Signatures

Email is widely regarded as a necessity in business throughout the world. And as such, millions of people all over add "signatures" to the bottom of their emails. These signatures typically contain pertinent information such as name, title, company, addresses and phone numbers. However, since personality is harder to achieve through corporate email, sometimes people will include some sort of inspirational or comedic quote at the end of their "signatures." These same people also will usually, if they can get away with it, go crazy changing fonts and colors within their "signatures" all as part of their attempt to make your daily requirement of reading emails a much more meaningful experience. I could be wrong on the reasoning here, but why else would one bother to do this unless it was purely to waste time? Oh wait....to waste time....I get it now. Kidding.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up? A woman with whom I work has the following saying added to the end of her signature: "Choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life." Every time I read this I get annoyed. It's such a naive statement. In theory it's the key to happiness but in reality...oh please! I'm working off the assumption that even if you love your job, you love spending time with your friends and family and spouse and kids even more. So unless your job is actually to [insert your favorite thing to do here] then that statement is just plain silly. For example, if I were to fill in the previous statement with my favorite things to do then my job would be one (or preferably a combination) of the following:

Traveling the world with Mr X
Sleeping
Eating

How can I possibly get someone to pay me for doing those things? The only people I've heard of that get to do something similar are Andrew Zimmerman, Anthony Bourdain and Rick Steves. Damn them. (I apologize - my jealousy got the best of me there.)