It's the Pitts by Lee Pitts 

 

Those who study such things say in the future people who work for a living can expect to change their career once every seven years. Notice I didn’t say change your job – I said change your career. It’s like a friend of mine who was a vice president of resource imaging; in other words, he ran a copy machine. He thought he had a job for life but was put out of work by home printers, and today he is transitioning into the booming field of pet therapy and canine hypnosis.

Evidently, if you want a regular paycheck in the future you are going to have to be trained to do more than one thing so you have a career to fall back on. Just look at all those Congresspeople who voted for Obamacare, who you fired in the last election. They were only trained to do one thing – to live off graft and corruption – and now they have to find honest work.

Some will continue to live off the gov-ernment the same as before, but I think most will put their training to work and become lobbyists, gigolos and prostitutes.

Another example is my friend George, who owns a septic pumping company in our town. The bureaucrats are making us put in a sewer and there will no longer be any need for George or his septic pump trucks, and poor George is not trained to do anything else.

It’s not like a 67-year-old man with limited skills and an off-putting smell can go overnight from pumping septic tanks to being a computer programmer, Web designer or art critic.

If the economists are right, you should get some education or training in an entirely different field than the one you are currently in. For example, if you are a rancher who gets hit with a seven-year drought or a foot-and-mouth epidemic, you could take advantage of the situation by becoming a rawhide braider or an artist who paints cow skulls.

If the eco-freaks have their way and folks stop eating meat, you could become a vegetarian short order cook. If you’re starving as a bad horse trainer, why not become a stock contractor and provide wild broncs for rodeos?

A veterinarian whose patients keep dying might want to have a side business as an on-the-farm butcher, tallow truck driver or owner of a backhoe service to get paid for burying the mistakes. A slow ambulance driver might want to buy a funeral home.

Sheepherders might want to bone up on cotton farming or petroleum textile engineering in case the bottom drops out of the wool market. A horse-shoer could become a pornographic metal artist by welding all the old horseshoes rattling around in the back of the truck into grotesque shapes. An aquatic farmer with no net income (pun intended) should consider the growing field of hemp farming.

Right now a lot of doctors with big college loans are leaving the field as a result of Obamacare. If they’re smart they’ll look into the more lucrative fields of grave-digging and homeopathic medicine, which we’re likely to see a lot more of.

You never know what will put you out of work. Stock clerks and grocery cashiers are living on borrowed time as robots and self-service scanners are making them an endangered species. UPS and FedEx drivers are really busy now, but in the future they might want to look into becoming drone pilots for Amazon.

As for myself, thanks to the internet, my diminishing skills and eyesight, there’s not a more dead-end career than being a humorist when there’s nothing socially acceptable to laugh at any more. I’m considering becoming either a disco DJ, a street mime in San Francisco, a librarian, a World Book Encyclopedia door-to-door salesman or a snowplow driver in Florida (I hate  cold weather).

There’s also a “help wanted” ad on Craigslist that pays $100,000 a year for a social network conceptualizer. All I need to know now is, what the heck is that?

If I can round up some Silicon Valley investors I’m also seriously considering franchising an idea I’ve kicked around for years: Five-minute stomach-pumping stations for vegetarians, called Pale-n-Queasy R Us.

The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of Farm World. Readers may log on to www.LeePittsbooks.com to order any of Lee Pitts’ books. Those with questions or comments for Lee may write to him in care of this publication.