My make-believe job

This has probably been obvious to everyone but me for a long time: What I do for a living isn’t serious or even real.

That fact dawned on me this week when I talked with someone who is on a SWAT team.

Most of the time I think I’m doing an actual job, interviewing athletes, writing columns about sports. I forget it’s in a make believe place, where people get paid obscene amounts of money to play games. I get paid less-obscene amounts to write about them.

SWAT people and cops deal with drug and weapons dealers, spouse abusers and sometimes killers. I only have to deal with an occasionally grumpy Al Jefferson.

If I have a bad day, I might have made a typo in my column or received a lot of hate mail. Or I may have even missed a flight! Boo-hoo! My wife is a nurse. On her bad days, a patient dies.

So the next time I’m tempted to whine about my work, I think I’ll try to remind myself about people who work in the real world before going back to my own make-believe one.