Job Satisfaction

When we were growing up, Mother would always tell us that when she was growing up, there were only three career options for girls. “You could be a nurse, a teacher, or a nun! The good thing, according to my parents, was that they’re all recession proof!”

            My sister, aged seven at the time, frowned. “A nun? That’s a career?”

            “Well, the Church doesn’t call it a career as such,” Mother said, as she delicately adjusted the diamond earring on her right earlobe. “It’s something fancier. A vocation!”

            “Really? Already? Where are we going?” Jack piped up.

            “Vocation, Jack. Not vacation!” I told him. 

            “So, where are we going?” Jack repeated.

            Meanwhile, like a dog that’s got its jaw clamped over a beef bone, Michelle was still gnawing over her career options. “Well, I’m not sure I want to be a nurse, a teacher or a nun. What else can I be?”

            “You’d look so good in a nurse’s outfit,” Mother said as she looked at her only daughter. “You have the figure for it!”

            Years later, Michelle would say that if that kind of comment wasn’t a ready made recipe for a case of raging adult bulimia, she didn’t know what was. “What kind of thing is that to say to a nine-year-old? Maybe that’s why I ended up being an accountant. I was never able to aim higher.”

            “If you recall,” I told her, “at one stage, you wanted to be a homeless beggar. I think being an accountant counts as aiming higher.”

            “I only said it to spite Mother,” Michelle said. “And I’d just watched ‘Down and out in Beverly Hills’. I thought Nick Nolte was so hot!”

            Anyway, as it turned out, Mrs Hahn’s children all turned out to be something of a disappointment, career-wise. Telling your mahjong kakis that your children are respectively an unambitious accountant, a deadbeat journalist and an unemployed musician doesn’t quite have the same ring as announcing, as Auntie Soo-ling once did, that Marcus Junior is an astro-physicist with NASA while Joanne is a neurosurgeon at the Mayo Clinic.

            “You’re not deadbeat!” Michelle said the other day on SKYPE in a rare display of sisterly support.

            “Ugh, it sure feels that way. I was just on willrobotstakemyjob.com. Have you heard about it?”

            On my laptop, my sister took a spoonful of yoghurt. “Tell me?”

            “It’s this website where you tell it your job and then it tells you what the probability is that your job will be taken over by a robot. I have an 11% chance of being replaced by Siri!”

            Michelle’s fuzzy image frowned. If you squinted, she could have been nine again. “Eleven percent is really low, isn’t it?”

            “You wouldn’t say the same thing if you had an 11% chance of getting cancer,” I said.

            “I see your point,” Michelle conceded immediately. A thought occurred to her. “Did you see the odds for a nun?”

            “I did. It said ‘no jobs found’!”

            Michelle was triumphant. “I knew it! I can’t wait to tell that woman!”

            “You’d be totally safe if you were a teacher or a nurse! Mother was at least right on that front. Those jobs are recession and technology proof!”

            “Oh, Jack asked me to see what it said about his new job as a bank clerk,” I rememberd.

            “And?”

            “It said ‘You’re doomed’.”

            “Oh dear.”

            “He didn’t seem to care too much,” I told her.

            When I told the girls about willarobottakemyjob.com, Amanda barely managed to look interested. “I don’t need some dumb website to tell me that my job is totally secure,” she said. “There are only a dozen or so lawyers in this town that can do what I do, and I’m smarter, I’m prettier and I dress better than all of them!”

            “You get extra marks for self-confidence,” I told her with deep admiration.

            “It also helps to be rich,” she confided.

Saffy, meanwhile, had immediately whipped out her iPhone and begun typing in ‘human resources manager’. “Point five five percent?” she moaned. “Oh crap! It says my job is totally safe! That’s not the result I’m looking for! I want to be retrenched. I hate my job!”

            I looked over her shoulder. “Oh look, there’s a 9 percent growth in your industry!”

            I had thought to be supportive, but Saffy’s magnificent bosom deflated to its lowest possible volume. “That’s even more depressing! Jack is so lucky! He’s totally doomed!”

            Amanda said that sometimes, it worries her that Saffy is actually allowed to speak in public.