From Jolly Good Fellow to Offical Wizard to Professional Sleeper – What’s Your Job?

Blogging, business, happiness, humor, lessons learned, Teaching and Education 3 Minutes

Thanks to Val Boyko for planting the seed for this blog post. Val’s wonderful website, Find Your Middle Ground, is where she explores, reflects, asks deep questions, shares insights, and connects with other bloggers. Her post today, Bring Peace to The World, included a poem that was written by Chade-Meng Tan formerly Google’s Jolly Good Fellow and founder of the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute.

While the poem was quite thoughtful, what struck me was that Google had someone with the title of Jolly Good Fellow.

Chade-Meng Tan was Google employee number 107, joining Google in 2000 working for eight years in Engineering, on projects such as mobile search and leading search quality. Tan earned his Jolly Good Fellow title after starting “mindfulness training” courses at the company — a groundbreaking mindfulness-based emotional intelligence course called Search Inside Yourself, which was featured on the front page of the Sunday Business section of The New York Times in April 2014. Search Inside Yourself is also the title of Meng’s The New York Times bestseller, which has been endorsed by world leaders such as President Carter of the United States; business leaders such as Eric Schmidt of Google and John Mackey of Whole Foods Markets; and spiritual leaders such as the Dalai Lama.

After reading about such a job title, my initial thought was to write a post about the Jolly Good Fellow, but then a few hours later I read that the city of Christchurch in New Zealand has announced that it will stop paying its official wizard $16,000 ($10,400 USD) a year in December.

Ian Brackenbury Channell (aka the Wizard) has been serving as the city’s appointed necromancer since the olden days of 1998. Over the past few decades he has made a total of $368,000 (roughly $258,825 USD) “to provide acts of wizardry and other wizard-like-services — as part of promotional work for the city of Christchurch.”

Channell told CNN that he views himself less as Gandalf and more as a goofball or a showman who brings joy to the city. “Every day the world gets more serious, so fun is the most powerful thing in the world right now,” he said.

What are the odds of that, learning about two unique jobs in one day?

So it seemed like that this blog was meant to be about unique jobs, and with a little bit of research, I came up with a few more:

  • Full-time Netflix Viewer: watches all of the Netflix content and tags it with the appropriate genre before it is released to the public.
  • Dog Food Taster: taste new dog food products, including bones, tinned meat, and biscuits. They do this to test for flavor and texture in comparison to rival dog food brands and human food.
  • Odor Tester: smells people’s breath, feet, and sometimes even armpits to assess the effect of odor-giving products
  • Professional Sleeper: A hotel in Finland hired a member of staff as a ‘professional sleeper’ to test the comfort of their beds. The individual sleeps in a different one of the hotel beds each night and writes a review about her satisfaction with each one.
  • Scuba Diving Pizza Delivery Man: There’s an underwater hotel in Florida that has a scuba diving pizza delivery man who supplies them with pizza by carrying them through the sea in a watertight case.
  • Professional Cuddler: helping people who are struggling with loneliness, depression, past trauma, medical problems, or who are simply in need of an extra cuddle …. from a stranger.
  • Water Slide Tester: check to see if the water slides in resorts, theme parks and hotels are both fun and safe.
  • Accounting Professor: drones on endlessly about debits and credits and straight-line depreciation and FIFO vs LIFO, ultimately putting everyone to sleep

Maybe I could pair up with the Professional Sleeper, helping them to fall asleep more quickly…

Sources:

*image from PADI

Published by Jim Borden

A 60-something guy trying to figure out the world, and his place in it. Happily married for 40-plus years, three wonderful sons. Accounting teacher, fitness enthusiast, blogger, reader.

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77 thoughts on “From Jolly Good Fellow to Offical Wizard to Professional Sleeper – What’s Your Job?”

  2. I would say the least desirable sounding job would be odor tester. I also can’t imagine being the person who is getting tested. “Come on over here and let me smell your armpits.”😜

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    1. good to know you consider an accounting teacher an essential job; I’m not sure it is. I think many people could teach it to themselves – just don’t tell my boss that!

      and that’s funny, and a little sad, that people didn;t know the difference between an architect and an archaeologist…

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  4. Professional Cuddler probably has a minimum weight limit. Perhaps he/she can moonlight as a dog food taster, to maintain the physical requirements of the job. But the dog food breath could generate some customer complaints.

    I was once paid to watch TV when I worked as a broadcaster for the Armed Forces Radio & Television service. I’d watch the shows we were about to air, to ensure none of the content was insulting to our host country (Turkey). Sometimes I really miss that job.

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      4. reminds me of a Rodney Dangerfield joke:

        A travel agent told me I could spend six nights in Puerto Rico. No days, just nights. I said to him, ‘What will I do with myself days?’ He said, ‘Do whatever you want, just keep out of Puerto Rico.’”

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      9. No, I never saw any pencil factories there. That’s where Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys stole some cannons from the British. I’ll bet it was fun. They must have had a blast.

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  8. Entertained by yet another interesting subject, and yes, sign me up for water slide tester, but I was struck by something else you wrote and now I can’t get it out of my head. You made reference to straight-line depreciation, which must be so named as to distinguish it from other types of depreciation. That set my mind to reeling with all the possible names to its counterpart; “squiggly depreciation”, “circular depreciation”, “wandering depreciation”. Alas, I was just not thinking far enough outside the box. A little research and I found, “Double Declining Balance Depreciation”, “Units of Production Depreciation”, and my new favorite, “Sum-of-the-Years-Digits Depreciation”. Man, you accountants come up with some great names for things.

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    1. water-slide tester would be a fun summer job.

      and us accountants do have a grand-old time; we have multiple ways of doing things, which is a great way to confuse people…

      and sum-of-the-years-digits is my personal favorite…

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  19. I read about the New Zealand wizard, and I was scratching my head that he was actually compensated for his services. Talk about enjoying the gravy train! As for a more professional sideline occupation, I will pass on the Accounting position. Someone already has it nailed down and totally understands how accrued income and expenses really work. Perhaps I can become a ghost writer and experience a multitude of readers on Halloween.

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