How about Large Tobacco Company lobbyist / PR rep?
Speaking of worthless jobs from your past, (construction sign flipper), I challenge anyone to beat my “internship” at Mobil my junior year of college:
I was a “clerk” in the Int’l Exporting and Producing division. My only job duty: I made a copy of every Telex order that came into our office from Int’l offices, made a copy and Fed Ex’d the copy to the respective international offices around the world.
Every day I’d overnight Fed Ex packages containing a single piece of paper (almost never more than one Telex order per day) to Turkey, Venezuela, Indonesia, Nigeria, Norway and the UK. This had been going on for years with internships in this office.
When I was there, our old boss retired and our unit got a new boss. He held an open meeting with bosses in all the other offices to discuss “ways to improve efficiency.”
The Norway boss asked why his clerk kept getting copies of their Telex orders, as the Telex system generated a copy for their records automatically. Every day for years this Norway clerk opened his Fed Ex package, pulled out the copy of his Telex order of which he already had a copy, and threw it away.
The new boss then went around the room asking the other bosses and determined that every clerk in every office was opening these packages and throwing the contents away.
My internship was eliminated. No word on how much money Mobil E&P spent over the years sending daily detritus overnight mail all over the world.
Well, it is my personal bias, but yes, I think the Porsche, Hummer, Rolex, insert-overpriced-brand-here market is pathetic. The desire for “status symbols” strikes me as one of humanity’s least attractive traits. Do you really mean to argue in favor of an exaggerated focus on superficial qualities? Does it really seem like a good idea to establish a culture of wealth worship when the majority of people have no hope of ever achieving that goal? Are poor children better off for wanting items they don’t really need that their parents will never be able to afford?
And I’m not sure that the effects in the marketplace are all that positive. Do luxury goods provide well-paying jobs to a lot of people, or is all the profit being siphoned off at the top and thus benefitting only a few business owners? If the reason for the high price has nothing to do with real manufacturing costs and everything to do with marketing, then it seems unlikely the people who’ve done the manufacturing are getting any benefit.
I’m not an economist and this isn’t something I’ve studied formally, so I can only opine; all I know is that there are an incredible number of luxury items in the marketplace, and the gap between rich and poor is on the increase.
I tend to agree with you Fessie, but where and how do you draw the line? People with big-time money want those conspicuous prizes. There’s no stopping it.
And yes, there is an ever-widening gap between the haves and have-nots. I wish I had the solution.
OK, I understand where you’re coming from. But I also believe that societal value has to be about more than dollars and cents moved.
Otherwise large-scale drug dealers would be valued members of society. The employ many people (frequently in impoverished areas with no other opportunities), train their employees (thus adding to the employees value in the marketplace) and have an enormous cash flow and profit margin.
Yet I don’t think anyone would consider them to have a large worth on a societal level.
Making money can have value, of course. If I didn’t believe that I wouldn’t be in the trade I’m in. But there also has to be consideration of the effect of one’s trade on other persons. And the fashion industry, other than its money-making ability, strikes me as being a large-scale negative for society as a whole.
Except maybe the Victoria’s Secret catalog. They can keep mailing those to my place.
Meh. Buying haute couture is no less shallow than buying wall-sized plasma TVs with 20-speaker surround sound and communist-scan (even better than progressive-scan!) DVD players. It’s all a matter of taste, and unless you’re a Ralph Nader type who pooh-poohs anything with a hint of luxury, it’s all good.
Whenever I saw them, especially on a 102º day with no shade nearby, I would think, “Man, and I think my job sucks.”
My vote for pointless job goes to whatever title we confer upon the people who stand by the exits of many major retail outlets and scribble on receipts with a hi-lighter. What does that accomplish? I understand in theory but many times I could easily have been strolling out with 7 car batteries and a lit Duraflame log in my cart as my receipt for a King Size Snickers is adorned with an orange squiggle.