by Mullen, Jim
There’s not really much of anything in a fast-food restaurant that would qualify as a fun job once you’ve done it a few hundred thousand times. Emptying huge bins of trash all day long, mopping floors, policing the parking lot—not fun, not fun, not fun.
A fun job would be, say, testing suntan lotion. Fifty thousand a year to start, no experience necessary. That’s the kind of place that should have a sign outside that says, “FUN JOBS! Apply Inside.”
Being a hotel-fortune heiress is probably a fun job. No wasting time getting a college degree; no bothering with inconvenient job interviews. Just buy a closet full of ten-thousand-dollar dresses and start going to nightclubs. The great part is you pick your own hours and you’re your own boss. Now that’s fun. The bad news? No paid vacations.
Movie stars look like they have lots of fun on the job. The sign out in front of most Hollywood studios should say, “FUN JOBS! Apply Inside.” No one asks actors to clean the studio parking lot, someone’s always fussing with their hair and makeup, they get driven to work in a limousine and they get an RV for a dressing room. Best of all, the minimum wage for movie stars is a few million dollars a year. And there’s a good opportunity for advancement.
Here’s the perfect first fun job for a young high school student: Cell Phone Tester. The kids would work on commission. The phone companies would give them a cut of their parent’s bill, say fifteen percent. So on a hundred-dollar phone bill, your high-schooler would only make fifteen dollars, but if they can drive your bill up to five or six hundred dollars, they could make as much or more than any part-time, not-so-fun job would pay them.
Some of them might even be able to test two phones at a time. They wouldn’t have to learn how to make change the way they would at that fun fast-food restaurant job, and they wouldn’t have to wear a uniform or a hairnet or a name tag. It’d be like hardly working at all. What a fun job!
A Learner’s Permit to Kill
Remember when James Bond out-golfed Goldfinger by one stroke? Bond never practiced, but he played golf like a pro. I play golf three or four times a week and I get worse, not better.
Bond walks through Q’s laboratory, picks up the latest gadget and knows how it works instantly—without ever having read the manual. I can’t even do something new on my cell phone—with the instructions in front of me—for a week.
It takes me fifteen minutes in a rental car to figure out how to turn on the lights and the radio, and to learn how to adjust the seats. James Bond jumps into the world’s newest and most sophisticated fighter jet and, never having seen it before, he flies it like he’s a Blue Angel.
I go to a casino and I lose every single hand, every roll of the dice. Bond? It’s like the place is his personal cash machine. He knows all the dealers and all the bartenders. He’s just come to withdraw a few hundred thousand dollars.
The computer I’ve been using for years still figures out new and exciting ways to frustrate me. Bond walks into a strange office and downloads secret files onto a hard disk disguised as a mole on his cheek with the aid of a paper clip and a fountain pen. Could he please come to my house and get my printer and my computer to talk to one another?
Bond flies from London to Rio and before he gets to his hotel, he has three dirt bike chases, one parachute jump, and pilots a mini-submarine to a yacht in the harbor, where he finally meets the second-most-attractive woman on Earth and goes to bed with her.
That evening Bond, who carried no luggage, will turn up at a casino in a custom-made tuxedo that can be turned inside-out to become a Level 5 Haz-Mat self-contained breathing suit. The great mystery of all James Bond films is not how Bond is going to stop the villain from destroying the planet, but how James Bond’s clothes got to his hotel room. You never see him carry any luggage. You never see him standing at the baggage carousel. Who wouldn’t golf, who wouldn’t ski, who wouldn’t program their own computer, who wouldn’t travel if it were really this easy?
I flew from New York to London last year and I have never been so exhausted in my life. The people in First Class looked tired; the people in Business Class looked tired; the people in my class, Abusive Coach looked clubbed and beaten. The flight was so numbing it only took one flight attendant to tie down our drunken air-rage passenger. Nobody on the plane was up for one dirt bike chase, much less three of them.
My feet hurt, my clothes were rumpled. Don’t 007’s feet ever hurt? Doesn’t he ever get jet lag? Does Bond ever spend two hours going through customs? I wasn’t met at the airport by a sexy female driver with a double-entendre name like Vi Agra who would flirt with me as she drove me to my swank hotel in her brand new BMW convertible.
No, I took mass transit to what had once been a meager one-star hotel, but was now seedy and faded. My hotel room had no grand staircase, no gilt furniture, no fresh-cut flowers, no wet bar, no spectacular view. On the plus side, there was no one in the room waiting to kill me. How could there be? There wouldn’t have been enough room for the two of us in such a tiny, cramped room. But I did feel very James Bondish. Thanks to the airline, I, too, was now luggage-free.
Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow
“Did you just wake up?” asked Ralph the counterman as he poured out my breakfast coffee.
“No.”
“Something looks different. Did you put on a ton of weight?”
“No, thank you, it’s just a new haircut.”
“You paid for that?”
“Yes, I did. And unlike you, I had to pay full price for having so much hair. You must get, oh what, a seventy-five percent discount?”
I shouldn’t have said that. For the next two weeks I will get runny eggs and day-old coffee. Ralph’s service will be slower than usual, there will be no refills, and it’ll take forever to get the check. But Ralph knows I’ve been trying to find a new barber ever since Charlie went to Florida two years ago after he developed carpal tunnel syndrome.
“From the repetitive motion of giving everyone the exact same haircut for thirty years,” Sue contributed.
“He didn’t give everyone the same haircut. He was an artist.”
“Yeah. So was the guy who painted the dogs sitting around the table playing poker.”
Since Charlie’s been gone I’ve been to every place in town and no one seems to get my hair right, or care.
Toné’s House of Hair (formerly Tony’s Barber Shop) in the mall won’t take reservations. Each time I go, someone new cuts my hair. Someone who wasn’t there last time.
“What happened to Jeannie?” I asked Madame Toné, the proprietor.
“She’s having a baby.”
“I was here two weeks ago. She didn’t mention it. She didn’t even look pregnant.”
“Did I say having a baby? I meant she’s in a safe house hiding from her boyfriend. But Tiffany’s free.”
Tiffany has rainbow-colored hair—blue, red, yellow, and purple, with black tips. Yeah, I know, black isn’t in the rainbow, but then, neither is hair. Her eyebrow, nose, lower lip and ears are pierced. She is wearing all black and zippers. I’m guessing she’s about forty years younger than I am.
“How do you like it?” she asked, running a hand through my grey hair.
“Oh, as Goth as you can make it.” She laughed and did a great job. She gave me a haircut that didn’t look like I’d just gotten a haircut. Finally, I thought, someone who understands me, someone who knows that I don’t want to look like a person who spends a lot of time fussing with his hair but I don’t want to look like Rasputin on a bad hair day, either. Tiffany and I bonded; from now on, she would be the only person to touch my hair. Two weeks later she was gone.
“Don’t tell me she’s hiding from a boyfriend,” I told Madame Toné.
“No, she was having money problems.”
“Really? She looked so busy. I’m sure she got good tips, too.”
“Yes, that was her money problem. Someone offered her more money to leave here.”
“Where’d she go?”
Toné
looked at me as if I had just crawled out of a Paris sewer. “David’s free,” she said. She pronounced it “Da Veed.”
David had a buzz cut that looked like he had a five o’clock shadow where his hair should have been except for one long lock right in the middle of his forehead pasted into a spit curl. David was wearing huge hoop earrings. My haircut that day was not successful. It looked very much as if someone had just cut my hair—with an axe.
“You’ll be able to get into all the clubs now,” he said.
Next I went to Nick’s, the jock barbershop with all the sports magazines and pictures of sports heroes covering the walls and featuring Nick’s personal collection of autographed footballs, baseballs, basketballs, golf balls, and hockey pucks. Nick wanted to carve the logo of his favorite team into my hair. I said if I’m going to be their billboard, they should pay me. Talk to my agent. After that, Nick lost interest.
There’s a bald guy at the other end of the counter getting another refill of hot, fresh coffee while mine sits, cold and half-empty. I don’t need a new barber, I need a new hangout.
The First Thanksgiving Family Feud
Historians all agree—the Pilgrim’s First Thanksgiving was a one-time event. It wasn’t turned into a yearly celebration until Abraham Lincoln made it official during the middle of the Civil War, almost 250 years later. A newly-discovered cache of papers composed by the original passengers of the Mayflower may explain why.
“Never again,” writes John Alden. “Six long hours we have spent looking at the hind end of a horse on the overly crowded road to the house of my parents and lo, for what? To see my brother with whom I barely speak and his harpy wyfe who so disrespecteth me and mine in a backhanded way? He starteth acting like a wee childe from the time we stepped from the carriage until the time we departed. He bringeth up small jealousies and grievances from our youth long ago. His unhappiness is like a contagion, a pustule that never heals. ‘Letteth it go and getteth a life,’ he has made me wish to scream, and more times than one.
“One unpleasantry follows another as I suffer my uncles and aunts to runneth on and on about my cousins—how well they are doing, how much money they are sending to their parents, what comely grandchildren they have produced. Yet I knoweth these same cousins. They would soil themselves if they were ever made to do a day’s work.
“They wish their parents dead and spend their days making plans to squander their inheritance in a warmer clime. Their small children hear not the word ‘no’ and understandeth not its meaning. They runneth around and screameth all day when peace and quiet is called for.
“And my wyfe cares not for the way my mother prepareth the meal. ‘She useth not oysters in the fowl’s stuffing,’ she rails at me. ‘She putteth not the bird in a paper bag in the hearth.’ It maketh me fatigued to hear such words. Yet Priscilla’s own stuffing would not winneth any prize, even in the land of my birth where they can taste not the difference between soup and soap. She knoweth not, but secretly I giveth my portions of her bounty to the hound beneath the table. It teacheth him not to beg.
“My wyfe speaks ill of none, yet I can tell from the bearing of her body that she would rather be ducking witches on a cold day in December than in the company of my family and their offspring. As if her family be a barrel of salted fish. Her sisters make it well known that their spouses buy them more kitchen tools than I, and that the corn from their labor is bigger and better than that of my own. They maketh my head hurt. Were they not aboard, the journey of the Mayflower could have been as a fun ship. With them, it was as the hate boat.
“It occurred to me suddenly that we may have left the wood stove on at home. Priscilla volunteered that it may be true as she had often noticed my forgetful habits. Happily, we fled the festivities. On the road home we sat in silence for many hours. ‘Let us hope we can do this again next year,’ at last I spoke. It got a hearty laugh as Priscilla knew I was in perfect jest. In truth, you could not make us do that again were two hundred and fifty years to pass. And for that we gave thanks.”
Ask Little Miss Know-it-all
Dear Little Miss Know-It-All,
My fiancé and I want to hold our wedding in an historic, eighty-room castle in France and fly all our friends and family in for free. At the reception we want a twelve-course French meal served by waiters wearing outfits of my own design. The guests must wear all black or all white. I’ve already told my friends they can’t be bridesmaids unless they weigh under a hundred and two pounds.
The bad news is that my Dad says he won’t pay for it. He thinks we’re too young (sheesh, I’ll be twenty in three years). He said he’d pay for a wedding in our local church if we invite the same old boring friends and family we see every day. And only if my fiancé, Tommy, gets a job. What should I do?
—Why Me in Massachusetts
Dear Why Me,
Can’t you see that your control freak Dad is trying to wreck your life? You’ve got to get out of that house as soon as possible by marrying Tommy. He sounds dreamy. As soon as you’re married, you’ll find that all your problems will magically disappear. Suddenly you’ll be happy with the way you look and you’ll be comfortable with your weight. Everyone will suddenly like you, even those snobby kids at your old high school. I think you should pay for the wedding yourself by maxing out all your credit cards, yours and Tommy’s. Besides, after the wedding you won’t need any money, because you’ll have each other. Maybe your stupid father doesn’t know it, but it’s awell-known fact that the more money you spend on your wedding, the better your marriage will be. Don’t let anyone, especially your unbelievably stupid father, step on your dreams. I wouldn’t even invite him to the wedding.
Dear Little Miss Know-It-All,
I’m sixteen and I want to be a football star or a basketball star. Or maybe a golf legend. The problem is that my parents want me to apply to one of those colleges that barely even has a sports team, like Harvard or M.I.T. just because I get good grades. They want me to be a scientist or a professor. How do I convince them that being smart is a dumb career move?
—Concerned in Mineola
Dear Concerned,
Sometimes you wonder where parents get these silly ideas. A scientist. As if Nike is ever going to pay you millions of dollars to wear a swoosh logo on your lab coat.
Still, let’s get real. You may never become a thirty-million-dollar-a-year athlete. You may only be a five- or six-million-dollar-a-year athlete. If you don’t think you can live with that kind of bitter disappointment, you might as well go to Harvard. I suppose it can’t hurt.
Dear Little Miss Know-It-All,
I plan to win American Idol this year, but I’m worried about what to do with the million dollars after I win. You’re the only person I can talk to. Should I spend it on fancy cars, designer clothes and jewelry or should I just waste it on silly stuff? What do you think?
—Tired of Waiting
Dear Tired,
Spend it all, baby! And why wait until you win? Spend it now and pay it back after you win.
Dear Little Miss Know-It-All,
I met a guy on a computer dating service and he says he’d like to see me in person but he can’t afford to travel all the way. He lives two states away and he’s really cute. Should I send him the six hundred dollars he needs to get here and back, or not?
—Confused in Columbus
Dear Confused,
Is six hundred enough? He may think you’re cheap. Why not send him a thousand to show him what a nice person you are? He sounds like a nice guy, I’m sure he’ll pay you back. After all, you met him on a computer. What could go wrong? You know, it’s funny that he can afford a computer but not airfare. I don’t know what that’s all about, but I’m sure it will all become clear once you meet him.
The Storm of the Century
“Snow! There is a five percent chance of snow tomorrow!” There is a look of panic on the weatherman’s face. It’s as if he were announcing that car-sized balls of flaming magnesium
mixed with nuclear waste were going to be falling out of the sky tomorrow. Snow! All plant and animal life will cease to exist. Dancing with the Stars may be postponed. And traffic will be a nightmare! Oh, the humanity!
“Snow! Sure, it’s the middle of winter in North America but who could have predicted a disaster like this? Snow! One to two inches expected! More in higher elevations! Some drifting may occur! Run for your lives!” Biff the weatherman is shaking. He forgot to kiss his wife and kids goodbye this morning and now this—two inches of snow expected! Will they ever see each other again?
Where Biff leaves off, the other reporters begin.
“Snow! What could be worse, Biff? A giant asteroid slamming into the Earth at 17,000 miles a second? A black hole swallowing the entire planet? Swearing live at the Grammy Awards? Why weren’t we warned about this months ago? Who’s to blame? The mayor? The governor? NASA? Stay tuned; Michelle and I will be interviewing the chief meteorologist of the National Weather Service to get the details on this totally unexpected disaster.
“Snow! Count your children! Fill a tub with fresh water! Run to a nearby grocery store and buy every single thing you can. Strip it clean; you never know when you’ll be able to get out of the house again. It may be hours, but then it may be several hours. Be prepared.
“Snow experts are advising people to stand away from their windows and shut the curtains. Watch the snow on TV and avoid the risk of snow blindness. We’ll be running a special report on snow blindness tonight right after Celebrity Wart Removals.
“And what about the possibility of avalanches? Dr. Maxwell D. Pushface of the National Center of Avalanche Spokespeople assures us that they rarely happen in flat parts of the country like ours, but that doesn’t mean we’re in the clear. There’s always a first time.
“One tragic death has already been attributed to the coming snowstorm. One-hundred-and-fourteen-year-old Maude Fitzwilly was found dead in her living room on Elm Street earlier today, sitting in front of a television. Emergency service workers at the scene said snow panic syndrome may have contributed to her untimely demise. Bob and Michelle will be discussing snow panic syndrome, or SPS as it is known, with Dr. Carter T. Cuffman later in the show.