The job scene sucks these days, that much we know. Much of my recent odyssey has been in search of Meaningful Work, and I'm finding that I'm far more sympathetic to those dangling from the bottom rungs of the Work Hierarchy, which goes:

Meaningful Work is better than Okay Work.
Okay Work is better than Bad Work.
Bad Work is better than No Work.

Down the scale of optimal ways to spend one's days, there are workarounds, lights at the end of the tunnel, lessons learned and the comfort of knowing that with time and vigilance, you can work back up the ladder to something more suitable. Bad jobs also are oddly motivating.

This issue's theme is Learning to Settle, so you pretty much know where my sympathies lay at the moment. Except in a few arenas like dining out (learning to love McDonald's salads) and buying new clothes (learning to love Valu-Village), I'm not learning to settle all that well. But these few noble men have.

I first saw this Polar Bear suit guy at the Ice booth at the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas in 1999. He wasn't an actor or one of the aspiring Booth Bunnies who usually work trade shows. He actually worked for the software company. And I think he was being punished. The costume was sort of limp, and the exhibits hall was hot. The igloo, alas, was not made of ice. The bear emoted a slumping kind of dejection, even through the foam and fuzz of the outfit. Paul Izbicki observed, "There's my idea of the punishment you get when you die and go to hell." Paul now finds himself a peg above the Polar Bear guy, working for a home shopping cable company in Tennessee, and on those inevitable days where the job is a challenge, he looks at his pay stub and remembers one of the best things about the gig. It's probably the same with the polar bear guy.
	Which brings us to another trade show costumed crusader gig, that of the MSN Butterfly guy. When the irrepressible Maude Lynn emailed us this image from MacWorld Expo in San Francisco, she said he was initially one reviled arthropod. Butterfly Guy was assigned to walk around in his low-budget wings and cheap tights (unlike the spiffier foam costume worn by his television commercial counterpart), handing out the most undesirable of trade show schwag: an MSN CD-ROM. No one would talk to him, and in fact his appeal was so negative among the Apple contingent that he was actively avoided. Until...
...someone decided that he had geek cache. Still, no one wanted his CDs, but he was good for a group picture, and he beamed as people crowded around for their turns being photographed with him. Up until this point, you really have to wonder if Butterfly guy would do this job again. For an aspiring actor, it was a vaulable lesson in rejection. Which brings us to a Job that I like to call, "If I die, please don't tell my parents you found me this way."
		Yes, a gig's a gig, as our friend Ian likes to say; a saying, by the way, extremely applicable in times like this. But this one has the earmarks of being the hat-trick of bad jobs: Poor visibility, an inability to flee, and no chance for tasteful accessorizing. TitanTV's Eyeball Guy can say one thing in favor of this gig: No one will recognize him when he is finally free to sit down at a Las Vegas lounge with a couple Fuzzy Navels and forgets the way sweat pools in the bottom of his giant cornea.

If you have a Jobs in Hell story for us, do pass it along. If you have pictures, we'd love to see them. We'll probably be merciful, even.

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FROM THE FORTIFIED STORY VAULT:

The world watches Seattle and asks, "Who Invited All These Tacky People?" (yet another costumed gig...)

The Coolest Job in Mendocino: Recycling in Wine Country

photographs by Maude Lynn

Oh, sure, you recycle. You separate your paper from your plastics. But in Mendocino, California, you must also pass the Wine Bottle Test.

The Pt. Arena Recycling center is the part-time job of a local Mendocino fisherman. Wine bottles are lovingly sorted by vague differential in color, shape and size, and sold for washing and reselling. On a sunny South Coast afternoon, the pattern, color, and glitter is spectacularly pretty. Adding your wine bottles to the bins is less recycling and more a Work of Art.

Photographs:

Ice Booth by Carey Dissmore

MSN Butterfly Guy and Titan TV Guy by Maud Lynn

MORE JOBS IN HELL

As I recently edit shows about women giving birth and shows where 12 women without any reason take their tops off (and more, but that doesn't make it to air) and the rest of the time is being filled with writing endless lines of computer code you might want to add my name to the list...

Bouke Vahl (who doesn't feel better in the knowledge that the latter has 17% market share...), Nijmegen, the Netherlands