Notes: The Perfect Job
And the benefits are great
THE PERFECT job—the one you would have if you could have any job in the world— what would it be? The most nearly perfect part of any less-than-perfect job is usually the occasional hour in which you are able to pretend that you are doing the job when in fact you are reading a magazine and eating candy. The rest of the office is throbbing frantically, but you are sitting quietly at your desk and learning interesting facts about Fergie and that guy who put his wife in the wood chipper. The perfect job would feel like that, but all the time.
The trouble with less-than-perfect jobs is that they usually don’t swoop you up and fling you through your day. That is, you don’t very often look up at the clock to find out how many minutes past eleven it is and discover that it’s five and time to go home. That’s what the perfect job would be like. The time would zoom by, the way it does when you are going through some old boxes and suddenly discover that they are filled with artifacts from the Pilgrim days.
Well, I’ve thought about this a lot (while I was supposed to be doing something else), and I’ve narrowed down my choice of perfect job to five possibilities:
• Doing an unbelievably great cleanup of my basement, and organizing my workshop so that I know exactly where everything is, and drawing up a lot of plans to show how I might expand my workshop so that it would fill the entire basement instead of only the third that it fills now, and buying every conceivable kind of woodworking tool and finding exactly the perfect place to keep each one, but never actually getting around to doing any woodworking projects.
• Doing the Times crossword puzzle and watching MTV while listening to people I knew in college discuss their marital problems on the other side of a one-way mirror.
• Sorting my children’s vast Lego collection—by type, size, and color— into muffin tins and other containers while my children nearby happily build small vehicles and structures without hitting each other or asking me for something to eat.
• Setting the prison sentences of criminals convicted in highly publicized court cases; making all parole decisions for these people; receiving daily updates on how they spend their time in jail.
• Touring the houses of strangers and looking through their stuff while they’re not there. If I were driving along and happened to see a house that looked interesting, I could pull over and let myself in with a set of master keys. If the people happened to be there, I could spray them with a harmless paralyzing gas that would prevent them from remembering that I had read their diaries and checked to see whether they were making efficient use of their limited amount of storage space, which they probably wouldn’t have been.
All these jobs, as I see them, would require a full complement of office supplies: every conceivable kind of clip and clasp, name-brand bail-point pens, ungunked-up bottles of correction fluid, ammo-like refills for various desktop mechanisms, and cool, smooth, hard pads of narrow-lined paper. I guess I would also need a fax machine and a staff of cheerful recent college graduates eager to do my bidding. Plus a really great benefits program that would pay not only for doctors and prescription drugs but also for things like deodorant.
Recently I’ve begun to think that my real perfect job would probably consist of all five of my possible perfect jobs, one for each weekday. That way I would never have to lie awake at night wondering whether sorting my children’s Legos would have made me happier than snooping through people’s tax returns. Then, on weekends, I could hang around my house, drinking beer and watching golf tournaments on TV. I would seem to be having a really great time, but in reality I would be counting the hours until Monday and just itching to get back to work.
—David Owen