My friend Tom emailed me today to ask if I saw "West Wing" last night.
I hadn't. Don't have a TV, you see. And I'm not one of these "Kill your TV" people, either. I just don't have one. The cheap ones are as convenient to move as anvils, and the expensive ones are, well, expensive. As such, I am a man without the power of cable culture.
However, Tom gave me a very good summary of the show. It sounded to me like the scriptwriter had gone along, collected a few reports on offshoring, taken a couple sides of the debate, and wrapped it up with a cute little bow for prime time tubing.
The message, of course, as we all know now, was clear: The jobs we currently have will disappear, but they will be replaced by better, stronger, newer, more interesting, cuter, hotter, sexier jobs.
Well, all I can say is HOT DAMN!
I'm actually so excited that I've already put my current job in a box, taken it to the post office, and shipped it to Southeast Asia myself! Good riddance, stupid high-paying tech job!
Man. When I'm head of NASA, life sure is going to be different. I'll be making all sorts of big decisions about this/that. Don't worry - I'll keep blogging, of course, but from the position of someone with power to wield. I'll write about life in a mahogany office with trim carved of the rarest Amazonian rainforest wood. The martini lunches, evenings at the club, and the drive home in my S series Benz. Not that it will be all that interesting. You'll all probably be doing similar things by then, so the grandeur should be par for the course (and much golfing there will be!).
When that gets old, maybe I'll switch to something else. I've never put my skills to use designing pharmaceuticals. Maybe that's my calling. I figure it's only about eight years of retraining. I'll have plenty of time to do that while living off of all the major cash I've pocketed as an overpaid coder and underappreciated exec.
Yeah. That's it. Spend a couple good years heading NASA just to make some connections, and then move on to something more "hands-on," like the good old days. Like when I used to code. I could design the next Viagra, or whatever. Certain to be a cash cow, of course, since so many of my fellow former-coders will have been transitioned into new even higher paid positions with more power and responsibilities, which means they'll all be working too much, drinking too many martinis, spending too much time planning their big yachting parties, and such. Everyone knows what this kind of stress does to the male body, and I can't wait to benefit from the impotence that will surely run rampant through the executive boardrooms of America (where I expect to find most of you within the next ten years (except for the foreigners - sorry, but no, no, no! creativity belongs to us)).
Ah, yes. The French Riviera in summer, Tahiti in the spring, and a few trips back to the office year-round in the Learjet to make sure everything's running smoothly. I figure that this will be possible with the infrastructure we're building for offshoring. We'll have high quality videoconferencing, high speed data transfer from anywhere on the globe, and collaboration software as yet undreamt. It will be a utopia, and we will push all the buttons and make all the decisions. After all, those silly foreigners don't have any creativity, do they? Of course not! Creativity is an American product, and we don't export it. It's not like pale, watery beer that we can bottle and ship. As long as we hang on to that, there won't be any problems.
That's the truth, too. People in other parts of the world are so very different from us that there's no way they could do our "high end" jobs. I figure that we share 99.6% of our active genomes with chimpanzees, and probably only a little more than that with people who don't have American birth certificates. I'm sure the genetic switch for creativity is in there somewhere. I don't know where, yet, but with my new job in the biotech industry (which I'll have in addition to all the other new, high-paying jobs), I'll probably be able to isolate it, patent it, and then, if I'm feeling nice, sell it to other countries so that they, too, can enjoy the singularly American experience of being able to use the brain to create rather than just manufacture from American design.
Actually, on second thought, forget everybody else on the planet. I'll own the key to creativity, and just share it with a few close friends (about 300,000,000 of them, to be exact). Always important, I suppose, to maintain dominance in the market.
<sigh>Life in the offshored world will be grand. Sort of like a cross between Nazi Germany and a junkyard in Tijuana. There will be those of us who are superior and rule by birthright, and those who will live in shanty towns to crank out the paperwork to support our blazingly rich and creative notions.
Put on your sunglasses and tanning lotion, people. The future is looking especially bright. I'd recommend something with a reasonably high SPF so that we don't all come down with skin cancer and get eaten alive by our own prosperity.
P.S.
Apples, which we Americans use in apple pie, something that some of us use as a symbol of this great country, are currently theorized to have originated in Southern Asia.