(Gentleman Jack is a good friend who has been having a rough go of his job search and general direction in life. These are his, at times, brilliant, eccentric and esoteric musings. These are The Loxley Files. Hopefully you’ll learn something – or at least have a good laugh.)
I recently got some bad news, apparently I do not have Hepatitis A. Not the disease, the full round of vaccinations (speaking of which, am I the only person that thinks if you pronounced it a bit more phonetically it would sound like a character from The Oddessey?). Without a lot of boring detail, I had the opportunity to go do some relief work for the earthquake in Haiti. However, since I am not fully vaccinated, and cannot be in time to go, I am stuck here. I believe the phrase they used was that I’ve been “stood down.” At least I got that much, which in terms of cool rejection terminology only takes a back seat to the phrase “loose cannon” or some sort of request to surrender a firearm.
I have some other potential adventures ahead of me, including the possibility of employment in Panama. However, in the meantime it may not be a terrible idea to have some kind of income. Earlier today I recommended to someone that they become a bartender. My exact thought was Alec Baldwin’s line in The Departed “the world needs plenty of bartenders,” though my actual suggestion was for him to go to bar-tending school. Not that you really need to go to school for it, but you can’t get anywhere without a degree these days. That was right before I got the (most recent) bad news about my own future. So my mind naturally went back to that advice.
I think I would make a good bartender, in the right circumstances. I don’t think I’d like to work in a meat market bar full of people in their early 20s – and a lot of people pretending they still are – primarily because I’m not intersted in being an unwitting accessory to daterape (though the tips are probably better). I think I would need a bar that caters to a slightly older crowd. Probably a bar/restaurant type place. Not real expensive, but a relatively nice place. You know, somewhere above the mall-chain range. I could dispense sage bullshit, and always have whatever interesting book I’m reading behind the bar to let everyone know I’m smart, but just too deep to have a real job.
The other thought I had, a moment after being reminded of my own advice was that the Baldwin character’s phrase seemed to be an alcoholic’s reformulation (they Irished it up, if you will – probably a holdover from a collective socio-ethnic memory) of the more classic “the world needs plenty of ditch diggers.” Given the expression, it sounds like there is an abundance of this kind of work, and it’s probably the kind of thing where you could show up at the digging office on a day that you felt like doing some digging; but then if you didn’t want to come that’d be fine too, they’d just send out one of the other guys who was sitting around reading a magazine and drinking the free water or coffee they have there out of those new, environmentally friendly disposable cups. As I’ve shoveled a decent amount of snow lately, and therefore my various digging muscles are in pretty good shap, I decided to look into this career path.
First I googled ditch digger. The most instructive result there were 2 definitions from urbandictionary.com. One described a sexual position and intolerance of homosexuals all in one run-on sentence (not to be confused with my long sentences, which are appropriately punctuated with semi-colons where necessary). The other was a low-grade racial comment in regard to Mexicans. Though unhelpful, this was instructive in terms of Urban Dictionary.
Next, I ammended my search to ditch digger jobs. The most useful result there was a thread someone started, looking, as I am for a ditch digger job. A month later there was a response from someone putting in an irrigation system at their house in New Mexico, to which the original poster replied: “i don’t even remember making this thread! 
”
Obviously, I was not getting anywhere. So I decided to narrow my search, and went to careerbuilder.com. Unfortunately, when I searched ditch digger in my zip code I got no results. In fact, there is only one result for the whole country, and it has to do with power line maintenance (a job well outside my skill-set).
Apparently the world does not need plenty of ditch diggers. I should have studied engineering like Thomas Friedman is always pushing (instead of international relations – do as I say not as I do, eh Tom?) then maybe I could get that power line job.
