Your Real Job

Pat Walsh tells the story of meeting someone at a party who worked for a circus. He was excited at the thought and asked what that was like. ‘A lot of paperwork.’

A friend from high school has one of those cool jobs, though. Some jobs suck to even a casual observer. I think that at a certain, young, age, whatever your Dad does for a living seems way cooler than it could possibly be. Insurance actuaries and astronauts are probably on about the same footing until their kids get to Kindergarten. Even a diesel mechanic can probably milk the ‘cool job’ image to when his kids hit puberty.

I doubt that even test pilots seem exciting to their teenage offspring.

And maybe it’s just me, but it seems like even my ‘real job’ doesn’t stack up that great against where some of my friends from high school ended up. ‘Commercial artist’ sounds pretty cool, but not as cool as anesthesiologist. Maybe ‘anesthesiologist’ sounds cooler than it is.

But I backed into my career. I was working in gas stations mostly, with stints as an ‘operator standing by’ for an 800-number clearing house whose clients included Fat Magnet and Tummy-Sizer, a professional phone pest paid to torment people with radio-program surveys, jobs which had only one common denominator: they were not as bad as washing dishes in a Mexican restaurant. Meanwhile, friends of mine were majoring in something besides avoiding a job you’d have to keep secret even from a three-year-old son. And they went on to get cool jobs, with titles like ‘photo editor.’

For what it’s worth, the Mexican restaurant in question is one I still patronize, which is notable in that after seeing what went on behind the wall in other food-service jobs, I never recovered my appetite. I’m sure other places I eat re-fry hushpuppies dropped in murky puddles on the floor or serve fish the manager bled all over trying to filet frozen cod after not thawing enough to get through the dinner rush, but ignorance is palatability. Still, while the Tex-Mex establishment was clean and professional, the dishwasher gig will never, I hope, be trumped for the worst job I ever had.

So my friend the photo editor was in journalism school when I was violating the no-smoking policy in a kiosk, doing my best to alienate customers so they’d quit bothering me. Instead of getting a degree, I gradually quit bothering with classes, instead hatching a variety of embarrassingly naïve plans for conquering the world of commerce. One of these was to launch a magazine, which I fancied would be a hybrid of libertarian/conservative journals like National Review and American Spectator, cross-pollinated with Playboy’s sexiness, and erudite fiction in the mode of a premier literary magazine. I’m not sure which was more absurd, that I thought I could edit and publish such a magazine, or that I thought anyone would buy it. I hadn’t yet looked up to notice that no one else in America was reading anything.

While I failed to become a long-haired William Buckley in smoking jacket surrounded by twenty-something girls who pretend not to mind pipe smoke, I did manage the commercial artist thing. It’s not a glamour gig, it’s a steady paycheck and decent benefits.

Still, to call me an artist, that’s weak. Which is almost as much of a stretch if you’ve ever seen me try to draw, or even write legibly. Luckily, you don’t need to have any artistic skill, aptitude or even a creative spark to be a commercial artist. You only need a computer, a cubicle, and a willingness to do unbelievably dull things with corporate logos.

Oh, wait, this post is about my friend. I mentioned that, didn’t I? She’s a photo editor for a ‘major metropolitan daily newspaper.’ If you’ve never visited one of these, you probably have images of chain-smoking cub reporters bringing down a President with honesty and hubris. I won’t disabuse you of that, the glorious image is one of the few things to offset salaries and benefits that make the circus look like a golden parachute.

And it does sound cool, when you call someone out of the blue on a Saturday afternoon and they have to go, right now because they’re due in a ‘page-one meeting.’ Which means my friend is either relatively important, or page-one is composed by people who couldn’t convince their boss that their kids’ soccer games would be missed if they didn’t get out of the office by noon on Saturday.

I tried to call my friend the photo editor the other night. George Bush was blowing hot air on Congress, which I wasn’t watching, but her boss sent her to be an ‘on-site’ photo editor. This struck me as an odd assignment. I guess I assumed a photo editor did things like shrink the jowls on the Vice President or take the crow’s feet down a decade on the Senator from New York. These are easy enough to do with Photoshop, but they’re also things you can do anywhere. You certainly wouldn’t need to be at the Capitol for the State of the Union address.

And you picture a photo editor, too, being a veteran photographer, spending hours with loupe in hand, going over contact sheets for ‘the photo.’ So imagine my disillusionment when she explained to me that she ‘shuttles disks from one end of the building to the other and make sure the names in the captions are right.’ Apparently, ‘photo editor’ was a title they came up with in lieu of salary when the last photo editor quit because he was sick of being called a copyboy.