"Oh... my... God. Is it really you? Commander Zigglepants?""Yeah. Heh. Nice to meet a fan.""I can't believe it. I've always wanted to be a space pilot like you. You've done EVERYTHING. How did you get started?""Well, believe it or not my first job was doing delivery runs.""Really? That must have been tedious.""It was. And the pay was terrible. You'd accept a mission in one star system and do nothing but hop from star system to star system for an hour or more before accepting your tiny payment."Sounds pretty bad.""Yeah. I only did that for a short time before I got into smuggling.""Oh, cool. Sneaking into heavily armed facilities with illegal cargo? That sort of thing?""Exactly. Although you only do the sneaking at the end bit of your journey. The rest of it was just as dull as the deliveries. And even the sneaking was only fun the first few times. After that it became pretty routine. The pay was a lot better, though.""So how did you become a famous bounty hunter?""I'm afraid the stories are exaggerated. I took my first contract at my local station. It told me to fly to a nearby star and hunt down a notorious pirate.""Did you get him?""No. I showed up at the star and he wasn't there. I flew around scanning promising signals, but each one turned out to be a dud. To make it worse, it took about 10 minutes to fly between each signal and there wasn't much to do in the meantime. After a few hours of this, the contract expired.""That's too bad.""Yeah, the next few contracts turned out the same so at that point I gave up, bought a warrant scanner, and decided to go freelance.""What does that mean?""Well, it means you sit in one place next to a navigation beacon or resource extraction point, and hope to catch pirates if they show up.""Neat. How many did you catch?""None. It took me about an hour to pick up the scanner and fly to a promising system. Then I waited around for a few hours scanning ships but no pirates showed up. Well, a couple did... but none of them came out of supercruise. After a few nights of this, I decided to dump the stupid scanner into the sun. When I got home, I received a strange message. Someone wanted to hire me to carry some mystery cargo to a certain sector and wait for further instructions.""Did you take the job?""Of course! It seemed like the first interesting thing that had happened to me as a space commander. Yeah, I accepted the job and headed out to the sector they named. Took a lot of time to get there. Then I started waiting for my contact.""Who was it?""I dunno. He never showed. I waited around for a couple hours and eventually the mission expired. I did get to fight some pirates, ironically. It seems like they really wanted that cargo, whatever it was. They should have just asked. After waiting around for a few hours, I tossed it into the sun too. Hold on, I have a customer."Commander Zigglepants turns away and talks into his headset."Hello, welcome to McSpaceport. Can I take your order? Combo #2? That will be 4,000 credits. First window, please." He turns back. "Sorry about that.""No problem. So you work a drive-through window now?""This is WAY more fun. Trust me.""What about the Close Quarters Championship? You know. Arena mode? Did you ever compete?""Oh, yeah! I actually hold the world record.""No way! What's it like?""Well, the Close Quarters Championship is a screen with the words 'Searching for Match' and a little spinning circle. The winner is the person who can sit and watch the screen the longest before closing it. I broke the previous world record with a time of 90 minutes before I got bored and went for a snack. The majority of commanders can't make it any longer than 10 minutes. It's actually not as -""Wait! Aren't there, like, space ships and stuff in the arena?""Hmm.... I doubt that very much. If there are, I never saw any.""You know what, I still think I want to be a space commander.""Suit yourself... but can I offer a word of advice?""Please!""You're going to spend most of your time travelling and waiting around, so bring a video game to keep yourself entertained.""Got it.""...and make sure it's NOT Elite: Dangerous."Meh.