Ok, I am indifferent about the news of Micheal Jackson’s demise. On one hand, he was a genius as an artist and performer, on the other hand he was certifiably insane and quite possibly a child molester.
It’s cool when you are certifiably insane and you have gobs and gobs of cash you are instead called “eccentric”.
The thing I am curious about though, is the legions of people that show up outside the hospital where his body is to mourn, reminiss, be on camera or what have you.
Are these people employed in any gainful manner? Are they taking sick days or vacation days to be there? Do they work a graveyard shift or something?
I’ve often wondered about these people and others like them. They seem to own clothing and obviously eat from day to day so they have to be getting money from somewhere. They found the means to get their either by driving or taking a bus so I don’t think it’s a random homeless flash mob or anything.
It’s not all teenie boppers who are living off of their parents. Micheal has been out of the music game too long for that to be the case.
“Sorry, Bob I can’t come in today I have to mourn Micheal Jackson’s passing”, just doesn’t sound like a line many people could use without hearing, “You’re fired” immediately afterward.
I recently took an unpaid week off of work to enjoy some time with my wife who gets more vacation time than I do. It noticably affected the bank acount. What are these people doing that they can afford time off to join the media circus on a whim?
They likely take a sick day.
According to an article I read – well more like an opinion piece – the writer says the June 25, 2009 will be remembered the same way that the day of Lennon’s and Elvis’ passing (not that I remember those dates either) will be remembered. I just can’t see it. I know MJ was an influence on other artists but of Lennon and Elvis stature?
Humbug.
You are lucky to have a Monday thru Friday nine to five job. A lot of us haven’t had that luxury.
So maybe the mob of people work second shift or work evenings at a restaurant or something.
But it was interesting to me that a lot of the mob was made up of teenie boppers who are either out of school for the summer or done with college classes for the day. I suppose that it isn’t impossible for younger people to like MJ, since I like the Beatles, but I’m still a bit surprised. I always think that you have to be just about my age to be a fan of MJ, and I was never that much a fan myself.
One more thing: I still think it is funny that when Thriller came out my brother thought that was his first record. Bad enough that he’d not heard of The Wall, but for crying out loud he must have watched the cartoon with me way back when. Who has not heard ABC?
@Laughingattheslut
I am not lucky to have a 9-5 Monday to Friday job. I worked my ass off to educate myself to get the skills needed to get such a job.
I worked mind-numbingly crap jobs for many years before biting the bullet and doing the work to educate myself to a point where I could break in to the industry that I currently work in.
People who claim that they don’t have “luxury” of a Monday to Friday 9-5 type of job, either don’t want that type of job or don’t want to do the work that it takes to get such a job.
The point was that you were saying that people were taking off work to mourn MJ, like you didn’t get it that most of those people just weren’t supposed to be at work at that time. Lots of people just normally have that time off, or even the whole day off. Lots of other people aren’t supposed to have the day off, but recently they’ve been told that they aren’t needed for the whole week, so they had the day off too.
And with the pictures I saw, I still think that the mob was mostly teenie boppers.
But I hardly think that you worked your ass off more than a doctor or lawyer or the people who work at the power company or court reporters or the girl who x-rays your hip when you fall on your ass, etc…and they don’t have the luxury of a 9-5. They might get those hours eventually, but they don’t have them right now. And they are just as educated as you, and just as skilled as you, and in some cases more educated and more skilled than you. The 9-5 job is a luxury, and you are lucky to have it.
@Laughingattheslut
The people that don’t work 9-5 jobs like power company people, doctors, etc. chose professions that don’t do the 9-5 things. That’s their choice. It’s not luck and it’s not a luxury.
There are plenty of doctors and lawyers and court reporters/ stenographers that do work 9-5.
And as for belittling the effort and hard work that I put in, screw you. You have no fucking clue about how hard my life has been or how hard I worked to get where I am.
There are times to attribute luck to a situation, and there are times to attribute effort. Most people that have the 9-5 jobs put in an effort to get them.
I wasn’t putting down the people that went to the crowds, I was genuinely curious about how they make ends meet. I was allowing for the possibility of off shifts or sick days. I don’t share their love of Micheal and really I wouldn’t go anywhere to mourn any celebrity. But I would go to a big crowd like that if my favorite author was signing books so I get the draw of certain situations.
Sorry, but I don’t care how hard your life is or what hard work you put in, I just don’t believe it was any harder than my friends who took crappy jobs so that they could go to college and get a degree, and after they graduated they still got screwed out of the job.
Some doctors and lawyers, depending on what kind of medicine or law that they practice, might end up working 9-5 later, later, when they are their own boss. They do not start out that way. The court reporters who actually work in court do not work 9-5 either. The 9-5 part is totally up to the judge, who might want to leave early, or he might want to stay late and get the thing over with. And then after court is done, if they actually heard any testimony in court, the court reporter has to go and type stuff, either in the evenings on on the weekends.
Some people did all the things that they were supposed to do and still didn’t end up with the 9-5 job that the worked for. Somebody gets the short straw. It’s usually the new guy, but sometimes it something else that is screwed up.
When they find the job that they are looking for, I think most people will take whatever shift that they can get and then wait til the 9-5 is open, and that is however long it takes. It is luck. I have only twice known people who decided to work something other than the 9-5 shift when the 9-5 shift was available. One guy decided to keep the graveyard shift because the 9-5 supervisor was an ass, and this one girl decided to keep the graveyard shift because when she was offered the 9-5 she was also offered to keep the graveyard shift with extra pay. She had planned all this time to take the 9-5, but after an accident she had to take the shift with the extra money.
So it isn’t always true that people have strange hours because they aren’t educated or that they made some choice different from yours. Sometimes, it is just luck, and all the education and making all the good choices still do not end up with the good job.
@Laughingattheslut
There is a whole big wide world outside the scope of your personal experiences.
Effort is one part of it, intelligence is another.
If you live in a town of 10 people where there are only 2 jobs in the town that offer 9-5 hours and what you are after is the 9-5, well either you have to put in the effort to be better than at least 8 other people or have the intelligence to move to a different town where there are more 9-5 jobs that you are qualified to do. And if the person hiring is an asshole that only hires people that suck up to them, you either have to suck up or resign yourself to the fact that you aren’t going to get either of those 2 jobs and still look elsewhere. That’s a choice.
If you send out 100 resumes and get 100 rejections and take a crappy job to support yourself and then stop sending out resumes, that’s a choice.
If people take a non 9-5 job and decide to wait forever for the one shift available to open up for them, that’s a choice.
If you don’t want to move to a place where there are more job opportunities that’s a choice.
Making choices is not luck. Finding a 20 on the street is luck. Hitting the big lottery on a quick pick ticket is luck.
People may get lucky to find a SPECIFIC job. My wife’s current job is the result of me winning a $1600 on a $2 bet. But she put in 15 years of hard work and effort to be qualified for that job. So while the circumstances of discovering a job might exist at the place was luck, the fact that she was qualified was not.
I could move to any city in the US or Canada and have a 9-5 job within 2 months I guarantee it. It doesn’t matter how screwed the economy is right now, I’ve put the work and effort into developing skills that people need. I could not move to a rural town of 12,000 and make that same guarantee.
My life and where I am today is not the result of a unicorn turning the right way and farting rainbows at me. It is the result of the effort and hard work I put in.
There are different levels of luck. You had some luck. You did not have have winning the lottery luck, but you had some.
The 9-5 job you have is a luxury. It involved some luck. You may have earned this particular luxury, and you may think that you deserve the luxury more than other people, but it is still a luxury, and it still involved some luck.
Some people who have had their job taken away and given to someone in India did not make a choice, they had bad luck. Someone with the same job in a company on the other side of town still has his job because he had better luck, not because of some choice. Unless you chose to work in a hospital or something so that they can’t send your job to another country.
Well, that isn’t quite true either. People now go to other countries to have medical stuff done, but I don’t think that it’s enough yet to really have noticable change in the job market.
I didn’t get a certain job. At the time I thought nothing of it and applied for another job. I later learned that I should have got the job, and that at that point in the hiring process the only reason I wouldn’t have gotten the job was if I failed the drug test. So it was just bad luck that there was a botched drug test, or the wrong box checked off, or whatever. It wasn’t my choice. It was either bad luck, or someone made the choice to lie about my drug test, which I find hard to believe anyone did that. Sometimes, it is just luck.
If I say more on the subject it will be on my own blog. I shouldn’t spend so much time on someone else’s when he’s got his mind made up.
Oh, and the point was that if you didn’t have your 9-5 job, it wouldn’t have occured to you to ask why all those people weren’t at work. If you had a different schedule, you just would have thought that they didn’t have to be at work right then.
I don’t go into the grocery store and Walmarts and the bank and the movie theater and wonder why these people aren’t at work, and I doubt that they look at me and wonder why I’m not at work. That sort of thing only occurs to people with 9-5 jobs and my mother.
@Laughingattheslut
As I have said to you in the past, you don’t dictate anything here. This is my blog.
As you have made it quite clear you don’t care what I think or how hard I’ve worked at anything, you’re honestly not welcome here.
Robbing Peter to pay Paul, which is as old as the hills. Take a person who has all the major credit cards. They use most of them and run them up to the limit. Then those that they haven’t touched go to pay off those that they did and vice versa. Hence, they get so deep in dept and think that they are being smart and that the banks don’t know what they are doing…GUESS AGAIN!!!