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I am generally pretty happy as a librarian.  It matches my skill set and interests and I like other librarians.  I seem to do a good job – patrons thank me more often than not and I continue to be employed.  All that said, on a given day I’d rather not work than work.  Note: I do anyway, because that is how I obtain money.  But without this extra incentive, I would not go.  I’m glad I am connecting people with information and all, but if I were not compensated for my time, society would just have to do without my guidance while I did something else that allowed me to continue eating and having a house.  Or, if money were not motivation at all, I would just do all those I other things I do that make me happy enough that I don’t need further enticement.  Naturally, this leads me to wonder if there is a job out there where I would want to go even if no one paid me.  Or at minimum, would it improve one or more work-related variables without overly screwing up the other ones?  For example, that would be great if I could do the same amount of weekly work for ten times the salary, but I would not make the trade if there was a significant chance of dismemberment.  I suppose I could try to estimate how much higher my salary would have to be to take on a job that entailed a risk of dismemberment, but I’ll leave that exercise for later.  (Off the top of my head, probably at least 7 figures.  And there would have to be some pretty good benefits.)

So, over the next months or however long it takes to get bored of this project, I will parse through this list of 200 top-rated jobs and consider whether any would be worth a career change.  I will use a random number generator to pick which to discuss next.  The random number generator says:

113. Barber.

Duties, per CareerCast site: “Shampoos, trims, cuts, and styles hair according to the desires of customers.”

Before I do any further research:

What do I think people who have this job do? You work in a small shop. Sometimes you own the shop, or work for the person who does.  Sometimes it’s more like a chain, which would be sorta depressing.  I think the best situation would be to work in a cool old-school barbershop like the one in Rushmore. But I bet most of those are getting put out of business by crappy SuperCuts franchises. You answer the phone and take appointments, but otherwise you sit around reading magazines until someone comes in.  Sometimes customers are really nice and aren’t too picky. Sometimes they will accuse you of ruining their life when you’re done. Sometimes they will be kids – the terrified ones are best because they hold still.  You have to objectively know stuff about when a haircut looks good and when it doesn’t, for both sexes.  Then you sweep up some hair. You spend a lot of the day standing and holding your arms up in the air, so I’d think your shoulders get stronger.  You see some pretty poorly-washed hair, but at least you can wash it.  You’re handling razors so probably no punks are going to mess with you.  You probably have your regulars and feel like a comfortable townie but don’t make much money.  You can watch TV while you’re working.  I would guess there are enough jobs that pretty much anyone willing to be a barber could be a barber.

Do I think I would like this job? Probably not at all. I don’t like touching strangers. I have little sense of style. I am terribly uncomfortable getting my own hair cut, why would I want to cut someone else’s?

What would be required to become qualified? Having no training matching this job whatsoever, I would have to either apprentice myself at a barber shop or go to beauty college.

Would I want to do that? No chance.

Looking at the numbers:

Overall rank: 113, in the upper part of the bottom half.  I guess 113 out of 200 says: if you have to have kind of a cruddy job, this isn’t a bad one to have.

Details: Work environment gets a 575.120 (pretty good), physical demands 9.22 (lots of standing, but that’s about it), stress 23.621 (way low), income about $24K (terrible), hiring outlook very poor.

Conclusion:

I think I pretty much get what a barber does, and I wouldn’t want to do it.  It’s not too demanding, and certainly not stressful (more the opposite: boring).  But the salary is awful.  I’m surprised that the hiring outlook is poor.  Wouldn’t society always need barbers?  Maybe it’s hard to become a good one.  Or maybe once a good barbershop job is taken, it stays taken.  I have been going to my current barbershop for years and have never seen any new staff.  Anyway, it all comes down to having to touch a lot of strangers’ heads.  No thank you.

Next up: #79, Public Relations Executive.

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We had snow yesterday.

This would be the stupidest thing ever deemed worthy of updating the internet about (if you ignore about 2/3 of Facebook) except this is like a once-a-year thing in The NC.  It immediately becomes a trending topic on Twitter.  And people immediately take a bunch of pictures of it.  I did so myself, even though I lived most of my life in Montana and Michigan and have seen snow about 12 million times (number approximate).

Raleigh 12/4/10

The view out my front window

Raleigh 12/4/10

Out back.

It actually accumulated on the grass.  Not on the sidewalks.  In December!  In Raleigh!  Wake County was so baffled they declared an emergency school day on Sunday so they would have something to cancel.

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On this Saturday, enjoy a picture of my cat Artie looking dapper in his bow tie:

Hmmm...

There is a story, as told visually here.  But the written version is:  we bought him this bow tie at Target because we thought it would be funny and it cost I think $3.  We got it home, tried to put it on him, got a single glorious picture of him looking really suave, then he went berserk and we had to take it off.  Occasionally I threaten to put it back on him but have never actually tried.

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Tecmo Super Bowl! It is one of the greatest video games of all time, if not the greatest.  Be excited and/or warned that I am going to be talking some Tecmo Super Bowl this month.

Here is a screenshot I earned just this weekend for the first time ever:

SUPER CHAMPION TAMPA BAY BUCCANEERS

SUPER CHAMPION TAMPA BAY BUCCANEERS

It was an early goal to win the Super Bowl with every team in the game.  I figured this goal to be fantastic, and never something I could or would do, considering how putrid some of the teams are.  Teams like: the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. I have won the Super Bowl many times.  Never with a team this bad.  I now have hope I can accomplish my goal.  New England Patriots!  Indianapolis Colts!  Phoenix Cardinals!  Your time is nigh.  (For the record, I still also need to win the Super Bowl with eight other teams, but I think those are just a matter of time and effort.)

One of my favorite things about TSB is that it has forever preserved the 1991 NFL.  The good teams will always be good.  The bad teams will always be bad.  Today, the Patriots and Colts are perpetual powerhouses, top teams year after year.  But TSB has preserved them as punchless, rainbow-pass-throwing, fast-defender-lacking cupcakes.  FOREVER. There’s just enough variation to keep it interesting: sure, the Patriots are bad, but from year to year they might win 8 games or just 1.  But you can always count on a victory when facing them, or a struggle if playing with them.

The downside of this dependability is that it will ALWAYS be hard to win with bad teams.  I can’t build up the Bucs through savvy personnel decisions in the draft and free agency.  No: Vinny Testaverde will always be the quarterback and he will always throw rainbow passes to eager defenders.  The ONLY alternative is backup Jeff Carlson. Jeff Carlson!  I have never heard of Jeff Carlson!  So anyway, I tried a number of times to win a Super Bowl with the wretched Buccaneers, and finally broke through.

Then I went on the internet (motto: We Ruin Your Video Gaming).  Poking around a few retro gaming sites I found all sorts of narratives about people who had undefeated seasons with the Bucs playing only with the backups and without ever calling a running play.  This is how The Internet Ruins Your Video Gaming.  For every game you’ve played and enjoyed, there is someone on the internet that played it to the nubs and wants to ruin it for you.  You beat the game?  Well, I beat the game blindfolded in one-third the time.  You think you’re good at the Ghost House 2 track?  I’ve beaten your time by 148 seconds. As with any other game, everything that can be done in TSB has been done a thousand times much better than you.  I thought I had a good passing season when I threw 51 TDs with Joe Montana.  Then there are dudes out there who threw nothing but bombs with Warren Moon for a whole season and threw 200.

The moral is: never look at the internet.

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All the fives but the wrong jack

All the fives but the wrong jack - 28 points

Last weekend I drew about the best cribbage hand possible.

As seen in the picture, I had three fives and a jack in my hand, and the remaining five turned up.  Those hip to the cribbage scene will dig that this is 28 points.  They will further dig that the best possible cribbage hand is 29 points, which would be the same as what I’ve got here, only with the jack matching the suit of the turned-up five, giving you an additional point for nobs.  If you aren’t hip to the cribbage scene, you’re totally confused at this point.

But the takeaway is: this is pretty amazing.  It never happens.

Well, almost never.

An engineering professor calculates that there are 12, 994, 800 possible cribbage hands, and a hand worth 28 points comes up 0.0006 percent of the time.  Which is to say, if you played 1 million hands of cribbage, this would happen 6 times, or once every 166,667 hands. Either I’m missing something (entirely possible) or he is, though, because the rest of the internet seems to think that it’s well-established that the odds of a 28-point hand are 1 in 15028.

I’ve played a lot of cribbage.  I would guess I’ve played several hundred, if not a few thousand games.  It’s probably in the low thousands – two or three games is an easy sitting and I’ve done that at least a few hundred times (uh, I guess?). Which means I’d estimate I’ve been dealt say, 10,000 hands or so.  If the 15028 is right, I guess I was due.

Additional note of interest: we are playing with a deck of cards featuring L. Ron Hubbard’s pulp westerns published in Western Aces magazine.  This is a swell deck.  They feature summaries of these stories, and they’re all (a) awesome and (b) pretty much the same.  My favorite description is from The Magic Quirt: “Old Laramie, cook for the cowpunchers at the Lazy G Ranch, happens to be in the right place at the right time to stop bandits from attacking a Spanish-speaking family with Aztec roots. The family offers Laramie a silver-mounted quirt as thanks, telling him the small horsewhip will make him a big man. Though he’d never really thought of himself as anything other than old, Laramie accepts the idea that the mysterious quirt holds special Aztec magic; in fact, he thinks, with the quirt in his hands, he’s now invincible. To prove this claim, Laramie sets out on a series of adventures showing that the quirt has given him extraordinary newfound bravery and skill—or has it?”