12-17-11 LISTS, PART 2

Running out of things to post on dumb blog.

A while back I decided to make a list of occupations, in the order I'd like to work in said occupation, given three criteria: 1) all jobs pay the exact same, say $75K/year; 2) all jobs are the exact same number of hours per week, say 40 hours/week; and 3) all jobs require the same amount of education, say 2-3 years of college.  So basically the question is, what job would you like to do for the rest of your life if you remove any external influences such as how much a job pays or how many hours you'd have to work or how long you'd have to study.  For example, I think a lot of us would love to be a teacher if it paid better; a farmer sounds like a pretty fun job if the pay was guaranteed and the hours were reasonable; and I know a lot of animal-lovers that likely would have been a vet if it didn't require 8+ years of education (I am not one of those).  In my hypothetical, being a doctor or a janitor pays the same.

I guess I was thinking about this because my personal idea of hell would be to be an accountant or an insurance agent-- working a desk job doing the same monotony every day for years and years... paperwork, spreadsheets, meetings, telephone calls, ugh.  But it turns out that after being a composer, there's a huge drop before I find any other occupation I'd like to do.  Yes, golfer is a close second, maybe even first on my list... followed by professional poker player and basketball superstar.  But I'm not including those, they don't really fall into the 'hourly' pay rate.  I mean if you're getting paid by the hour to golf it kind of defeats the purpose of golf.

I guess the way you read this list is to say, given a choice, I'd rather be an undertaker than a politician.  That says a lot about what I think about politics.  And yes, I'd rather be either of those than a lawyer.

After I made the list I broke them into categories because I realized there was a huge gap between certain occupations and my list naturally fell into groupings.

THE TOP PICKS:

composer/musician
chef
vintner/brewmaster
construction worker
carpenter
soldier/marine

STILL HAPPY:

farmer
fireman
writer
mechanic
teacher
scientist
architect
psychologist

COULD BE WORSE:

producer
pilot
gardener
police officer
janitor

GETTING TO THE ROUGH STUFF:

bartender
porn star/prostitute
taxi driver
mail carrier
waiter

PLEASE HELP ME:

veterinarian -- slightly better than a doctor because of cute pets
dentist -- ugh
doctor -- too gross, also couldn't deal with delivering bad news
undertaker
politician
receptionist
truck driver
actor

I'D PROBABLY KILL MYSELF:

flight attendant -- dealing with grumpy people all day, I wouldn't last an hour
priest
lawyer
accountant -- hell
insurance agent -- worse than hell