironman – really entertaining, a nice loud summer movie.
2. I hit the driving range again this weekend and did about as well as I ever have. I guess my game is so bad that I can take 8 months off and still be in top form. Wonderful.
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