In My

Next Life

by D. J. Herda

I was thinking the other day about what a strange business writing is.  I mean, you can’t earn a living from it unless you get published, and it’s getting more and more difficult to get your words into print. 

Then I thought about what it is I’ll do for a living if I have my choice of jobs in my next life.  That’s assuming, of course, I don’t come back as a lawyer or a sloth.  You know what I came up with?  A weather man.

I mean it.  If you stop to think about it for a minute, a weather man (or, for weather forecasters of the feminine persuasion, a chippy) hardly does any work at all.  He’s always in demand, and he  doesn’t have to know much.  He doesn’t even have to memorize the state capitals.  I know.  I heard one of them refer the other day to the capital of New York State as New Jersey.  Or was that Charlie Rangel?

Anyway, a weather man, if he works for a television station, goes on the air for about sixty seconds an hour.  That comes out to around eight minutes of work a day.  For that, he pulls in (in a major market, now—we’re not talking about Harlem here) around a hundred grand a year.  Doing the math, that boils down to something around $3,000 an hour.  Can you believe it?  Even the President of the United States doesn’t make that much money.  Unless, of course, you count the vacations.  Then he’s way ahead of the game.

And what does a weather man have to do for all that dough?  Well, once an hour he has to go to Google Maps and see where the storms are, and then go to Google Weather and see what the prediction is for anywhere in the world, and then go to Google Live to see what people are wearing in, say, Fairbanks, Alaska, or Griffin, Georgia.  I mean, if they’re running around in galoshes and covering their heads with a newspaper, you’ve got a pretty good idea it’s raining.  Either that or you’ve stumbled onto Google Hollywood, where their filming Caddyshack 27.

Of course, you do have to put in a few extra hours now and again, like when it’s hurricane season and Tropical Storm Nancy is bearing down on the Gulf Coast.  But even then, you collect overtime, and the work is even simpler.  All you have to do is look worried, point to the Google Interactive Blue Screen behind you, and warn your viewers that this storm poses a serious threat to a.) Biloxi; b.) Galveston; or c.) Panama City, depending upon which landfall prediction you mucked up the last time a hurricane came through.  You don’t even have to be right, because once the hurricane blows harmlessly out into the Atlantic, everyone will be so relieved, they’ll forget all about your bungling the call again.

See what I mean?

And if you’re a weather man on a radio station, you’ve got it easier still.  You don’t even have to show up for work.  You can ‘phone in your forecasts or tape them and have the station manager play them twice an hour.  “Hot and humid this afternoon, cooling down into the lower seventies tonight, and more of the same again tomorrow.”  I mean, any moron who owns a home with a window in it can figure that out.  Which pretty much leaves you out of the labor pool if you happen to be sitting on Death Row.

So the next time God attempts to play a dirty trick on me by making me a writer, I’m gonna tell Him, “Uh-uh.  Not this time.  Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice…”  After all, I’ll say, the world needs weather men, too, you know—not only writers. 

And if God insists that I come back as a writer (or, God forbid, something even worse, like a banker or a real estate agent), I’ll tell him, “Sure.  Okay.  That’s fine with me.  If that’s what You want, that’s what You’ll get…just as soon as all hell freezes over.”

And I’ll be able to predict exactly when that might happen.  After all, I’ll be a weather man by then.

And I…am D. J. Herda.

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D. J. Herda is President of the American Society of Authors and Writers (http://amsaw.org), an organization made up of authors, writers, editors, publishers, agents, directors, producers, and other media professionals who rely upon the printed word in the creation of quality literature and entertainment.  He is a member of the Author's Guild, a former member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and a former member of the National Press Club.  He has published more than 80 books and several hundred thousand articles, short stories, columns, interviews, plays, and scripts.
 

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