Free Now in Paperback! by Jim Mullen Page B

on.”
    Still I wonder, what could these fun fast-food jobs possibly be? Cleaning the restrooms? It’s not that much fun. If it was fun, kids would do it at home. If it was fun, the customers would pick up after themselves. Perhaps that’s why so many places have stopped cleaning their restrooms—it’s just not fun, it’s like, a job.
    That would also explain why there are no paper towels in the paper towel dispenser, why the place smells of antiseptic spray instead of soap and elbow grease, and why there is some kind of nasty mold growing under the sink. Cleaning: it’s just not fun.
    Microwaving the food sounds like fun. But after the first four or five hours, I’ll bet teenagers figure out it’s not as much fun as playing “Grand Theft Auto” while locked in their bedrooms. Cooking food all day long is not as much fun as playing video games all day long and then ordering in pizza when you get hungry. If only they would pay us to play video games. That would be a fun job!
    There’s not really much of anything in a fast-food restaurant that would qualify as a fun job once you’ve done it a few hundred thousand times. Emptying huge bins of trash all day long, mopping floors, policing the parking lot—not fun, not fun, not fun.
    A fun job would be, say, testing suntan lotion. Fifty thousand a year to start, no experience necessary. That’s the kind of place that should have a sign outside that says, “FUN JOBS! Apply Inside.”
    Being a hotel-fortune heiress is probably a fun job. No wasting time getting a college degree; no bothering with inconvenient job interviews. Just buy a closet full of ten-thousand-dollar dresses and start going to nightclubs. The great part is you pick your own hours and you’re your own boss. Now that’s fun. The bad news? No paid vacations.
    Movie stars look like they have lots of fun on the job. The sign out in front of most Hollywood studios should say, “FUN JOBS! Apply Inside.” No one asks actors to clean the studio parking lot, someone’s always fussing with their hair and makeup, they get driven to work in a limousine and they get an RV for a dressing room. Best of all, the minimum wage for movie stars is a few million dollars a year. And there’s a good opportunity for advancement.
    Here’s the perfect first fun job for a young high school student: Cell Phone Tester. The kids would work on commission. The phone companies would give them a cut of their parent’s bill, say fifteen percent. So on a hundred-dollar phone bill, your high-schooler would only make fifteen dollars, but if they can drive your bill up to five or six hundred dollars, they could make as much or more than any part-time, not-so-fun job would pay them.
    Some of them might even be able to test two phones at a time. They wouldn’t have to learn how to make change the way they would at that fun fast-food restaurant job, and they wouldn’t have to wear a uniform or a hairnet or a name tag. It’d be like hardly working at all. What a fun job!

A Learner’s Permit to Kill
    R emember when James Bond out-golfed Goldfinger by one stroke? Bond never practiced, but he played golf like a pro. I play golf three or four times a week and I get worse, not better.
    Bond walks through Q’s laboratory, picks up the latest gadget and knows how it works instantly—without ever having read the manual. I can’t even do something new on my cell phone— with the instructions in front of me—for a week.
    It takes me fifteen minutes in a rental car to figure out how to turn on the lights and the radio, and to learn how to adjust the seats. James Bond jumps into the world’s newest and most sophisticated fighter jet and, never having seen it before, he flies it like he’s a Blue Angel.
    I go to a casino and I lose every single hand, every roll of the dice. Bond? It’s like the place is his personal cash machine. He knows all the dealers and all the bartenders. He’s just come to withdraw a few hundred thousand