Everyone's Job Sucks ... sometimes

My friends and I were talking over e-mail about Latrell Sprewell the other day.

Because that's what guys do when they're bored at work. Even though none of us particularly like basketball, we spent a good 20-30 minutes discussing a guy who hasn't played for four years. He's an interesting story, and it led to some thoughts about employment.

After choking his coach and getting suspended for a good portion of a year, Sprewell came back and was such a solid player that the Knicks gave him a 5 year, $62.5 million contract. And NBA contracts are guaranteed, so once he signed it, he knew he was going to no doubt get that much money in his pocket. If that were me, I'd like to think I would meet some sort of financial advisor the next day and make sure that I was set up so that if I never earned another dollar again, me and my family would be fine. Apparently Spree didn't work that way, because when the contract was up and his skills had somewhat diminished, he turned down a 3 year, $21 million contract and said "I gotta feed my family."

Either that's a big family, or Latrell Sprewell is a jackass. Anyway, long story short, Sprewell continued to turn down less and less money and is now completely out of the league and possibly close to bankruptcy. As we're all talking about this one of my friends sent an e-mail that said "How could anyone turn down 1 million dollars to play BASKETBALL?"

I understand the idea of what he was saying, but my first thought was to kind of want to defend the guy. Latrell Sprewell can't be defended, but it kind of led me to the idea that every job sucks, and money alone doesn't fix that. Even if your job is to play basketball, sometimes that has to suck. Maybe your teammate is a dick, or your coach is annoying. Whatever it is, every job has to suck ... sometimes, and if somebody told me I'd have to work just as hard to get paid less than 10% of what I was making, even if that was still a million bucks I might tell everybody to screw off too.

There just isn't a perfect job out there. Some of us are happier than others, but nothing is perfect. I have a friend who got a job working for the company that makes those touch screen cash registers that you see in bars and restaurants all over the place now. Now he's moved up and is more on the design/business development side. But when he first started, his job was to travel around the country (and the world) teaching bartenders and restaurant managers how to use the touch screens. He'd go meet people, spend some time on a tutorial and then drink with the employees. His job was not too far from partying professionally. But even this job had to suck sometimes. Not every bartender would necessarily be cool. Or maybe he just wouldn't be in the mood for travelling but had to spend 3-4 days in a hotel. I guess my point is, whatever it is, don't assume that somebody else has an awesome job they could never complain about. Because there's always something.

What sucks about my job? Getting to work at 8am for starters (although that should be done in a couple of weeks). Needing to document where I am at pretty much all times (my phone basically acts like a punch card clock) is taking a while to get used to also. But overall, it's not that bad. I work with cool people at a good company and I'm a quick train ride back to NYC whenever I want.

Speaking of that, I don't care if you've never heard of any of their songs, go see Dropkick Murphys if ever given the chance. Just do it.