To enhance your return to work, Dara Fox suggests what might be the worst jobs in the world
At this time of year you may well be feeling a bit melancholy as you return from your holidays. The sheer relaxation of fighting your way through the airport, paying for overpriced meals and keeping endless company with your squabbling offspring must now give way to the real world of work. But whatever you have to do to pay the bills, it could be worse. Honest.
Your job is boring? Then why not try an exciting career change, by working with the PRA Coatings Technology Centre in Hampton, Middlesex. Here a wide variety of experiments on paints and varnishes are done. One of these tests determines "the surface drying characteristics of a paint or varnish film which dries by reaction with air or by a chemical reaction of its components".
When translated into layman's terms, the actual nature of this employment becomes clear.
Maybe you think you lack status in your job? But how bad can it really be when compared to the maligned profession of weatherperson, for instance. Apart from the inherent embarrassment involved in being wrong, members of this group of adults desperately need to be taken seriously.
"I'm a meteorologist," they cry plaintively. "I do sums. I'm not just a pretty face."
Maybe your job feels pointless? Whatever it is, get down on bended knee in thanks that you're not an opposition politician, being paid to sit around waiting for a chance to shout "no".
What kind of way is that to live your life? What kind of message does it send our kids?
Maybe you're not particularly proud of what you do. But how could you live with yourself if you were, say, a tribunal lawyer or a stock-market speculator?
As we all know, the wads of cash that regularly come their way mean those people have consciences that gnaw at them, stop them sleeping at night.
Guilt is also the default emotion of clampers, of course, some of whom I've had the great good fortune to meet in my travels. I know for a fact that each and every vehicle they're forced to clamp causes them to sink to the depths of despair, augmented by the bizarre public misconception that they're sadistic lackeys of a malevolent system.
Maybe your job is too demanding? Would you swap it to be Charlie McCreevy's voice coach? Or public relations officer for the Luas, explaining to a bemused world the perfect logic of the two lines not meeting? Or the council official or garda in Galway who has to rationalise to visitors what is happening with Eyre Square?
Perhaps your job is positively evil. That's a toughie all right, but at least you're not a Big Brother contestant, whose job it is to display man's inhumanity to man.
Face it, there's always someone worse off than you. And besides, a central feature of the modern labour market is "flexibility", as the economists say, which means that during your working life you'll likely move from one job to another, and possibly even to a new career or two.
"I know of accountants who've made a 180 degree turn in their careers," says Ciarán Williams, operations manager at Richmond Recruitment's Dublin branch. "My brother-in-law, for instance, went from being a credit controller to an electrician.
"When I look at CVs, I sometimes see people who've quantum-leaped into three different careers."
So for many - though not all - of us, if we're unhappy in a job there's often the means to change tack. (see above)
This option isn't open to everyone. Think of Santa, whose annual struggle to persuade our increasingly precocious kids of his very existence puts other anxieties in the shade.
Finally, when observing through green-tinged spectacles those few who clearly do have better jobs than you, console yourself that what comes around, goes around. As Jean Cocteau put it: "I believe in luck; how else can you explain the success of those you dislike?"
