I received the following e-mail yesterday from Wendell Wilkie High School’s perennial sophomore, Bubby Spadmen.
Hey Mr. C.,
They tell me it’s Spring and school will be over soon. I guess that’s right even though all the normal signs are missing, like warm weather and stuff. Anyway, I have to start getting ready for it so I can get a summer job – something that will prepare me for the future that never seems to get here.
That’s why I’m thinking I’d like to be an actuary.
All the lists of “best jobs” say the job of actuary is the bestest of the best. It’s got high pay and low stress, you can work regular hours in a comfortable place where they take good care of you. And there aren’t a lot of people in the field so it’s easy to get hired.
That sounds like the perfect job for me, even though I still don’t get what it is!
And in those “best job” articles when they go on to describe the work a lot of the writers say “no one understands what an actuary does …”, which is kind of odd because writers are supposed to be good at figuring things out. Some of them try to explain it in detail, but that’s when I kind of lose interest. I think it has to do with numbers or something, which is too bad because I was hoping it had to do with acting.
Anyway, if most people don’t know what the job is, I hope I might still be able to get one because I’m really good at pretending that I know what I’m doing. Here’s the secret – you try to look busy and don’t talk, unless it’s about the weather.
Will you give me a glowing reference letter if I need one? It would sure help, and if you could work the words “actuary”, “actually” or “actuality” in there, I think that could be the thing that gets me over the top.
My future is in your hands,
Bubby
I told Bubby I would write a recommendation letter for him, but I wouldn’t pretend that he has any skills he hasn’t got or drop in misleading words. But I also agreed I wouldn’t put the word “clueless” in there either, even though I desperately want to.
Describe a job you had that you didn’t know how to do.
Trail Baboon 
A few years ago, I decided that sitting in the cottage listening to people’s problems hours every week was a bit too confining for an extrovert so I got myself hired at a swanky Caribou Coffee Shop near by. I was the oldest barrister by at least 30 years and found the training extremely challenging, but was determined to spend a few hours each week among a steady stream of people. I soon learned that my weakest skill is multi-tasking and that seeing more than one drink order on the computer screen was overwhelming. To hide my weak barrister skills, I managed to stick to the register and coffees. Even here, I got in trouble by repeatedly closing my apron string in the cash drawer, then having to call the shift supervisor to unlock it. I also had a problem cashing out my drawer more often than not.
The day finally came when no one else was available to make a guest’s drink – a latte – so I did my best. Steamed the milk just right and hit the expresso button on one of three machines. I was so proud of my accomplishment! A few moments later, the guest returned grimacing and saying that something was terribly wrong with her drink. At that moment, the manager walked up and realized that I’d poured cleaning solution rather than expresso into the steamed milk. The machine was being cleaned, but the liquid looked just like expresso. To say it another way, I had poisoned the guest!
Over the next few weeks, I couldn’t help but notice that my initial 15 hours a week dwindled down to only three. When I asked the manager for more hours, he said, “You will never get more than three hours in this store!” I took my cue and resigned shortly thereafter but never quite got over the fact that even with two masters degrees, I couldn’t hack this job.
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you missed your opportunity cb. the introduction of tasty cleaning solution with a hazenut or mocha flavoring is just what the world needs. who says cleaning solution need to be toxic? why are we putting toxic chemicals in things we eat out of? product development is where your future lies.
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Big OOPS here. My dear brother just emailed me that saying I might want to refrain from composing posts at 3AM because my spelling gets sloppy (my words, not his). My correction here: “barista” not “barrister”. I don’t even know what a “barrister” is, but I think it’s some kind of political position in the UK?
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A barrister is the kind of lawyer in the UK who wears a wig and argues cases in court. If you want the kind of lawyer who does wills and stuff, that’s a solicitor.
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Thanks for clarifying that, Steve. I’ve always wondered what was the difference between barrister and solicitor.
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I suggest that any baboon who wants to know the difference between a barrister and a solicitor look it up in Wikipedia. While Steve’s description is correct as far as it goes, it’s not entirely accurate. For one thing, the wig is court dress also worn by solicitors. As to what a barista does, other than get her apron string stuck in the cash drawer, I’ll need to research that further.
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In her work as a barista, my daughter once had to help a customer going through the drive-through figure out how to send a text to someone on the customer’s new smart phone. The woman told my daughter “Here. You send this text. I just can’t figure it out.” Daughter obliged and got a $5.00 tip. She aslo has to give dog biscuits to pooches going through the drive-through with their owners.
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One April my principal told me they were yet again making cuts in the music program. He offered me the job of teaching orchestra lessons to make up for the cuts in my position. I was legally qualified to do lessons, but I did not know how to play the violin! So that April I started taking lessons and by the following September I could play well enough to start the beginners. It was fun.
Here’s another music teacher:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CC33O52pGUg
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i associate with the other music teacher in the show
http://us.yhs4.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?hspart=Babylon&hsimp=yhs-002&type=direct&p=76%20trombones%20you%20tube
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBQWsBiM5YY
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gotta
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I love ‘Music Man’. (‘I always think there’s a band, kid’)
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See Holly, you could have just used the “Think Method”,
la-di-da-di-da-di-da-di-dah…..La-di-dah….La-di-dah……
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i ended my school days at jefferson high school and was ready to go travel the world but first let me go ask grandpa for a job at his construction company. shoulder length hair and beard that came to two points about 8 inches long were not what my grandfather wanted to present as his offering to nepotism so he said if i got my hair cut i could have the job. i hemmed and hawed and came to the decision that the hair had acted as a deterrent long enough and the person inside is more important and all that balderdash so i cut it. inch and a half long. kind of a paul neuman sort of feel to it. but the beard is where i could leave a little person statement. trim off the points but leave it a good 5 or 6 inches long. well grampa accepted my calling to show him the hair cut and be assigned to one of his constructon jobs for 575 an hour which was big wages in 1973.
well grandpa decided that the hair was ok. i thought you might go shave your head and then wed have a problem he said, but that beard is in need of a trim. here let me give you the name of my barber and he will trim it up for you and he wrote down his barbers name on a piece of paper and handed it to me and that wa sthe end of the possible friendship he and i could have had. my dad had worked for him when we moved to minneapolis and he hated it. he didnt want to poision the water when i told him i was going to ask grandpa for work but he knew the outcome before the second step was taken. he didnt speak badly about many people but he all but spoke badly about my grandpa, a self important man who didnt know he was pooh poohing everyone around him his whole life. he thought it was the me me me show. so… the guy who lived across the street form one of my dads golf foursome was charlie mc gough of mc gough construction and he was all to happy to hide me on as a laborer on a worksite he had in st pul by fort snelling picking limestone for 7.20 an hour. a twenty percent raise before even started. i already had my union card and my new work boots and i was ready to go. the first day was 90 degrees and 90% humidity. i got there at 7 for a 7 oclock start up but i didnt realize that was not the agenda here and i had started off on the wrong foot. i made a bad first impression on the forman and he made some crack about my being late and slow and i got the hair raised on the back of my neck and from the top of the rock pile i began to show my worth and the rocks came flying out of the pile and went ailing down the hill to where the guys at the bottom were assigned the task of putting the rocks each the size of a watermelon into a pile to be put into the front end loaded and dumped into the truck to be hauled away to stack for rebuilding fort snelling. well i went on like that until lunch and old stand called me over and says you neet to trink some vater to keep from passing out. you verk gut and hard but you vill die in dis heat vitout some vater. here have some salt pills. i tink you vere supposed to take dem before you get svetting but here take em anyvay.
tanks fur verking so hart. well i knew my response had not fallen upon deaf eyes so i was rewarded for the hard work i did the rest of the summer. i was in the best shape of my life and as the summer ended and the job at the quarry was wrapping up stan called me and tom over and told us we were reporting the next day to brooklyn park to build the high school up there. well thanks stan and a handshake and a smile to let me know i had passed the test and had been awarded work for the winter.
this is where the stroy begins…
i showed up at the high school with my well worn work boots my lunch box and a beard that allowed me to make a personal statement and the forman at this job look like my grandfathers poster boy for tollerence. he said something along the lines of ” all the labororer i know cant get hired on here and they send me you two?” and the day bagan. you ever run a power wheelbarrow you ever run a tamper ( a jack hammer with a big flat pad on the bottom for packing in the dirt where it has been ug out and needs to be put back in withoyt waiting a week or tow for it to settle. no sir no sir, as i learned later in life the correct response is sure can and the learning curve on operating a tool is pretty quick and if you have to ask how to turn it on that generally is enough to start and 3 minutes into the process you are pretty much an expert. but we said no and he kept finding gruntier and gruntier job descriptions for us and i have told the finale bhere beofer about taking down the 50 foot tall scaffolding and being fired after we proved beyond the shadow of a doubt we didnt know the coreect way to do that.( i handed down all the 2×12 planks used for walking on before handing down the skeleton work from the top layer. embarassing and a good reason to begin my plans with a coffee can full of twenty dollar bills to go see the world. construction is a job i could handle today but it would be a different persepctive. today i feel sorry for all the poor ignorant workerbees and the off color jokes and stereotypes they embrace. i would be the philosopher king who showed up did an honest days work and took home an honest days pay. but ill tell you something about an ice cold one at caseys after a day of sweating like a section hand makes you proud to be an american. look what you can buy for a dollar.
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It’s too bad, in a way, that you didn’t stick with construction, tim. You could have had a great influence on all those workerbees who have such a narrow view of the world.
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Yeah that’s my goal bring the Archie bunkers up to a level of Ed Norton.
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Snort!
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I spent a couple of years working during the construction season as a roofer. It was very strenuous work and I got into very good physical shape as you did on your construction job, tim. I was never a top notch worker, but I could do it. I moved on from that job because I wanted to get back into doing work related to my education in agricultural science and biology.
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As a costumer, I was continuously asked to do things I had never done before, that no one else had probably done before, and that no one knew for a fact COULD be done.
But it was a GREAT idea!!!!!!
Sometimes I was brilliant, sometimes, there was just no way to change the laws of physics.
Gee I miss theatre.
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bet there is a stage out there with your name on it mig
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TEACHING! They have you take all the subject courses and methods courses and x number of weeks of student teaching, and then they turn you loose! What was I thinking? I’ll never forget the feeling that first day of school, when I was supposed to know what to do with 40 kindergarteners! Will describe more later.
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I don’t know how those grade school teachers manage to do what they do. I had all I could do to fill in for them as a sub and didn’t really get the job done completely. I think 40 kindergartners is too many. Usually in our district they only have 20 or a few more in a kindergarten class. There are some grade school teacher that can keep a class of 40 going, but I think they really can’t do much more than crowd control with that many.
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An actuary is a subspecies of accountant, and that reminds me of a job I didn’t know how to do. I was a composition instructor at the U of MN for six years. In the sixth year, I was assigned to teach advanced composition for accountants. They had to take advanced composition to get a degree in accounting. In other words, nobody was in my course because they wanted to be there.
The first thing I learned about teaching kids to compose essays was that there was no hope of them writing well if they didn’t have anything to say, and as a general thing most young people have very little to say that interests them or could interest anyone else. I was a passionate, original, dramatic instructor. I could work with a kid who had something to say but didn’t know how to shape his message. But it isn’t possible to teach writing to a bored kid who has no message to deliver. That problem was never so daunting as it became with my room full of little accountants. They were BORING human beings. Their sentences were boring and their paragraphs were more boring and their essays were unbelievably boring.
I became so desperate that I decided to learn enough about accounting to meet them on their own grounds. What are the burning issues in accounting that we could write about? How about LIFO versus FIFO? A big issue in accounting is whether the accountant records the Last product In, First product Out or First product in First product Out. LIFO or FIFO? Which should it be? I described this hot issue and then set up a paper that would debate LIFO vs FIFO. I threw myself passionately into presenting it. The papers I got back from them were less interesting than dog turds. My students didn’t give a damn about LIFO vs FIFO. They didn’t give a damn about accounting! Most of them considered accounting boring, almost as boring as my composition class.
Did anyone read the link Dale dropped in to explain what an actuary is? The joke at the end is that “an actuary is someone who wants to be an accountant but doesn’t have the personality for it.” That’s a bitter joke nobody would understand until they tried to teach a room full of bored accountants. I laughed hard.
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Well, if LIFO vs FIFO didn’t get their creative juices flowing, there’s just no hope for them.
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I was looking for essays in which a LIFO boy falls in love with a FIFO girl, and their families won’t let them near each other. I see this as a tragic story with the girl pretending to die and when the boy finds her he commits suicide.
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Sounds faintly familiar, I think it may have been done before.
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There must not be any hope for me either, PJ. LIFO vs FIFO does nothing for me either – except make me yawn.
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I was being facetious, Edith. To my mind you’d have to be extremely creative to breathe anything remotely interesting into LIFO and FIFO, but, as we all know, some accountants can get very creative.
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So am I, PJ, so am I.
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i think i would have tried to employ that time tested challenge of making them squirm. tell them that i am the closest thing they have to getting a passing grade and many accounting majors have to take this class 5 or 6 times before the move on. i am the teacher you will have again next time so a word to the wise is i take cream with my coffee and let me know if you want the same seat next time around or if you want to change and avoid the boredom of doing it exactly the same this term and next. accounting is ok to get a degree in with zero personal effort but i think they want the english department to insert the concept of about life after your degree. you will need to participate in life and balancing columns of numbers aint gonna do it. lets talk about your stamp collections or something stimulating you dweebs.
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Good morning. I finally managed to get the Honda CRV out of the back of the house and into the street so that my wife can go to work. We have around 10 inches of very wet snow here. I’ve never driven a snow plow and probably wouldn’t be good at that, although I would have liked to had one to use this morning.
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I had put some houseplants out on the porch last weekend and pulled them back inside last night. No accumulated snow here, though – flurries flew but melted immediately.
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i did the same thing but gathered them up form all over to put on the patio and when they came back in they took up a lot more space . my mother in laws tyounges got split last fall when they came in and are in processional mode. hibiscus trees are waiting anxiously for sol to make his permanent entrance and the christmas cactus feels right at home
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Try as I might, I can’t translate what the “tyounges” are, tim.
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mother in laws is your clue.. tongues. i never spell that right
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If it’s any consolation, BiR, I was stuck on that too.
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I got mother law tyounges right away because we have one of those plants and my mother law always pretended to be offended when I mentioned the name of that plant. I also have trouble spelling that word.
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Many times I wonder if I am able to do my current job teh way I ought. I don’t know if Jacque ever has these moments of self doubt. Sometimes I feel that I really know what I am doing, and sometimes I feel that I am completely in over my head. This is after almost 25 years in the business.
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I’m willing to bet she does, Renee. I think it’s hard for anyone in the healing professions to realize that sometimes even their best “medicine” isn’t going to get the job done. Medical doctors have to face that when they have exhausted every option in combating disease, and the patient dies. It’s no different in your line of work, Renee. Sounds like that tough case is taking its toll on you. Hang in there, my friend, be gentle with yourself.
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I hope this does not come out sounding wrong, Renee, but I think it would be more worrying if you thought you knew exactly what to do in every case. Unlike accounting, your line of work doesn’t always have right or wrong answers, you do the best you can. As PJ says, sometimes there is no “win”.
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I wonder how realistic it is to expect one therapist to be the right person for all clients that might appear. That seems a little like expecting every physician to be an oncologist and a pediatrician and a rheumatologist, etc.
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Thank you all for your support and wisdom. I think part of my uncertainty comes from the fact that I and my colleagues here are considered to be engaged in “Frontier Psychology”. To a certain extent, we are, to use Steve’s language ” general practitioners, oncologists, rheumatologists, and pediatricians”, because we have to treat whatever comes throught he door since it is too far for most people to go for services 100 miles or even farther away. It provides lots of variety, but uncertainty sometimes as to how to proceed.
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One of the fine arts of the health care business is this whole matter of matching up the right doc with the right patient. I suppose the burden of getting the match right has to rest with the therapist, but the patient needs to be paying attention to how well the match is working. I had a wonderful, wonderful physician for years, but I abandoned him because I realized that I could deceive and distract him when I was afraid to talk about a health issue that scared me. I switched to a guy who won’t let me charm him out of doing the important stuff.
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YES!!!!!!!
Especially with painful losses and when life is unfair. Busy day here.
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so you dont just tell to take two prozac and call me in the morning?
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I tried being a factory worker and, in some ways, I wasn’t very good at that. I worked at Hormel Foods for over 2 years with less than one year of working right in the factory on the lines or as a quality control clerk checking the lines. I would have been able handle some of the jobs without too many problems if could have stayed at those positions. At Hormel you had to move around to various jobs if you are a new worker and they don’t give you much training or much time to learn a new job.
I found that I wasn’t very good at reaching the work speed needed to do some jobs and decided to quit. I think the management thought I was not suited for the work and they were glad to see me go. I got along with most of the workers and they generally thought I was not a bad worker. In fact I probably could have been one of the better workers i I had been given a chance to fit in at the right jobs.
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the art of japanese management is a book i read years ago and it has a philosophy that you would like. in the us we tend to promote a person to the level of incompetency and then fire them and then they go to the next job and say where they were l[placed at theior last job and they are hired at that level and fail again and again. in the japanese art of management the promote you until you reach a level of incompetence and then back you down a notch and you tend to spend the rest of your life at a level you can feel comfortable at. not everyone is meant to be the head of the department or wants to be but that is not the american way according to the mbas who rule human resources.
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Yep – The Peter Principle.
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My first job after high school was the prestigious job of working the “mangle” at the laundry which cleaned, dried, and folded the linens for the resorts in the area. Feeding sheets through the mangle is a two-person job as you have to feed each sheet in through the big rollers perfectly straight or the sheet will get totally wrinkled and maybe jammed (think: giant paper jam, but with sheets) and you have to stop the mangle and get it out. Well, I wasn’t very good at that my first week, so they put me on the other end of the mangle where the sheets come out and two people fold them, using an intricate rhythmic dance step to fold them perfectly, finishing one just in time to do the next one. Ideally, the rhythm is never broken, two people feeding in, two people folding, never stopping except for lunch and breaks. For variety (whee!) you switch from feeding to folding and from folding to feeding periodically. Unfortunately, I was even worse at the folding than I was at the feeding. In fact, I was so bad that when I eventually learned to feed the sheets into the mangle, I had to stay there every day, all day. To rub salt in my wounds, later in the summer, my friend started to work there and within 5 minutes – 5 minutes! she was able to do the folding perfectly.
I still hate folding sheets.
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I guess I now know where the expression to “mangle” something comes from.
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i had a mangle apprinticeship form my mom when i was a pup. i loved sprinkling the water bottle on the cotton sheets to get them ready to hiss hitting the stainless steel roller iron while they were going through. i had one in the back of my ebay store for years. a couple of months ago a ldy wrote of needing help getting her mangle fix. we wrote a couple of funny exchanges back and forth about the illness she obviously needed help with and she came to buy it one day when i wasnt there. i felt bad i missed her. i guess she was as odd as you would expect. she came in thinking she was talking to a mangle expert and my worker didnt have a clue what she was talking about. she talked him through it and it was gone.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgggSIybg_I
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Yeah, I think that expression was inspired by my job performance there.
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You are folk legend, Edith.
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Funny, Edith! I imagine something like Ethel and Lucy in the candy factory…
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Evening–
Yeah; there’s some snow out there.
Public schools closed this morning and even the college in Rochester was 2 hours late. Pretty soon the college closed for the day and that’s really unusual.
Our power went off about 11:00 this morning. As of 4:00 it wasn’t back on and I hooked up our generator to make supper and warm up the house again.
Used the rear blade to clear some of it from our long gravel driveway and didn’t scrap too much rock off. Around the buildings I made more of a mess ripping up grass and dirt. I had several robins following me around looking for bare ground.
Deer are hanging around the house. Chickens, ducks and guineas are all in the shed making a racket. No one seems happy about this snow.
I tried doing some fieldwork Tuesday but it was a little too wet. It’s a lot too wet now.
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I was surprised that the power stayed on here with all the heavy snow bending down the branches of trees. The robins were looking a little disturbed around here with almost all of the ground covered by a thick blanket of snow. Field work will also be late here and I will be late getting my garden planted.
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I don’t think Buddy realizes what power he would have as an actuary. He could set the insurance industry on its ear with creative counting that would provide skewed estimates on occurances and probability. Perhaps, for example, Buddy could provide numbers that proved teenage boys were the least likely to have auto accidents, and that people with preexisting medical conditions whould be insured at the lowest premium cost. The sky is the limit!
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