When I worked for the phone company, one of my jobs was testing other vendors’ equipment. The purpose was to help our customers decide what equipment was most compatible with our ISDN service.
Unfortunately, vendors were upgrading their ISDN products so rapidly that the equipment I was testing was literally obsolete before the tests results were written up – every time. My job, for all practical purposes, was testing equipment that no one could purchase no matter how hard they tried. It was the most useless job in the universe.
Or so I thought.
Yesterday I was thinking about President Bush’s Secret Service detail. Their job is to protect the president against would-be assassins. That sounds like an important job until you ask yourself this question: “What kind of assassin would prefer Dick Cheney as president?”
I’m not making an anti-Bush or even an anti-Cheney statement here. It’s simply an observation that no one on the planet – Democrat or Republican or Green Party – thinks policies would improve if Cheney had the top spot.
Even Al Qaeda has no reason to go after a president with a two-thirds disapproval rating. If they ever got past Whitehouse security it would be to slip a baby aspirin into the President’s orange juice and leave some yoga brochures.
I know you’ll argue that the people who try to kill presidents are usually insane. For example, John Hinkley tried to kill Reagan to impress Jodie Foster. But even Hinkley would have realized that making Dick Cheney the leader of the free world doesn’t get you laid. Hinkley wasn’t THAT crazy.
I imagine myself in the job of protecting President Bush. Would I even bother wearing that itchy bullet-proof vest? And how much effort would I put into scanning the crowds for potential threats versus daydreaming about using my service weapon to shoot the Lincoln Memorial in the head just because it would be funny?
This made me wonder what other jobs might be competitive for the title of Most Useless in the Universe.
– Canada’s Minister of Defence?
– Libertarian Party’s candidate for president
– Sanjaya Malakar’s vocal coach?
Any ideas?