Who says my job is the worst?

I wasn’t surprised when a survey by CareerCast, an American internet job search site, listed a newspaper reporter’s job as the worst for 2013.

It cited low pay ($3,600 or Dh13,240 a month), stress and the lack of opportunities in the future as the main reasons for this job being the worst, followed by other worst jobs such as a lumberjack, a soldier, actor and an oil rig worker.

By the way, the bleak scenario is in the US where shrinking budgets of newspapers and competition from the internet are creating difficult conditions for reporters. But the part about stress remains the same for reporters working anywhere in the world.

The best job, the survey said, was an actuary — a number-cruncher working in an insurance company, calculating the risk of you being hit by a vehicle or a hurricane. It’s said to be a nice job with high pay, low stress and job prospects are great, what with global warming and terrible weather taking a toll on unsuspecting people.

The job site offered alternatives and said if reporters wished to stay in the field of media and communications, a PR job would be better, as the pay is better, hours are shorter and there’s little stress. When I started out as a journalist, I thought it to be the best job in the world. You get to meet some really interesting and eccentric people and every day is different. One day you are trying to follow the black cloud of smoke mushrooming out of an industrial area and the next you are travelling with a celebrity in his or her car.

Mundane things like money

Being a journalist is also a big ego booster and offers instant gratification of a job well done. In fact, you tend to get a huge, big head when someone calls up and says that he or she enjoyed reading your writeup and wants to learn how to write. “Oh, that’s nothing. Writing is easy ...”, I would say.

But there’s always the other side of the story. When my wife told her dad she wanted to marry a journalist, he didn’t think it was such a great idea. “They smoke a lot and they die young,” he warned her. Then came the humiliating part: “They are also so poverty-stricken,” he told her.

When you are young, idealistic mundane things like money do not matter. I was sure I was going to make a difference to the world with my writing, but I was not sure how reporting a burglary in the neighbourhood — where the silly robber ran away with a huge TV set — would change the world.

This was a classical robbery, by the way. The crook lifted the TV and put it on a carpet and dragged it out of the house even as everyone in the house was snoring soundly.

Anyway, my wife placated her dad that if ever we were short of money he would be the first one we would turn to.

Being rich and well-known is fun. And being well-known in your city, as the new hotshot reporter, and being poor was also fun. So I had to make do with what people gave us. Whenever a textile company held a press conference we would get what was known as a “pant piece” and after a fortnight, every journo would look like a hotshot in his new tailored shiny pants.

Over the years, I have found that being a newspaper reporter is great and that I am lucky that I am not in a stressful job as the door-to-door encyclopaedia salesman who cajoles us to buy a wall-full of books.