A humorous post from Stanleybing.com (without 50 bullshit pages of clicking) author of 100 Bullshit Jobs … and How to Get Them.

1. Advertising executive
Create perceived need/value for inherently generic or worthless products

$$: Ground-level workers with writing ability move quickly to the top, immediately snagging low to mid-six figures; those who can spin mythological concepts surrounding quotidian household objects can command up to seven figures.

The upside: Great expense account living, see your handiwork everywhere, the wonderful feeling of being creative and corporate at the same time.

The downside: Must take meetings with the AFLAC duck.

The dark side: You’re considered a dinosaur at forty.

2. Agent
Talk on phone, take percentage

$$: Seven figures is not out of the ordinary, and the lunch action is astounding.

The upside: Lots of people groveling as you eat your gravlax. A sense of achievement in the success of others, as long as you’re getting a piece of it.

The downside: People sucking on your face all day. And there comes a time when Steve doesn’t seat you at the right table.

The dark side: You die alone and unmourned.

3. Allergist
Inject placebos to offset hypochondria in children

$$: Low to mid-six figures, if you’re serious about it.

The upside: Not a whole lot of death.

The downside: Crushing boredom.

The dark side: Your application for membership to Pebble Beach is rejected.

4. Aromatherapist
Use smelly things to make people feel better

$$: $25,000 for simple scalp workers to $87,500 for those with full-body expertise.

The upside: Your bullshit doesn’t stink.

The downside: You must smear a variety of substances on people who smell funny to begin with.

The dark side: Engorged nose syndrome leads to gigantic beezer.

5. Aquarium cleaner for the rich
Dredge fish feces out of tanks nicer than most people’s apartments

$$: $35,000-$85,000.

The upside: Join Aquarist Paradise, which describes itself as “a global community of aquarists that share a
common bond: our passion for fishkeeping . . . and our desire to share our knowledge/experiences with like-minded aquarists.”

The downside: Fish mung.

The dark side: Fish die horrible deaths with great regularity, often eaten by their associates.

6. Backup dancer
Dance behind people’s behinds, provide controlled substances, marry pop tarts

$$: Depends on the divorce settlement and the quality of the prenup.

The upside: Proximity to many talented people, one of whom may encounter you in an overheated condition and make a decision she will later regret and you will not.

The downside: Having your Ferrari towed away by your pissed- off ex-wife.

The dark side: Looking at sleeping pop tart without makeup first thing in the morning.

7. Barista
Prepare doses for crazed acolytes of the bean

$$: Pretty lousy, starts at $7.75 per hour. Baristas make less by the hour than the kids who construct Double-Doubles at the In-N-Out-which are absolutely superb, by the way-who start at more than ten bucks an hour!

The upside: Beautiful, rich, sensuous coffee; coffee in beans in juicy, wildly odiferous blends; coffee roasting, dripping; hot milk frothing; and other human beings reaching out to you for the very thing that you can give them, plus free lattes for all your friends.

The downside: Deal with agitated, needy customers on the verge of a jag half the time.

The dark side: Poverty.

8. Being a brand
Become the personal embodiment of a product or service

$$: Untold millions.

The upside: See your name on people’s butts as they walk down the street.

The downside: Tacky people like your stuff.

The dark side: The horror of outliving one’s brand.

9. Being Donald Trump
Arguably the No. 1 bullshit artist on the planet

$$: No one really knows.

The upside: Your name is imprinted on everything you eat, live in, travel in, do your business in.

The downside: Idiots make fun of your beautiful orange hair.

The dark side: Must refer to everybody as “Baby.”

How to get it: Purport to be doing great no matter how things are actually going; borrow money when you need to.

10. Best-selling author
Crank it out

$$: $500,000 and up, depending on royalties.

The upside: Knowledge that one’s name will live as long as there are airport bookstores.

The downside: Mandatory rehab after you are arrested on the lawn of your Hamptons home dancing with a raw
turkey.

The dark side: You can’t start or finish anything without somebody else’s “help.”

11. Blogger
Download contents of your mind, even when there aren’t any.

$$: Relatively small, but prospects for high-paying bullshit job in the future are virtually assured.

The upside: This is one of the bullshit jobs you can do immediately, with no training and no prior experience. You can also become very famous, since the established media, increasingly devoid of excitement and ideas of its own, has taken to siphoning off daily blogging activity as a much better and more interesting alternative to actual news.

The downside: You need a full, daily dose of imagination, guile, bile, and people pouring nonsense into your head that you can repeat.

The dark side: Your skin glows an ethereal white, your eyes become rheumy and bloodshot. Hair erupts in horrendous places. You don’t care. You are now nothing but a conduit through which pass all the rare gases of the universe. You are, in short, a blog.

12. Book editor
Take breakfast meeting with writers, assign ideas generated by others, hound writers for manuscripts, have lunch, hound writers for manuscripts, have drinks and dinner. Repeat as necessary.

$$: $16,000-$450,000, depending. The lower you are paid, the less bullshit your job is; conversely, the more you make, the more access you have to the highest, rocket-grade bullshit imaginable.

The upside: Meet Oprah.

The downside: You are seated with James Frey and Nan Talese at the PEN dinner.

The dark side: Must eat at Elaine’s.

13. Boulevardier
Frequent the most fashionable places, enjoy the company of fatuous people who are impressed with you and use your social cachet as their own, or vice versa.

$$: None. Being a boulevardier is an ancillary bullshit occupation that must feed off a core job that produces income. The premier boulevardier of our time, George Hamilton, acts to support his tan and his bon vivant lifestyle; his activities as a boulevardier in turn enhance his chances to obtain appropriate roles satirizing himself.

The upside: Barry Diller always says hello.

The downside: Secret knowledge of one’s own fatuosity.

The dark side: Skin cancer.

14. Cable news demagogue
Deliver highly opinionated news and views to people who don’t want to hear anything that disagrees with them.

$$: $20 million per year.

The upside: Pleasure of vanquishing the small and weak.

The downside: Must occasionally listen to other people talk.

The dark side: Develop tendency to spew insane nonsense when exercised, like “If Al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we’re not going to do anything about it. We’re going to say, look, every other place in America is off-limits to you, except San Francisco.”

15. Celebrity stylist/aesthetic consultant
Create a look for people who want to be looked at.

$$: Good bucks with no security whatsoever. If you lose your mojo, you might as well go back to Boise.

The upside: Everybody wants to be your baby.

The downside: When your client makes the Worst Dressed List.

The dark side: You wake up one morning and look like Bruce Vilanch.

16. Chairman
Visionary, autocrat, delegator

$$: You’re beyond the point where you need money. Money is for people who move through space in a world not of their making. That’s not you.

The upside: Your feet do not touch the floor when you walk. This saves money on shoes.

The downside: The voices in your head won’t let you sleep at night.

The dark side: Everything is crawling with germs, and nobody knows how to clean your bottom without leaving it all red and chafed.

17. Cheese artisan
Sculpt milk products for upscale restaurants and pretentious markets

$$: Virtually unlimited for those who craft museum-quality work.

The upside: The knowledge that people really love what you do, especially with crackers.

The downside: Critics don’t take you seriously just because you work in cheese.

The dark side: Mold!

18. Closet organizer
Organize closets for people who can’t organize their own closets.

$$: Middling, unless the closet belongs to some crazy rich person, and who else would hire a closet organizer?

The upside: Unparalleled opportunity for those with an unhealthy interest in footwear.

The downside: Hard to explain what you do to serious people, and therefore you may not find yourself around many.

The dark side: Obsessive-compulsive disorder acquired over time degenerates into horrible need to keep everything on matching hangers, followed shortly by madness and death.

Where you go from here: Stager, another bullshit job, where people set up an apartment that’s for sale to look more attractive than it actually is.

19. Construction-site flag waver
Stand in street and cause confusion.

$$: Minimum wage for municipal construction crew, which turns out to be more than many employees make at corporate jobs.

Duties: Stand at “active” road construction zones and wave traffic away from the guys who are chatting, having coffee and a smoke before they go back to chatting, smoking, and having coffee.

The upside: Wave drivers on cell phones into a ditch.

The downside: You’re the only one working at the site. That’s really not fair.

The dark side: Lots of exhaust in your face.

20. Consultant
Have gun, will travel

$$: Entry level grunts may begin in the high five and low six figures. If you’re a graduate of one of the huge consultant factories that leach humanity out of students and turn them into guns for hire-Wharton, and to a lesser extent, the somewhat squishier Stanford School of Business-you could be making an executive’s salary almost immediately.

The upside: It’s a pretty easy job, with great travel benefits, nice hotels, drinks on the companies you are soaking.

The downside: Your kids can never explain what you do to their friends.

The dark side: You are a ninja, a samurai, a lone traveler on the road to nowhere. It’s a very opulent nowhere if you’re good at it. But somewhere in your heart, you want to come in from the cold.

21. Crumber
Remove detritus from dining tables in restaurants.

$$: $5.50 per hour, more if you get a piece of the tips.

The upside: Get to use cool tool and eat leftovers.

The downside: Waste of life.

The dark side: Get to like crumbing, as opposed to auditioning.

22. Diet doctor
Inspire fat people to buy books.

$$: On its lowest levels, which they call a nutritionist, it’s still pretty good, well into the mid-$100,000 level, since very needy people with low self-esteem will flock to you and never leave. At the guru level (see Guru), the money is excellent, and if you have a successful book you are truly in fat city.

The upside: Money. Sex. Power.

The downside: Can never eat a Ring Ding without looking over your shoulder.

The dark side: Posthumous decline in your book sales, particularly if you die under fat circumstances.

23. Dolphin trainer
Get aquatic mammals to smile for Kodak moments.

$$: Decent.

The upside: Play with Flipper or Mitzi or whomever.

The downside: Necropsy. That can’t be good.

The dark side: Must deal with Zipper, Flipper’s legendary evil twin.

24. Economist
Generate conflicting opinions

$$: Academics make professors’ salaries, in the high five or low six figures. Those who work for Wall Street firms or other fiduciary institutions can make enough to force Eliot Spitzer to sit up and take notice.

Skills required: Write very poorly, or at least so obliquely that no matter what happens in reality, the theories and prognostications you offer can never be called wrong, exactly.

The upside: People think you’re brilliant, and you may be!

The downside: Your mother leaps off the side of a cruise ship when her retirement account goes south.

The dark side: Your ideas are adopted by the ruling class of a third-world nation, who then use them to exterminate the entire middle class.

25. Executive Vice President, New Media
Sell vaporware to space cadets.

$$: $225,000-$1.5 million per year, with absolutely no ceiling if the firm you are working with turns into a Google of some kind.

The upside: As long as the bubble is full, you’re golden. And there’s never any need to prove yourself with real results, because people don’t want that, they want simply to feel that there’s somebody thinking about all of it, and that’s you.

The downside: Hard to see if there is one. Whatever it might be, if you’re a really good bullshitter, and I know you are, it will take ten years to discover it.

The dark side: Your entrepreneurial friends in this area, who have the courage to push the envelope on the outside of corporate life, are now multitrillionaires. You are slogging along on less than a million a year.

26. Expert witness
Testify what you’re paid to.

$$: Usually an hourly rate that includes waiting time in court. But the value comes from potential results. For, say, a psychiatrist hired to exonerate an ax murderer, the fee of several thousand dollars per day would not be unthinkable.

The upside: A good, solid living not based on the vagaries of an actual career in your chosen profession.

The downside: Bad guys get off. Oh well, that’s our legal system!

The dark side: Bad guy gets off and comes to your house to say thank you.

27. Feng Shui consultant
Show people how to improve their home, work and sex life by arranging their physical surroundings in ways that are in harmony with the universe.

$$: Cosmic.

The upside: You can really make people feel more at home in their surroundings, since the majority of homeowners have very little sense of where to put that credenza.

The downside: You are called out at 4 a.m. when your No. 1 client feels negative energy coming from her electric blanket.

The dark side: There is a distinct possibility that any time now rich people will stop believing in this stuff.

28. Greeter
Say hello to people when they come into a store, say hello to people when they come into the store…

$$: Minimum wage.

The upside: Easy to learn the drill.

The downside: Sometimes your face hurts.

The dark side: Your college buddy shows up with the girl you used to go out with.

29. Handwriting analyst
Profile human behavior. Interpret meaningless chicken scratches without laughing.

$$: A good handwriting analyst can make $100 per hour at a cocktail party; big ones who are asked to authenticate major documents are very well paid, particularly since they rarely are capable of being definitive and mostly offer a raft of bulls**t rationalizations and excuses for not being more certain of anything.

The upside: Great glow of science about a whole bunch of mumbo jumbo. Get to hang with other graphologists, who are really fun at parties.

The downside: Clients get very annoyed when they rely on you to authenticate things and all you can give them is a raft of halting excuses and mumbling horsesh**t.

The dark side: Sudden conviction that life is meaningless and the truth is essentially unknowable.

Where you go from here: Water dowser.

30. Headhunter
Put big jobs together with big people, at about the rate at which an elephant gestates.

$$: $250,000 a year and up.

The upside: Big, formerly successful people come to you on their knees, begging for a lift back onto the gravy train.

The downside: You’re a human resources professional.

The dark side: Sitting with people who really need you, and you know you can’t help them. That bothers even you at times, admit it.

31. HMO health care professional
See sick people, get rid of them.

$$: Not so great, actually. You could do a lot better as a plastic surgeon, allergist, or any specialist not supported by insurance.

The upside: After a while, figuring out ways to deny people medical attention can be a challenging game. The good news is that you win more than you lose.

The downside: Sometimes people get so sick that you may have to treat them.

The dark side: Even though it’s not really your fault and you’re only enforcing the codes and regulations of the system you work for, and everybody has to make a living, you know, sometimes it’s very narrowly possible that you may do something, or not do something, that results in the death of somebody. Then, you know, if you think about it too much and dwell on it in a way that you really have no reason to, you may feel bad.

Where you go from here: Hunting endangered species for their fur.

32. Industrial psychologist
Utilize principles of behavioral psychology at the behest of senior management to manipulate minds of unsuspecting employees.

$$: Corporate salary-not the top but not the bottom, either. If you can wrangle the gig into an executive vice president position in human resources, low seven figures is not impossible since you control compensation.

The upside: Able to turn perfectly serviceable workers into drooling zombies.

The downside: You turn into a skinny, tweedy old fart with hair everywhere but on your head.

The dark side: You are in league with the devil. This is not all bad, of course. That side eats more meat and less fish than the good guys.

33. Infomercial spokesperson/celebrity pitchman
Lend personal imprimatur to sell crap in paid programming time.

$$: Millions! Billions! Hundreds of thousands sold! Not available in any store!

The upside: Free stuff, big money, unless you’re the nodding dummy tasting the perfectly grilled chicken, then my guess is all you’re getting is scale plus perfectly grilled chicken.

The downside: Terminal loss of self-respect.

The dark side: Electric antiwrinkle mask gets wet and sears your face off.

34. Investment banker
Strumpet of capital

$$: Booooooo- yah!

How to get it: Must attend many conferences and hang with financial types, bullshitting extensively about ways perfectly good businesses can be blown up, macerated, pureed or jammed together with others for no particular reason other than that nobody has done it yet. If you look at really stupid deals and do not say “why,” but instead say “why not,” then you’ve got what it takes.

The upside: These guys are so rich their Bentleys have Bentleys.

The downside: Sometimes you get a hangnail getting out of the limo.

The dark side: You must consort with many, many moguls. Every occupation has its tools, but they’re really big ones.

35. Life coach
Take over hapless people’s entire existence and reshape it in ways that you think are good for them.

$$: Successful practitioners in this relatively new field can earn as much as a psychiatrist - hundreds of dollars an hour. But unburdened by the same ethical constraints, an aggressive bullshit artist could conceivably view his or her compensation as a percentage of the life that is being fully, you know, actualized.

The upside: It feels good when people pay you to yell at them.

The downside: Some days you may not be positive enough to get out there and make people bark that happy song.

The dark side: Every now and then you see one of your success stories sucking the pavement in front of your local tavern.

Where you go from here: High school hockey coach.

36. Marriage counselor
Help people complete the destruction of their marriage.

$$: Some charge on a sliding scale, depending on the income of the suffering couple. While some marriage counselors may be MD psychiatrists or PhD psychologists, a fair amount simply have degrees in social work or counseling, and they get paid okay, too.

The upside: You’re single!

The downside: It’s like working in a coal mine in which the canary keels over and dies every day.

The dark side: You get a large dog and move into a small houseboat on the marina.

37. Meteorologist on TV
Look good, play with map.

$$: Local weathermen make in the low six figures; those on national morning television can earn millions and reap commercial benefits as well.

How to get it: Be the guy with the best hair and no interest in actual news per se.

The upside: Opportunity to scare people when an inch of snow is coming.

The downside: People actually blame you for bad weather.

The dark side: When a true natural disaster pops up, they send Anderson Cooper!

38. Patent troll
Purchase dead patents for peanuts, sue real company, make billions.

$$: If you win, hundreds of millions per year.

The upside: You feast on ill-gotten meat you did nothing to hunt or dress. Look at all that money you did nothing to earn!

The downside: Almost impossible to get good PR.

The dark side: Hard to see. Trolls are happy to be trolls, and do not get insulted when you call them trolls or feel bad when they look in a mirror and see a plump, successful troll.

Where you go from here: Ogre.

39. Personal trainer
Build average humans into gorgeous beasts, have sex with as many as you like, marry some of them for brief periods of time.

$$: $35,000 per annum. But what’s the meaning of money when part of your job is holding J. Lo’s foot while she tries to work out her upper thigh?

The upside: Lookin’ great, eating like a champ, swinging high and hard and loose? What a gig!

The downside: The San Francisco Chronicle does a huge exposé revealing that the special additive you’ve been giving to your customers is, in fact, anabolic steroid. You go to jail and your clients are disgraced, in addition to having tiny, shrunken testicles.

The dark side: You are an overexercised monster, both bulgy and stringy at the same time, your body is aging, and so are the poor, hyperstressed clients you tend to; you wake up one morning, and God, you’re tired.

40. Poet
Drink, write very little, diddle students, generally have license to misbehave while sponging off friends and other nonprofi t organizations.

$$: $350 per annum from your actual poetry or if you’re serious about a career in the business, you earn whatever college professors are making this year, plus what you get from these very cool writer-in-residence gigs you can apply for.

The upside: Unlimited sex from adoring fans. The knowledge that your pain can be turned into something of artistic and/or commercial value. The right to drink all night and wake up at dusk.

The downside: You give a reading of your work at a small lecture hall of a university that does such things. They put you up at the Travelodge. The night of the reading, you go to dinner with the head of the English department at a sad, empty place that still features a blue plate special. Eight people show up at your reading. One of them has a bottle in a brown paper bag and is dressed wrong for the season. Afterward, you go out for drinks with him.

The dark side: You are a dead caboose sitting empty on a neglected piece of track somewhere in a forgotten rail yard. You tell yourself that when you’re dead, you will be appreciated. All things considered, that seems like a long time to wait.

Where you go from here: Greeting card writer.

41. Political reverend
Turn public issues to personal advantage.

$$: Millions, if you’ve got a good TV gig going on. A lot less, if you don’t.

The upside: All kinds of people hugging you, throwing money at you.

The downside: You have to be careful when you check into that motel with Lurleen.

The dark side: What do you mean, the IRS is on line two?

42. Posse dude
Stand around looking large.

$$: Small cheddar, until you get your own jam.

The upside: Blunts, bitches and ho’s? I’m just guessing.

The downside: Hurts really bad when you get shot…

The dark side:.. and die.

Where you go from here: The Vibe Awards. Then, immediately after your appearance informs the police of your whereabouts, Folsom.

43. Quantum physicist/string theorist
Produce theories about the nature of the universe that are not amenable to proof by normal human means.

$$: Academic professor salary. If you become a cultural icon, like Brian Greene or Stephen Hawking, you can be one of the few who attain rock star status equal to that of, say, the host of a popular cooking show.

The upside: In your hands you hold the secret to the machinery that runs the universe. That’s heady stuff, which is good-because you’re a head case, dude! But seriously. The media loves you. Your last book was a best seller that everyone bought but nobody read, which, as you know, is the very best kind. And while other guys from your class are playing with petri dishes, you’re accelerating fictional particles at hyperspeed underneath the mountains of Switzerland.

The downside: None of what you do helps anybody understand anything.

The dark side: Tomorrow… next week… perhaps a year or two from now… some sharp kid is going to come along with a theory that takes a wicked detour directly from Einstein, goes completely around quantum theory, and explains the entire universe in simple, elegant terms that do not need a billion-dollar machine to prove. Your entire realm of endeavor will be relegated to a footnote on the twentieth century, the way the nineteenth was obsessed with phrenology-the science of reading head bumps.

44. Roadkill collector
Cruise highways looking for dead things.

$$: Minimum wage. What do you expect for a job where you get to work outside all day, nobody bothers you, and job security is excellent?

The upside: You are doing your part to make America beautiful.

The downside: Ironically, the small animals that break apart on contact are the worst.

The dark side: Sometimes you don’t want to get up in the morning.

45. Rogue journalist
Work the system untroubled by annoying self-doubts entertained by others, misuse the confidence placed in you by your subjects, nurture book deals.

$$: $75,000-$100,000.

The upside: The mighty of the earth tremble when you walk into the room.

The downside: Jeez, it’s hard to slip a bogus factoid into a piece now. People are watching!

The dark side: Disgraced. You are as much of a nonperson as any character you ever created.

Where you go from here: You can be a very good blogger.

46. Sports bloviator
Delve deep into a bottomless river of drivel.

$$: Radio guys make less than those on TV, but a fair number do both and pile up a huge wad.

The upside: Like Babe Ruth, you’re thrilled that somebody wants to pay you to play the game you love.

The downside: You’re not sexually attractive to straight women.

The dark side: You are, however, sexually attractive to straight men.

47. Talking head/pundit
Occupy a seat at any available table.

$$: $125,000 for your punditry, which is usually a line extension of your other pontification ventures.

The upside: A little knowledge goes a long way.

The downside: Having to see yourself on television is not always pleasant, because you’re not very attractive.

The dark side: Having to get up at 5 a.m. to do a five-minute pop on Fox and Friends.

48. Velvet-rope Nazi
Establish and maintain elite fascist cadres.

$$: $1,000 per night and all the blow you can stuff up your sinuses.

The upside: Everybody loves you.

The downside: Everybody hates you.

The dark side: The club closes. The party moves on. You are older. And one day some big stud with huge pecs tells you that you don’t belong in the salad.

Where you go from here: Guy at the front desk, coolest restaurant in town. Let’s see how Mr. Zuckerman likes being seated near the kitchen!

49. Vice president of the United States
Be prepared.

$$: $198,000. Which pales, you know, beside what the job is worth afterward, when you rejoin the gigantic multinational firm you’ve been steering business to for the last eight years.

Duties: Well, before the current administration, you’d have to say virtually none. Now, who knows?

The upside: Great title, decent perks, very little job responsibility (except for Dick Cheney).

The downside: Everybody makes fun of the office and thinks it’s completely superfluous (except for Dick Cheney).

The dark side: You da man. What have you got to show for it? (Except for Dick Cheney).

Where you go from here: Back to Halliburton.

50. Yeti
Be strong, silent, and mysteriously unavailable.

$$: Unknown.

The upside: Nobody bothers you, ever.

The downside: Kind of cold out there.

The dark side: When somebody finds out you’re the yeti they’ve heard so much about, their whole attitude toward you changes entirely.

Where you go from here: Scotland.

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