Jobs.

It’s Monday morning. Back to the grind for many.

I was thinking about the various jobs I have had over the years. A couple of them were fairly interesting, even if I didn’t think so at the time.

For instance, when I was in high school I picked up eggs and graded them, and then delivered them to stores and restaurants. “Picking up” the eggs meant going into the chicken houses every day and collecting what the hens had produced. “Grading” was loading the eggs onto a machine, 2 1/2 dozen at a time, washing them, inspecting them one by one over a light to make sure everything inside looked good (called candling), and then packaging them onto flats or cartons by size.

In addition to video production, which isn’t really that interesting but gets you in to a lot of interesting places, I worked as a news reporter and a radio DJ. Being a reporter also gets you into a lot of interesting places and you get to meet and interview a lot of interesting people.

Being a DJ on the radio, I like to say, is basically sitting in a padded room, talking to people you can’t see. Some people get prescribed medicine for that. I got paid.

My Dad, when he was a farmer, had a side job artificially inseminating cows. I was a young kid at the time and I never really understood what he did. I just knew it involved a tank of dry ice, which fascinated me the way it smoked and swirled when he took the lid off the tank.

I later found out it involved a rubber glove that went up to his armpit and a few minutes spent on the wrong end of a cow.

Today, I really appreciate that he did that to make ends meet for our family. And I think about the guy who had to get the material Dad used to do his thing. Now that guy earned his paycheck.

I know some people that have really interesting jobs. A family member flys Chinook helicopters in war zones, delivering large fuel tanks and other supplies for the troops. One of my best friends was a member of the FDNY and spent years working for Rescue 3. They’re the guys who rescue window washers from skyscrapers, people from airplane crashes, and run into burning buildings where they can’t see and don’t know if they’re coming back out.

Another friend had a safer, but also fascinating job. He was a PGA Teaching Professional. After a round of golf one day, I asked him if he had any advice for me. He said, “Yes. You should take two weeks off and then quit.”

Years ago I knew a guy from the BMX track where my boys raced who was a horse dentist. You have to admit, that’s an interesting career field.

Being the inquisitive reporter-type person that I am, I asked him a lot of questions about horse dentists. He told me the worse thing for him was getting a call from someone who got a horse for Christmas. I asked why.

He said, “Because you can’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

Whatever job you do…I hope you do it with vim and vigor today.

If you can’t muster the vigor, at least try to have a little vim.