by Dave Barry
Another source of bad career advice is school. Your teachers will tell you that the way to get a good job is to memorize such things as the capital of Bolivia. Do you think that your average successful corporate executive can name the capital of Bolivia? Don’t be silly. I’ll tell you who can name the capital of Bolivia: your teacher, that’s who. Do you want to be a teacher? Do you want to spend your days trying to convince a bunch of snotty kids that they should memorize the capital of Bolivia? Of course not. You want to make large sums of money and have a nice office with various buttons you can push when you want coffee. So what you want to do is memorize as little useless information as you can in school. And as soon as you graduate, you should apply for a job in the government.
The government is loaded with terrific jobs. For example, you might want to be an ex-president. Here’s a lifetime job, with excellent pay and benefits, that virtually any incompetent can do. The only real duty ex-presidents have is to write their memoirs, which nobody ever reads anyway. If you were an ex-president, you could turn in Volume Four of the Encyclopedia Britanica (Ceylon-Congreve) and claim it was your memoirs, and nobody would know the difference.
You could also apply for a job as Supreme Court Justice. The pay is excellent, and you cannot be fired unless you appear on national television naked or something. You don’t even have to know anything about the law. If the Chief Justice asked you what you thought about a particular case, you’d answer: “Oh, I don’t know, I can see both sides. What do you other justices think?” Then you’d vote with the majority. Your only other duty would be to wear a robe.
If you can’t get a good government job, you may have to work for private industry, which is not as good, because many private employers expect you to work. The best job, of course, is corporation president, but even this has its pitfalls. For example, when Lee Iacocca was named president of Chrysler, he probably thought he would be able to spend his days sitting in his office, wearing expensive suits and signing the occasional document. Instead, he is regularly forced to appear in humiliating television commercials, in which he offers to pay people money if they will buy his cars.
I think the best private-industry job is construction worker. You may think this would be a difficult job, involving lifting heavy objects and assembling buildings. But if you look closely at a construction site, you’ll notice the workers walk around a lot, drink coffee, and yell to each other, but, because of various clauses in their contracts, they never actually build anything. I’m not sure who really builds buildings;
I suspect it’s done at night, perhaps by serfs.
Wedding Etiquette
This is an excellent time of year to get married, what with the warm weather and all. As you may recall, it was around this time of year that Prince Charles and Princess Diana got married in a ceremony that lasted, by my calculations, about two weeks. It took Charles nearly a half-hour just to say “I do”:
“I, Charles Arthur Philip George Henry Maurice Billy Bob Norman Howard Elmer the Third, Duke of the Realm, Defender of the Throne, Earl of Pillsbury, Lord of the Manse, Prince of a Fellow, Knight of the Trouser, Top of the Morning, Vice President of Marketing, and much, much more, do.”
If you want to have a nice wedding, a really Special Day, you have to plan very carefully and follow the rules of wedding etiquette. Here’s what you do:
Getting Engaged
You should get engaged to somebody who has a job and will show up at the wedding. If you think your fiance is unreliable, get engaged to several people, because there is no breach of etiquette worse than making your friends and relatives give you wedding presents and then failing to go through with it. If you get engaged to several people and they all show up, take all but one aside, tell them you won’t be needing them, and give them each an inexpensive fondue set (you’ll receive dozens as wedding gifts).
Announcing the Engagement
If you are a member of the working classes and have a name like Heivina Spackle, the newspapers won’t print your engagement announcement, and you’ll have to settle for a three-by-five card on the bulletin board at the supermarket. So if you want to make the social pages, your best bet is to use a name like Allison Weatherington-Huffington DuBois and send in a picture of Julie Andrews.
Choosing a Church
You must do this carefully, because some churches won’t let you get married in them unless you hold certain specific religious beliefs. Check this out in advance by calling the clergyman:
YOU: Hello. Could you tell me if you require people to have any specific religious beliefs?
CLERGYMAN: Why yes, we do.
YOU: How many?
CLERGYMAN: Let’s see ... five, six, seven ... nine in all.
YOU: Fine. Can you send me a set?
The Invitation
Your invitation should consist of a large envelope containing several smaller envelopes in random sizes, a piece of tissue paper, and a card with these words:
Mr. and Mrs. Earl C. Spackle Request the Honour and Favor Of Your Attendance at the Marriage Of Their Daughtour Heivina Mae (who is not pregnant) To Elrood P Budgcood At the Manor Downs Vista Country Club And Racquetball Court Friday at around 4:30
RSVP
No Tank Tops
What the Wedding Party Should Wear
The groom’s party should wear pastel senior-prom-style outfits rented at the shopping mall. The bride’s party should wear expensive dresses so unattractive that they can never be used again, even as tourniquets.
The Order of the Wedding Procession
The first person down the aisle should be an adorable child belonging to the sister of the bride. If the bride’s sister has no adorable child, she should rent one. Next comes the sister of the groom escorted by the maid of honor’s boyfriend, followed by the niece of the maid of honor’s boyfriend escorted by the oldest brother of the mother of the bride, followed by the oldest unmarried bridesmaid escorted by the youngest male member of the groom’s family who has completed at least two years of college or technical school, followed by the great-grandmother of the bride (unless she is dead) escorted by the best man, followed, in order, by anyone else at the back of the church who is wearing nice clothes.
Who Pays for the Wedding
The family of the bride pays for the church, the clergyman, the limousines, the bridal gown, the flowers, the reception room, the band, the photographer, the hors d’oeuvre, the dinner, the cake, the liquor and the honeymoon. The family of the groom eats a lot and gets tanked.
So there you have them, the rules of wedding etiquette. In a future column, I’ll discuss the other two major etiquette areas, which are eating and death.
“Look! I Got You A Gift!”
Well, the holiday gift-giving season is upon us once again, like an outbreak of shingles. Already I have received dozens of colorful mail-order-gift catalogs urging me to buy bizarre objects and give them to people. I recently got a catalog featuring enormous cans of popcorn smeared with caramel, each containing enough carbohydrates to meet the needs of a medium-sized industrial city for a year. If you want to give this gift, you just call the catalog people on their toll-free number and they ship a can to the person of your choice. It never even has to enter your home.
The question, of course, is, Why would you give such a gift? Do you know of anybody in the entire United States who would actually want a huge congealed mass of caramel popcorn? Of course not. This is an example of a holiday gift, which is an object whose primary purpose is to be given, not to actually be used. It expresses the ultimate holiday gift-giving message, which is, “Look! I got you a gift!” Another example is electric razors. Every year at this time, you see television commercials wherein a cartoon version of an electric razor shaves a cartoon face just as well as a cartoon razor blade, and thousands of women go out and buy $39.95 electric razors and give them to men (“Look!
I got you a gift!”). And the men say, “Great! An electric razor!” Then they continue to use their nineteen-
cent blade razors. They stick the electric razors into closets with their caramel-covered popcorn.
Men do the same thing to women. Every year I go to the department-store cosmetics counter, which emits a powerful aroma, reminiscent of a house of ill repute, and buy my wife one of the thirty thousand gift packages containing little designer tubes and jars with names like “Essence of Fragrance Moisturizing Body Cream,” “Body of Essence Cream Moisturizing Fragrance,” “Moist Fragrant Body Essential Creamer,” etc. I don’t know what these terms mean, and I don’t care. All I know is I can say, “Look! I got you a gift!” I doubt my wife uses these things, because she lets my two-year-old son play with them, which means he routinely smells like a house of ill repute, but that’s better than some of the things he smells like, if you get my drift.
But these are not the ultimate Holiday Gifts, because technically you could actually use them. I mean, you could use caramel-covered popcorn as attic insulation, and you could use an electric razor to crush insects. But many of the gifts that spring up in the holiday season reach a new level, the level of Pure Holiday Gift, which means you can’t use them for anything except possibly ballast. For example:
Cute ceramic knick-knack figurines depicting animals, especially cats—The way I see it, everybody who wants a cute ceramic cat has already bought one. It is cruel to inflict such objects on other people.
I once was present when a holiday guest gave the hostess a ceramic cat, and she stood there, handling it as you would a live grenade, and trying desperately to think of an excuse not to put it on her mantel, which is the only thing you can do with a knickknack. Eventually, of course, she had to put it on the mantel, and the entire room suddenly acquired an air of cuteness that no amount of expert interior decoration can disguise.
Guest soap formed into little balls or fruit—Nobody uses this soap. The people who live in the house don’t use it, because it’s for guests. The guests are afraid to use it, because they don’t want to mess it up. They end up not washing their hands, which leads to the spread of infections. The government should put a stop to this soon, because it is only a matter of time before somebody starts selling guest soap shaped like cats.
Fruitcakes manufactured in April and packaged in cans and allowed to sit in a warehouse until they reach the density of a bowling ball—These present all the problems of caramel-covered popcorn, with the added problem that they can cause hernias.
Coffee-table books—These are gigantic books with lots of pictures and titles like Scissors Through the Ages that you couldn’t read even if you wanted to because the pages are all welded together from when your guests spilled banana daiquiris on them.
What can you do about this? You can buy gifts that people actually use. Think how happy you’d be if YOU got, say, a case of paper towels. Wouldn’t that be terrific? That’s what I’m going to get my wife this year. I’ll bet she’ll be speechless.
About Lawn Order
I got to thinking about ecology the other day when I ran over a turtle with my lawnmower. Now before you reptile lovers start sending me irate letters full of misspelled words, let me assure you that I was not aiming for the turtle. I have enough trouble keeping my lawnmower in operation, and the last thing I would do is risk damaging it with a turtle. Let me also assure you that the turtle was unharmed, except for
a few nicks on its shell that might make it less attractive to turtles of the opposite sex, whichever sex that happens to be. I don’t know how you determine the sex of a turtle, and I don’t want to know. I have come to think of this particular turtle as male, because my two-year-old son, who receives signals directly from outer space! recently announced that its name is Bob.
Bob has been hanging around our lawn for several months now, despite our efforts to encourage him to go into the woods with the other turtles.
“These are the best years of your life, Bob,” we say. “Don’t waste them on our lawn.” But Bob turns a deaf ear to our suggestions, assuming turtles have ears. You would think the lawnmower incident would have made him have second thoughts about our lawn, but lately he seems more attached to it than ever. This makes me think that maybe the theory of evolution is wrong after all. I figure that if turtles really had been evolving for all these years, they would have come up with something more intelligent than Bob.
Anyway, all this got me to thinking about ecology. Most wild animals are, like Bob, fairly stupid. Plants are even worse. It is up to us human beings to use our superior brains to protect them, or one day we will wake up to find there is no more nature, and we will no longer have any place to hold 1960s-style outdoor weddings.
So I am all for preserving wildlife, but I also think we have to use some judgment about it. We can’t go around preserving all wildlife, because some of it is disgusting. Take insects, for example. The other night, while we were having dinner, some wildlife entered our house in the form of a flying insect that looked like a mosquito, but was large enough to play in the National Football League. It was the kind of insect that wouldn’t even have to sting you, because it could crush you to death merely by landing on you.
Now I imagine that the president of the Sierra Club, sitting in the safety of his insect-free office, would say that we should have let this insect drone around the dining room until it broke a window and flew outside, where it would be eaten by another species, which would in turn be eaten by another species, and so on and so on, leading up the Great Chain of Life, until finally the second-to-last link in the chain is eaten by a nuclear physicist. But that is mere theory. The truth is that nothing around my house would have dared to eat this insect; in fact, it probably would have eaten Bob, shell and all. I bet that if the president of the Sierra Club had been in my house, he would have done exactly what I did, which was to leap up from the table and batter the insect repeatedly with a rolled-up newspaper.
So I propose that we direct our ecology efforts toward preserving those forms of wildlife that are safe and nondisgusting, namely:
Cute, furry animals, such as seals and otters, that you see in Walt Disney nature movies, but never around your house. Large animals, such as elephants and boa constrictors, that live on other continents. Plants that produce flowers or eat insects. Turtles.
I have already embarked on a personal ecology effort to preserve Bob. I have resolved that, despite the great personal sacrifice involved, I will no longer mow my lawn.
The Law Vs. Justice
Most of us learn how the United States legal system works by watching television. We learn that if we obey the law, we will wind up chatting and laughing with attractive members of the opposite sex when the program ends, whereas if we break the law, we will fall from a great height onto rotating helicopter blades.
Some television shows explain the legal system in greater detail: they show actual dramatizations of court trials. The best such show was
“Perry Mason,” which starred Raymond Burr as a handsome defense attorney who eventually gained so much weight he had to sit in a wheelchair.
“Perry Mason” was set in a large city populated almost entirely by morons. For example, the prosecutor, Hamilton Burger, was so stupid that the people he prosecuted were always innocent. I mean always. I imagine that whenever Hamilton arrested a suspect, the suspect heaved a sigh of relief and hugged his family, knowing he would Soon be off the hook.
Now you’d think that after a while Hamilton would have realized he couldn’t prosecute his way out of a paper bag, and would have gone into some more suitable line of work, such as sorting laundry. But he kept at it, week after week and year after year, prosecuting innocent people. Nevertheless, everything worked out, because in this particular city the criminals turned out to be even stupider than Hamilton: they always came to the trials, and, after sitting quietly for about twenty minutes, lurched to their feet and confessed. The result was that Perry Mason got
a reputation as a brilliant defense attorney, but the truth is that anyone with the intelligence of a can of cream
ed corn would have looked brilliant in this courtroom.
The major problem with “Perry Mason” is that it is unrealistic: Perry Mason and Hamilton Burger usually speak in understandable English words, and by the time the trial is over everybody has a pretty good grasp of the facts of the case. In real life, of course, lawyers speak mostly in Latin, and by the time they’re done nobody has the vaguest notion what the facts are. To understand why this is, you have to understand the history of the U.S. legal system.
In the frontier days, our legal system was very simple: if you broke
a law, armed men would chase you and beat you up or throw you in jail or hang you; in extreme cases, they would hang you, then beat you up in jail. So everybody obeyed the law, which was easy to do, because basically there were only two laws:
No assaulting people. No stealing.
This primitive legal system was so simple that even the public understood it. The trials were simple, too:
SHERIFF: Your honor, the defendant confessed that he shot his wife dead.
JUDGE: Did he admit it freely, or did you have your horse stand on him first, like last time?
SHERIFF: No, sir. He admitted it freely.
JUDGE: Fair enough. String him up.
The trouble with this system was that it had no room for lawyers. If a lawyer had appeared in a frontier courtroom and started tossing around terms such as “habeas corpus,” he would have been shot.
