

Jobs that would be better than mine

I get up after hitting the snooze button a minimum of six times. I make a coffee, then sit in the shower drinking it and smoking cigarettes until the initial agony of knowing I have to spend another day with my coworkers dissipates. I generally spend this time trying to calculate the pros and cons of just not turning up. I know they will bitch but their opinions mean little to anyone so sometimes I just stay in the shower for an hour and then go back to bed. If I do decide to go in, I sit in an office the size of a wardrobe and temperature of a kiln prostituting myself by spending the day making poor products look appealing so that people will be tricked into buying them. This pretty much sums up the entire design industry. Sometimes I grumble and whine out loud so that people think I am working but I will be on the internet instead. It has lots of things on there I like. As I am possibly the laziest person I know, the design industry is only field I can survive in. I would last less than an hour doing manual labour of any form and I often cope on less than two hours sleep a night so anything requiring alertness or intelligence is out of the question. As is anything requiring personal hygiene. This leaves either taxi driver or my boss's position. As his job role consists only of pretending to talk on the phone, passing blame and downloading pornography, I am more than qualified.

Fortune Cookie Writer As far as writing jobs go, this would probably be the easiest as the pages are very small. When I was at school, I had an English teacher named Judith Bowman who would make us read a novel every few weeks and write a two page essay on each. This would not usually be an issue, as I enjoy reading, but Mrs Bowman loved Agatha Christie novels so would force us to read only these. As my interest in reading about French inspectors on trains is on equal par with being molested by a drunk uncle, I handed in my two page essay on two pieces of paper measuring two by three centimetres each (arguing that the size of the two pages had not been indicated at any time) with the words "Reading the novel Murder on the Orient Express was" on one piece, and "less enjoyable than being molested by a drunk uncle." on the other. This did not go down as well as might have been expected and I was forced to re-write the essay which this time I began with "Being forced to read Mrs Bowman's own personal preferences in literature is less enjoyable than being molested by a drunk uncle which is why I chose to read Enders Game by Orson Scott Card instead." If I was a professional fortune cookie writer, amongst the standard messages of promised hope and riches, I would include statements such as "I am sending you this message from the future, robots will take over in four days, leave the city immediately." and "Judith Bowman has anal warts". Wind Turbine Technician (specialising in aerotechatrons) Everyone loves wind turbines because they are so big and white and symbolise clean, renewable energy and environmental responsibility. I knew a girl once who had a poster of one on her wall and when I asked if she was an evironmentalist she answered "no, I just like them" which is fair enough. Everyone does. I have never heard anyone say "God I hate wind turbines" so if my business card said Wind Turbine Technician rather than Graphic Designer, I would probably receive the pity look a lot less. The only problem is that I would probably have to pretend to care about the environment. There is an old saying that "this is not our planet, we are just looking after it for our children" but in thirty years when my offspring complains that we trashed the planet, I will say "That's what you get for all the crap Fathers day presents." Park Ranger Sometimes when I am at work and I have had enough of moving pixels around the screen, I will grab my keys and say "I have to go to a client meeting, I will be back in an hour" and run out the door before anybody can question who the meeting is with. Then I go shopping for cleaning products or to a movie. If I was a park ranger I would tell everyone that I had a meeting with a bear or something then go for a canoe ride or trap squirrels. Drug Dealer It would seem to me that being paid to provide something that makes people happy would be one of the most satisfying professions available. A while back, my mother visited a Tasmanian region where they grow opium poppies for medicinal puposes and brought me back me a seed she had 'found'. I planted it in my front yard and several weeks later it bloomed. Having read L.Ron Hubbard's Mission Earth series which included detailed instructions on processing opium, I used a scalpel to cut lines in the black centre then dried the milky substance resulting in about half a teaspoon of white powder. That night, my friend Kas came over to my place with his entire CD collection to listen to and we decided to try some of the powder. A short time later, with the live version of Gary Numan's Down in the Park playing on loop, we were both standing completely naked in the bathroom shaving our entire bodies following a discussion about how nice it would be to have smooth skin like an eel. I do not recall much of the rest of the evening but I awoke to find myself wearing a pillow case with holes cut out for my arms as a shirt and Kas asleep on the sofa wearing the same plus 3D glasses. Before waking and leaving later that afternoon, Kas swapped me his entire CD collection for the remainder of the powder, which proves there is a market. New Zealand Tourism Operator This would give me plenty of spare time as nobody wants to go there. Parking Inspector Although there would obviously be many benefits to being a parking inspector, the knowledge that every day I would be making the world a better place would be the most satisfying aspect. They would try to pay me and I would put my hand up and say "No, the important contribution I make to society is payment enough." Accident Claim Investigator Having a job where people tell you a story and you say "I don't think so" seems like it would be a lot of fun. I have been in a total of three vehicle accidents. The first occured when I was driving on a dirt road in the rain, lost control and hit a cow. The second involved forgetting to set the handbrake and a river. The third and most recent accident occured while driving home from my friend Simon's place. While at his house for a coffee, I attached a black rubber spider on string to the inside of his cupboard with sticky tape so that the next time he opened it to grab a coffee mug, the spider swung out at him. The reaction was more than expected as Simon screamed, threw himself backwards onto the floor and actually sobbed a little. Later that afternoon as I was driving home, I lowered the sun visor and the rubber spider, which Simon had placed there in what he felt was appropriate retaliation, fell forward onto my lap. My immediate reaction was to press hard on the brake and turn the steering wheel which sent the vehicle into a spin before clipping a white Mercedes and ending up in an elderly man's front hedge. On all three occasions I have been assigned an accident claim investigator. Forest Fire Lookout As far as I can tell, the position consists entirely of sitting in a very tall cubby house looking out the window. As you would be able to see for miles around and tell if anyone was coming, you could do anything you wanted in between reporting over the radio that you have not seen any forest fires yet. I would probably watch a lot of pornography and do drugs. When I was about ten, a friend of mine and I built a cubby house in the tallest tree in our backyard using wooden planks stolen from the neighbours fence. Late one evening, while my parents were at a marriage councelling session, I was in the cubby house (as it overlooked the neighbour's bedroom) when a strong breeze caused the cubby house to collapse and pin me between the floor and a fallen wall. Unable to call out or move due to the crushing weight, I remained there the entire night, falling asleep at one point but waking when it started to rain, before finally being rescued the next day when the neighbour let his cat out and heard my soft cries for help. While I was at the hospital being checked over, the neighbour took back his wooden planks.