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December 2, 2008

Selling my soul

Dude. I've been looking for a second part-time job to supplement my piddly income since, like, ever. I'm on Craigslist every freaking day praying to find something like this:

Hip, truthy magazine seeks peppy young writer/editor semi-fresh from college, but with a year of journalism odd jobs under her belt. We need you 20 hours a week, and heck yes we'll work around your other job. Along with an outrageous hourly wage for the work required and a sublimely generous benefits package, we'll feed you and send you home with leftovers. We also have an office dog who likes to curl up in your lap and be cute whilst you work. Oh, and sometimes we like talking in Cockney accents. That's all. Pip pip!

Instead, I inevitably find listing after listing that says something to the effect of this:

Boring office in lame suburb seeks peon to do menial office work while we stare our beady eyes down your neck. The work required is tedious, but we want you to have been doing similar tedious work for at least a decade before we will even consider you. We only want you 20 hours a week (and never a minute more!), but we will schedule it in such a way that it is impossible for you to have another job. We will pay you a pittance. Benefits? You wish! We will hate you and you will never have anything more enjoyable than a "semi-OK, I guess" day here, so don't get your hopes up. Oh, and our toilet overflows a lot. You're going to have to clean it up.

Or this:

We need a sales-driven, computer-savvy registered nurse who has a car.

The job market here hasn't been stellar since I started paying attention to it--too many do-gooding recent graduates just like me are flocking here--and this Recession doohickey isn't doing a heckuva lot to help anything. So it got me to thinking: Recession or no, people are hella anxious to procreate, right? And the people who are unable to will go to quite the lengths to get a bouncing bundle of joy on their knee.

Basically what I'm trying to say is people would pay top dollar for my reproductive facilities, as evidenced by this article in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine. And according to what I've been seeing on Craigslist, they'll pay double for my goods since I'm Jewish. We're talking $20,000 here for the teensy trade-off of physical discomfort, social stigma and chance that in the future someone with my genes will be walking around somewhere in the great wide world.

Just throwing it out there.

4 comments:

  1. Don't do it. We've been over this before.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Funny post. Please don't compromise your reproductive capacity.

    An interested party

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  3. Not gonna lie, for the poor, recent graduate, the Times does make a pretty persuasive case for surrogacy. But at this point in life, birthing a child just does not sound appealing...Mind you I'm one of those "having kids freaks me out" people.

    ReplyDelete