Thursday, November 18, 2004

If I said that work isn’t always fun, gentle reader, would I be so far off the mark? It almost seems like common sense, and I’m not sure it’s a topic worthy of debate. I mean, you’ve got your good days, sure, but you’ve also got your bad days as well, right? I’d go so far as to label this a fact, if it weren’t for a job fair I attended a year or two ago.

There was a representative from the CIA at this fair, and after conversing a bit I asked about bad days in the agency.

“Oh, every day is great,” she said. “I don’t have any bad days.”

Right. I didn’t need intense training on The Farm or even a math class to realize that this probability was the special kind, the kind that makes statisticians giggle with glee. This is all merely a prelude, however, to our real discussion.

Whenever I have a tedious day at work, I imagine landing a plush job in Hollywood. In my mind, the grind simply doesn’t exist there. It just doesn’t have room to breathe. I’d spend my time jetting from place to place, drinking cool beverages with famous people, composing Oscar-winning screenplays on a willfully shitty typewriter, purposely dirtying my pants with caviar, that kind of thing. Hollywood, or so goes my fantasy, is the kind of place where people eat Lucky Charms the way they were meant to be consumed–with free-range oats and real gold and diamonds.

Over the weekend, I saw some filming done for Derailed, a thriller that comes out sometime next year. Clive Owen and Melissa George were both in Wilmette, while Jennifer Anniston was somewhere else. zOMG, WTF, I’m going to have an aneurysm from the excitement, right? Wrong. What surprised me most was the 9-to-5ness of the whole deal. Although they probably made much more than the average bear, the actors and the crew were grinding it out, same as all us other Joes, on a Sunday afternoon no less.

It was boring, and there was a guilty pleasure to this boringness. You get the impression from interviews and documentaries that, really, all you need is a director with a “vision” and lots of Evian spring water to make a movie. And the actors, hell, all they need are assistants willing to twist the tops off their water bottles.

Of course, maybe they started rolling out the caviar and the Really Lucky Charms after I left, but I doubt it. A job is a job is a job. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going back to my first love, Microsoft Excel.