“You don’t know how lucky you are that you don’t have a real job.”

Excuse me? What? Huh? I never know exactly how to respond to comments like that because, fuck you.

I get that the speaker is trying to be nice. Is trying to be complimentary. And is quite often envious of the fact that I do get to work from any comfy piece of furniture in my home or nearby coffee shop.

But… because there always is a but.

This is a real job. Granted the application process was somewhat loose. And I’m friends with my boss. And my work wardrobe, as previously discussed, is far from corporate chic. But job.

Job.

I do have a job. What makes a job a real job can be summed up in three questions.

1- Are you working?
2- Are you getting paid?
3- Is it legal?

That third one I just threw in there for arguments sake. There’s hard work out there that isn’t legal. Lots of it. And the getting paid thing we could quibble about. You can work your ass off and not get paid but that’s working or volunteering. So for the sake of this post we’re going with my three questions.

Since the answer to all three of those questions is a resounding yes let me reiterate how puzzled I am each time my employment is deemed unreal. I don’t have an office to go to and I pretty much set my own hours, but that doesn’t make it any less real. It’s not a job milking unicorns of their rainbows and selling them on the Fairy Black Market for pots of Leprechaun gold. I simply have a position which has evolved past the antiquated notion that I need to sit miserably behind a desk with a slave driver staring over my shoulder.

Though if you ever meet someone who does sell unicorn rainbows on the Fairy Black Market please send them my way, I’ll apologize for calling their job unreal, though since black market sales are illegal it still wouldn’t fit my criteria.