One day a month I emerge from the basement, squint at the fire in the sky and curse it with all the strength of my dark, damp gods that I worship from my laundry tub shrine.  Then I set out to do my business.  I run errands, visit hookers, pay bills, go shopping and visit the clinic.  It’s my routine and I enjoy it.  But every so often in my travels I run afoul of things that neither I nor my underworld deities can fully understand.  I make sharpened sticks to poke at them and pray to the loose socks I find in my dryer and still no answers are forthcoming.  So now, in this venue, I vent my otherworldly frustrations with professions, mayhaps even careers, that must have been borne from a parallel universe where logic operates differently than it does here before some sinister force transplanted them to our Earth for us to ponder over.  These are all real jobs.  They just don’t need to be.

Bathroom Attendant

I have to admit, this blows my mind.  Does this job hearken back to a more illustrious time when monocled gentlemen would take their top hats and walking sticks to the lavatory and be desperately out of their element without a man, hopefully a foreigner from the mysterious East wearing a red uniform and some kind of tiny hat, to guide them through the process of urinating or mounting the polished oaken stool filled with rose water so that one might excrete feces from one’s buttocks and, dare we presume, anus?  Feces is made by fairies, you know.  They put it in your behind if you don’t leave them a dish of cream on the mantle at night.  Piffle ha guffaw.

They’re a rare breed these days but make no mistake, there are a minority of club owners out there, generally greasy-looking fellows with fake tans and enough chest hair to make it look as though their neck is actually a giant scrotum that’s oozing up through their collar, who think their establishment needs a bathroom attendant.  And so some shmuck who needs to support himself, maybe even a family, actually has to be at this club from like 9PM until 2 AM or so, just standing there breathing in drunken piss fumes all goddamn night.  And he offers you soap and cologne.

Hey buddy, way to piss.  Want me to squirt this coconut body butter in your hands.  Oh me?  Yeah.  I’m a stranger who just stood here watching you piss.  And now I want to give you stuff to make you smell nice.

Can you comfortably shit in a room when you know a stranger is just standing out there?  A guy who knows when you came in and can hear every single moist sound you produce?  A guy who’s probably drifting off in his own thoughts but is brought back to reality every time another shit plops into that pool?  How can you look that man in the eye?  How can he look at you after smelling what happened to your breakfast?  Who thought this job was necessary?

Do you know what heralded the Industrial Revolution?  What paved the way for radio, television, automobiles, robotic arms, home computers and HD porno?  The first son of a bitch who dropped his monocle in unabashed surprise when he finished pissing and realized there was no bathroom attendant handy because the man just got diphtheria or whatever, so he was forced to actually wash his own hands.  That man was probably PT Barnum or Leonardo Da Vinci or Henry Ford or something.  Make no mistake, he was a trend setter.

Why bathroom attendants exist in 2010 is a mystery that cannot be solved.  It’s like an MC Escher painting, or some kind of nightmare shat from the mind of a mental patient.  It’s just bizarre.

WWE Referee

This may be a gimme, but come on.  Come on.  I get that the WWE is sports entertainment, and even though I haven’t watched it since, you know, I grew up, I imagine it’s quite the same as it once was.  It has its place in the pantheon of ways people wallow in their own crapulence and waste time, money and brain cells.  That’s cool, no worse than Desperate Housewives, I assume.  But why the charade, WWE?  Couldn’t it work just as well on the honor system?

Typically, if memory serves, wrestling matches worked in only a handful of ways.  It’s a straight ass kicking buffet that ends with no surprises because these shows are like 10 hours long and wrestlers can only spout nonsense for so long.  Something needs to happen to pad out the shows they put on Saturdays just to kill time.  So you’ll see wrestlers like The Great Twatini and Vandal McRandall sparring on an afternoon match and wonder who the fuck either of these guys are, but you’ll put up with it because later HHH is going to talk for 15 minutes straight about the match he’s having tomorrow on pay-per-view and that’s going to be totally awesome, man!

During said match, the ref will separate the men if they engage in choke holds or cock punching.  He’ll count if someone goes outside the ring.  And he’ll give the 1-2-3 when Vandal McRandall gets pinned.  Good job, ref.

In other matches, when you have a real heel in there, the ref will get beaten with a leg of lamb or something.  Just crowned.  They’ll plaster that dude to the mat and he will be unconscious just long enough to miss the good guy win in a fair match.  Then, when he’s had the bad guy pinned for a 10 count, the bad guy will muster some strength to cheat, or maybe his manager, a busty Swede with an eye patch or whatever, will hit the good guy with a chair.  The bad guy pins him and the ref wakes up and does the count.  Oh no!  This is a great injustice!  Shit!

Pretty much that’s all that goes into refereeing the WWE.  Straight boring matches or horribly scripted stupid matches that involve massive referee trauma.  If the refs in the WWE were actually calling real sports and they were actually subjected to that much abuse, those that weren’t dead would literally be retarded.  And not because they chose to do the job, but because you can’t get hit in the head with that many chairs and not go retarded.  Literally.  I can barely comprehend the brain damage that the WWE pretends its employees get subjected to on a daily basis.  If someone did that to you at your job, and you lived, you’d sue.  Plus you’d quit.  Why on Earth would you go to work, only to have someone actually smash your skull in with a folding chair, and then go back the next day.  That’s exactly when you say “Hey, I never agreed to get hit in the head with a folding metal chair.  I quit” and you’d be well within your rights because I don’t think you can have a legitimate employment contract anywhere in the Western world that’s legally binding if one of the stipulations is that you may or may not get hit in the head, totally unexpectedly, by folding metal chairs.  The very idea is preposterous.

Walmart Greeter

Arguably this job exists because one old man got lost in a Wal Mart and wouldn’t stop saying hello to everyone he met.  Wal Mart management waited 24 hours and when no one claimed him, they put a blue vest on him and parked him at the entrance.  The trend caught on and now seniors exist at every Wal Mart, wishing you well and generally making you feel on edge the very moment you set foot in one of these stores, that really don’t need any more reasons to make you feel uncomfortable.

Probably the most unsettling aspect of the Wal Mart greeter is their stark unprofessionalism.  Maybe this is just me but literally four out of five times I go to a Wal Mart, these people just don’t greet me.  They stand their, grinning like Skeletor, hovering about the shopping carts and waiting like birds of prey for someone to set off that extremely detached security warning so they can totter over and check your receipt to make sure you’re not stealing  Wal Mart brand jerky.

I don’t run a big box store that’s world renowned for horrible, heinous, nearly atrocious workplace violations and generally abysmal treatment of its employees.  I wish I did.  I wish I could lock foreigners in my store at night and make them stock shelves for me, or any of the other myriad of things Wal Mart has been accused of doing that, in the right part of the world, might be considered war crimes.  I wish I had the kind of power to not only do that, but get away with it because people, when presented with news of corporate dumbfuckery, weigh this against the deal they can get on bargain bin DVDs, and decide it’s not worth giving a shit about.  You’ll never see anything closer to royalty in America today.  But I don’t.  But if I did, my first order of business, on the first page of my corporate manual, would be to set in stone that our store’s mission is to not turn the elderly into campy zoo attractions like an ape that can paint pictures or a camel that can lick its own asshole.  I would not allow it.

I understand it’s difficult for the elderly to find work.  Our culture likes to sweep you out of the way once you hit the decrepit age of 50 or start to look like you might not lubricate fully of your own accord.  No one wants to endure that in the workplace.  But dammit, surely there’s more worth to the old and infirm than being mannequins that actually need bathroom breaks.  There must be more.  Old people are more than capable of being florists, sweater folders or bathroom attendants.  Give them a goddamn break.  Or at least force them to actually greet every person who enters the store with some bit of useful information.  If my Wal Mart greeter looked me square in the eye and told me something amazing, like there’s a species of South American toad that, when threatened, emits a noise that sounds exactly like Britney Spears falling into a trash bin, I’d be blown away.  I’d be like “Holy shit, really?” and he’d just nod and not say another word because that’s all I get. I could beg and plead and he’d press a button and a cashier would come and ask me to please go about my business or they’d have to ask me to leave because it’s just one greet per customer.  I’d go to Wal Mart every goddamn day just to get another greet.

But that doesn’t happen, does it?  No sir.  No it does not.

Traffic Reporter

Thanks to 24 hour news networks we, as a people, have had to redefine what constitutes news.  Once upon a time, news was when a war broke out.  News was a massive fire that wiped out the red light district and put the whore population at an all time low.  News was the President coming to town to help bolster support for bringing whores back to the ravaged red light district.  Today, news is Paris Hilton’s failed bid to copyright “that’s hot” or 6 straight hours filming the house of a congressional page who was caught filling his ass with cottage cheese at work.

Because we need to literally never stop the news, the traffic reporter exists, one more rusty cog in a deficient machine that spins in circles and sometimes kills pedestrians.  Television stations literally pay for an entire helicopter or some retrofitted crop duster to send up a dude with a microphone to let you know, during rush hour, that the expressway is busy.  It doesn’t take a comedy website intern who’s also a fortune-telling gypsy to give you the news that, no shit, the expressway is busy at rush hour.  Do you know why the expressway is busy at rush hour?  Because that’s happened every day, at the same time, since someone put a road there.

At best, if a bus runs afoul of a moose or something and causes a massive delay, you have reason to inform people that traffic isn’t as smooth as silk today.  And that’s what phones are for.  Do you know how many radio stations have tip lines that drivers can call to let people know about traffic accidents?  A statistically amazing 107% of them.  And no one needs a helicopter.  You can tell traffic sucks from right on the sidewalk.

If the traffic reporter could at least improve himself to the level of the weather person, that’d be something.  By and large the weather guy is useless to.  Is it raining?  I couldn’t tell, you see I’m blind and deaf and my skin has no functioning nerve endings so I’m not sure if I’m getting wet just now.  But the weather guy can tell you with a decent degree of accuracy if it’ll rain tomorrow, and that’s all he’s good for.  Five day forecasts are all lies, no one remembers what he said 5 days ago.  And honestly, if it’s sunny in the middle of July today, take a wild guess what the weather is going to be like in 5 days.

Ah, but the traffic guy can’t tell you how the traffic will be tomorrow.  All he can do is waste however much cash it costs to keep and maintain a helicopter and look down and describe what he sees.  That’s literally all a weather guy does.  He looks down and has to not go blind and/or insane at the same time.

Event Planner

My apologies to the event planners of the world but I should point out I’m actually trained to do this.  I went to school for this, more or less.  Amongst other things.  This is close to my heart.  So close that I can see how utterly pointless this job is.

Event planning is pretty much exactly what it sounds like.  You are tasked with planning an event for someone.  Party planning is basically the same thing.  Wedding planning, too.  That’s not to say these people don’t know what they’re doing.  A lot of them probably don’t.   I didn’t.  But why does anyone need them?

This is how event planning works – Hey, I want to have a party.  Have a party for me.  Event planning is 3^rd party crotch washing.  I need clean balls but I’ll be damned if I can work up the gumption to clean my own balls.  Say, college-educated person in a smart-looking business suit, want to wash my balls in exchange for an hourly rate?  Make sure they’re sparkling when you’re done.

There’s no foreseeable reason why anyone can’t plan their own event.  Maybe you’re an idiot, that’s OK.  How do you know your event planner isn’t an idiot?  Worse yet, do you trust your event planner to plan the event on their own?  No.  You tell them exactly what to do.  And doesn’t that mean you can do it all yourself?  Yes.  Yes it does mean that.  That;s exactly what it means.

No wedding planner is going to choose color schemes and center pieces and menus without the bride and groom telling them what they want.  That would be utter madness of the sort that leads to Mad Max-style post-apocalyptic nightmares full of football gear and leather pants.  The people who want the event will list off everything they want.  This means, basically, an event planner if a McDonald’s employee, only more mobile, better paid, and with a more extensive menu.  And probably less prone to suicidal thoughts. You order what you want and they give it to you.