Got invited to a school career fair the other day.
Didn’t know I was brought there as a warning.
“Study harder, or this could happen to you!” shrieked the counsellor, arms spread wide to shield the students from the empty table at which I sat forlorn as a circus freak. Students, wrinkling their noses at the stench of decay, shunned me in favour of those whose vocations offered a more promising future: VCR repairman, bomb-disposal technician, lumberjack.
Lumberjack is the second-least desirable profession around, according the just-released Jobs Rated report, CareerCast.com’s annual index of employment opportunities. It’s a U.S. study, but has applicability here.
The worst job, dead last at No. 200?
Newspaper reporter.
“Ranked at job number 126 when the first Jobs Rated report was published in 1988, newspaper reporters have fared poorly in the report for years due to the job’s high stress and tight deadlines, low pay and requirement to work in all conditions to get the story.”
I brought this to the attention of the editor: “Apparently I’m stressed. You should pay me more. Being a newspaper guy sucks.”
He pointed out that A) if I want to feel stress, I should try being a subsistence farmer in drought-stricken Africa, B) no, and C) it has been years since anyone has written for a newspaper alone. Reporters are now “platform agnostic,” pounding out content for the web like a hamster on a wheel.
Some wrestle with the change. “I used to have at least a rudimentary idea of how a newspaper got produced,” wrote Washington Post Magazine columnist Gene Weingarten. “On deadline, drunks with cigars wrote stories that were edited by constipated but knowledgeable people, then printed on paper by enormous machines operated by people with stupid hats and dirty faces.
“Everything is different today, and it’s much more confusing. For one thing, there are no real deadlines anymore, because stories are constantly being updated for the Web. All stories are due now, and most of the constipated people are gone, replaced by multiplatform idea triage specialists. In this hectic environment, mistakes are more likely to be made, meaning that a story might identify Uzbekistan as ‘a subspecies of goat.’ ”
My editor also pointed out that for a guy whose job sucks, I get to do a lot of fun stuff. This is true.
I have been tasered (voluntarily), been blasted with blowhole spray by Luna the whale (it tasted like fish), and interviewed a porn star in the nude (her, not me). Barack Obama phoned me four days before he was elected president. A headless body once fell at my feet. I have met prime ministers and premiers, talked with a murderer in his cell (I liked the murderer). I get to poke my nose in places it doesn’t belong, tell interesting stories and try to change the community, hopefully for the better.
Some reporters are better at this last bit than others. Last year, a Times Colonist team led by Lindsay Kines won Canada’s Michener Award for public service journalism, their stories forcing the provincial government to stop pushing developmentally disabled people out of group homes against their will. When he was at the Vancouver Sun, it was Lindsay’s relentless digging that forced the investigation that eventually resulted in the arrest of Robert Pickton. Don’t tell me this job is dead last.
The point being: the Jobs Rated report needs a new yardstick, one that measures fulfilment, not security and regular hours. It makes me think of my dad, who got out of the army at the end of the war, worked for the post office for 2,000 years, then quit at age 55 to go to theology school and get ordained as a penniless preacher. Good choice — when was the last time you heard of a crazed gunman “going Anglican” on his co-workers?
Anyway, for those who are interested, here are the 10 best careers as listed in the CareerCast.com index: actuary, biomedical engineer, software engineer, audiologist, financial planner, dental hygienist, occupational therapist, optometrist, physical therapist, computer systems analyst.
Here, in descending order, are the bottom 10: flight attendant, roofer, letter carrier, meter reader, dairy farmer, oil rig worker, actor, enlisted military personnel, lumberjack and, of course, newspaper reporter — the best job in the world.
