The other night I had a dream – a nightmare, really. The kind that caused me to sit bolt upright in bed, sweat pouring off me.
It was horrible, so bad that I was afraid to go back to sleep.
What was my worst nightmare?
I dreamed I had been elected governor.
Argh! Just typing that caused my liver to quiver.
I can think of no job worse than being governor, of Oregon or any other state, for that matter.
First off, in my real job I answer to about a half-dozen people who own and manage the company. That’s fine. I like and respect all of them.
But as governor I would have 4.2 million bosses. That’s enough to make me head for the door right there. There is no way I could ever hope to follow all of their directions. I would compare Oregonians to a really big herd of cats.
The other thing that disqualifies me as a governor is I don’t like meetings. When I was a cub reporter, I covered borough assemblies, school boards, city councils – you name it. The only thing I got out of those meetings is this: you can take a handful of perfectly sane people and put them in a room with other people watching and all bets are off. They might come up with a brilliant solution for a problem, or they might come up with the worst idea ever. But more often than not, they just kick the can down the road and don’t address it at all.
That’s why watching most government bodies is like watching the movie Groundhog Day.
There are other reasons I wouldn’t want to be governor. The salary/aggravation ratio is way out of whack. The governor makes $98,600 a year, which is a lot of money for a normal job. But I calculate the governor is paid less than a penny per aggravation.
For starters, there’s the COVID-19 mess impacting everyone, the unemployment mess impacting hundreds of thousands of people, the foster care system, homeless people everywhere, the crummy roads, forest management problems and a broken budget system. And don’t forget the retirement system. Add to that the legislature – a random collection of people proposing random ideas that they hope will make them look pretty to random special interest groups.
You get the idea. It’s just not worth it. Someone would have to be really hard-up for a job to want to be governor. Forget about it.
There are jobs I would happily take. Secret agent, fighter pilot and cake decorator are near the top of my list. So are race car driver, mechanic and rock star.
But the all-time best job ever would be astronaut. Blowing through the sky at 18,000 mph – how awesome is that? Then once you get to the International Space Station, which is 250 miles straight up and circles the planet every 45 minutes, you live in total weight-lessness – no more diets for this guy. I would never want to lower myself to live on earth again.
And my wife would totally go along with me being an astronaut. Why, just the other day I screwed up again, and she gave me one of those looks. You know the kind I mean.
If she could have put me in a rocket and shot me to moon one-way, she would have.
Carl Sampson is a freelance writer and editor. He lives in Stayton.
