I woke up around 2:00am this morning and couldn't go back to sleep. I decided it was too early to get up, so I turned the TV on. Immediately, a commercial came on that (as far as I could tell) was for some sort of incontinence information and supplies clearing house. Apparently you can call their hot line, talk to some sort of sympathetic ear and then order your Depends which will be discreetly delivered in a plain brown package. According to the commercial, the person you will talk to is a Personal Incontinence Counselor.

Now a couple of things come to mind when I think of Personal Incontinence Counselor. One is the new category that can be added to the old "What do you want to be when you grow up?" question. The other is the rising unemployment rate being reported lately. How can a country even have an unemployment rate when there are jobs like Personal Incontinence Counselor? The fact is that we live in a country where there is a job for just about anything you can think of. I did a little research and here is a list of real jobs that people have -

Odor Tester Hair Boiler Citris Fruit Dyer Fortune Cookie Writer Pet Detective Cheese Sprayer IMAX Screen Cleaner Light Bender Professional Whistler Fountain Pen Repair Man

Snake Milker Wrinkle Chaser Chicken Sexer Furniture Tester Braille Translator Ski Slope Illustrator Dog Food Tester Gum Buster Golf Ball Diver Whiskey Ambassador

Obviously this is not a complete list, but you get the idea. Pet Detective? Whiskey Ambassador? This is the great thing about America. You can just make something up and get a job doing it. Maybe this is how we should encourage our new generations. Channel their furtive imaginations into initiative. Instead of asking them to pick from something they see or know about, just tell them "Hey, did you know that when you grow up you can just make something up and be it?" "Whatever you think is cool, you can make a living at it. People will pay for anything."

Of course, there are pros and cons to everything. The down side to this is that one day we may wake up and not even think Personal Incontinence Counselor is weird.