by Brian Jeffiers

Created on: April 29, 2008

From time to time, I will run across someone doing a job that makes me realize how glad I am that I went to college. I work in agriculture, so I've been known to get a good bit of animal poo on my clothing and skin, but I grew up doing that on purpose, so it doesn't count.

By contrast, there are some very clean jobs I wouldn't want. I've watched the Canadian television program "How It's Made" with my nine-year-old many times, and I've seen an awful lot of Canucks spending hours and hours doing the most repetitive stuff. I saw one threading the ring and lanyard onto a referee's whistle. Apparently, he does this all day. "That," I'll say to my daughter, "is why you want to go to college."

But even that job, in its tedium, has its good points. That worker probably builds a nice little mountain of zebra tooters every day and says to himself, "I'm getting a lot done today!" There is satisfaction in that. If you don't believe me, try stripping tobacco. It involves standing at a long table and ripping the leaves off a stalk of cured tobacco, one at a time. The first few stalks of a pile are agonizing. Then, your discard pile of bare stalks starts to grow. Soon you have a nice mound of leaves of each grade, and finally you start to notice a decrease in your un-stripped pile. As your work satisfaction builds toward a crescendo, somebody comes and takes your leaves to the baling box and your stalks outside, then wags you a fresh armload of un-stripped. The cold air rushes in at your feet as your stalks are carried out. The dust makes you sneeze a big, wet, sloppy tobacco sneeze with no tissues in sight, and you instinctively cover it with a hand that is sticky with the thick, black gum of the tobacco stalks. Glamorous work, tobacco. Anybody wonder why I don't smoke or chew?

But you only strip tobacco a few weeks out of the year, and you can watch the barn rails empty as you work your way through the crop. Imagine a job with no end in sight, no cycle away from the same chore. A job like telemarketing.

I have been there, too, in a way. During college I answered a solicitation for students to help with, well, solicitation. Specifically, we were to call alumni and hit them up for donations toward our scholarship fund. At the time, I thought it sounded like fun. I'd be sequestered in a room for hours with, presumably, a lot of girls. We'd all be chatting away on the phone and casting flirtatious glances at each other, and can't you tell a lot about somebody by the way they talk

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