and the dressing on the side

I remember scanning newspaper ads and looking for jobs back in the early 1980s – I was most interested in working as a waiter. What you find out pretty quickly in the waiter otherworld is that every single ad – or posted sign – includes “experience required”. I never ended up being a waiter, crushed dreams and all, because I could never get either myself or the employer beyond the “experience required” roadblock. I’ve been a host, a busboy, and short-order cook but never a waiter. The reason this comes up is because I find the political idea of “experience” to be almost comical; I’ll get to it in a minute. Wouldn’t it be nice to own a restaurant and have the World’s most experienced and successful waiter walk in my door one day? No doubt. The flip side of that equation is that you hired an “experienced” waiter he turns out to be a fool, experience or not. In fact, aren’t you simply eliminating a massive pool of possibly very good workers – maybe even the future ‘greatest’ – by demanding completely pointless qualifications? Based on my dining out history, I’d say that about 30% of waiters are completely useless, 60% manage to not be useless, and about 10% are very good. If you accept my math, and you should, then what we have in our required hiring pool is that 90% of the bad and mediocre ‘experienced’ waiters running around applying for jobs that only they can possibly manage. You won’t often get a shot at the great 10% because they probably write their own tickets. I don’t want everyone to get all hot-and-bothered if you’ve been, or are, a waiter: it’s grueling work, the pay is for shit, and I don’t know if I would have been any good at it. I understand that…I’m making an analogy. I also know some pretty put together people who failed miserably at the job. If I’m the boss and I’m hiring waiters then I’m going to give just about everyone a good look. You’re always best to remember that everyone started somewhere – even the experienced waiters.

Politics. Are we so completely lost that we’ll just sit on the couch and pick-and-choose our representatives based on something called experience? At what? Being a Governor with no foreign-policy background? Being a Senator for some number of years? An actor and Governor? Experience at being President? What exactly is the issue, and why are we suddenly so selective? Somebody said on the talking radio box the other day that they didn’t need a President with experience they needed a President to lead. Lead. Simple concept, isn’t it? Let me carry over some math from the previous word problem: 30% of experience politicians are completely useless, 60% avoided being useless, 10% are pretty damn good. I feel that the further someone moves into the political otherworld the worse they get. I’d certainly love for one of those 10% to walk into my living room and tell me he wants to work for me. Even if they don’t walk through the door, I’m certainly going to give everyone a good, long look and I’m not adding something stupid like “experience required” to my ballot.

It’s a ramble, it’s probably not worth much, but it woke me up last night.

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