Monday, June 20, 2011.
A Day Off. Of The Easiest Work.
I agree with those who say I have the best job imaginable, but I know they're thinking only of the choicest part of the work: the eating out. The hard part, as someone once said, is the paperwork. One must write. And judging by the sparse reply to my call for blog writers, this is something that most people would shrink back from.
Fortunately, I find writing as much fun as I do dining. As long as I don't think about how much of it I have to do before I start. The crisis that causes is familiar to every high school student. When you have a lot of homework to do, unless you're in the groove the temptation is strong to start with the easiest stuff first, then to take a break, then to do even easier, utterly non-essential work. This makes you feel like you're getting something done, even as you don't. Then you get tired, and the important parts of the day's assignments remain not only undone but become harder because of the increased pressure as time ticks away.
If as a child of thirteen I had known that my life would be one of eternal homework, I would have been very depressed. But I wouldn't have imagined then that I was headed for a career like this, either. I was thinking about being a bus driver in those days.
Well, today was one of those days. I got hung up looking for information about a few restaurants whose reviews I was updating. You can really waste some time doing this. I'm astonished by:
1) How many restaurants don't have websites
b) Of the restaurants with websites, how many don't post up-to-date menus. And how many don't post their menus at all
iii) How hard it is to find hours, credit card information, and even phone numbers and addresses on most restaurant websites
IV) How many websites purporting to serve information about New Orleans restaurants have no more data than the phone book
I'm sure many readers are noting right now that I am writing inessential filler instead lieu of more useful copy. To them I offer an apology for my imperfections and an excuse. After all the eating over the past week, I am taking a day off, that I may hold on to my recent weight decrease and continue the trend. I ate nothing worth talking about all day. Instead, I churned out a lot of boilerplate copy for the website. There is no limit to the amount of that I can do, as I proved by doing it for twelve hours today, racking up just over five thousand words.
Is anyone still jealous of my job?
The diary entry for June 21 ran in yesterday's edition, to balance out the length of this department. You can read it here.
