It's a living.(THE STRAGGLER)(jobs)

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THE other day I met a very bright and beautiful young woman who had been introduced to me as "a dating columnist." As an old married guy, I am long past the dating stage of life, and our encounter was on far less intimate terms, but I was curious to know what a dating columnist does. "Well," she explained helpfully, "I go on dates. Then I write about them."

As Carlyle said: Blessed is he who has found his work. And what a variety of work there is in this postindustrial society! Aglance through the postings on craigslist, a popular classifieds website, turns up dozens of job titles whose manner of contributing to the Gross National Product one can only guess at: Infotainment engineer; Barista; Supply Chain Specialist; Dependency Resource Coordinator; Flash Developer; UI Designer; Data Miner; Phlebotomist; Esthetician ... What do these people do for their weekly paycheck? Is a Barista related in any way to the portly gents in horsehair wigs who plead for their clients in English courtrooms? Does a Supply Chain Specialist specialize in supplying chains, or in chaining supplies? Do Data Miners have lamps on their hats? Esthetician I think I get: Since a Mortician deals with dead people (Latin mors, mortis--death), an Esthetician's clients are presumably beautiful people (Greek aisthetes--one who perceives, with the common extension to sensual appreciation), or people who wish to be made beautiful --something to do with cosmetics or personal training, perhaps.

For a really luxuriant proliferation of job titles, Ed Biz is the place to go. My daughter's modest suburban high school held an orientation session for parents of freshmen a few weeks ago. There we all were in the school auditorium, facing a phalanx of school employees up on the stage ... none of whom was a teacher. Administrators, Directors, Advisors, Psychologists, a Dean, five Guidance Counselors (under, of course, a Director of Guidance), Administrative Assistants ... all this for eleven hundred students. I cornered the Director of Mathematics, a very cordial fellow, to ask if he himself did any, you know, teaching. No, he regretted to say, he didn't. No time!

At colleges this is all raised to the fourth power. I wrote some commentary on the recent news item about residence-hall indoctrination sessions in political correctness at the University of Delaware. To get some background, I waded into their website. There were the university employees, smiling out at me from the thumbnail pictures in their little biographies on the site: the Director for Residence Life, with--of course!--her Associate Director and three Assistant Directors; the Assistant Vice President for Affirmative Action and Multicultural Programs; the Vice Provost for Academic Affairs and International Programs; the Assistant Vice President for Labor Relations and Human Resources; and so on, and on, down through the administrative food chain to lowly Financial Aid Advisors and Assistant Librarians. I have seen it written somewhere that a typical big American university has more administrators running it than had British India. This may well be true.

And why ...