Work Daze

I know! It can be a little frustrating to read my endless complaining about work, especially when it’s combined with my totally negative attitude about bosses, and my completely hostile feelings about co-workers, no-workers, and super high achievers, too.

But suddenly, I am negative no more. Instead, I am full of optimism and hope. Just call me Little Bobby Sunshine for, at last, I have discovered a job that I know we would really enjoy—official unofficial driver of exotic, expensive, and 100% free European sports cars.

Here’s how it works: certain car companies, not satisfied with the effects of lavish television commercials and profligate print ads, secretly hand over the keys to their most pricey products to certain “beautiful people.” There’s no pay, but then again, the job does not involve a whole lot of heavy lifting. In fact, your duties are simply to drive your Jaguar or Mercedes around town for one year. Just drive, I said. Drive as you carry on your beautiful life style, giving the other beautiful people – and even some uglies – the opportunity to see you and your car in a variety of exclusively posh settings.

It’s called “product placement,” and while I always thought the placement was limited to slipping big jugs of Coca-Cola into the mitts of the American Idol judges, or making sure that Gwyneth and Uma had your cell-phone to their shell-like ears, the marketing geniuses who sell expensive autos have taken the concept to a new height (or low) by actually inserting their vehicles into everyday life, albeit into the neatly manicured hands of “beautiful people.”

Nico Bossi is one good example of the kind of beautiful person who gets to drive an $80,000 XJ Jaguar convertible around in return for, well, being beautiful. The 27-year old New Yorker is described by The Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, as looking like a “runway model.”

“Bossi and his silver ride show up at all the right places,” the Journal admiringly exalts. “He is known to pull up at Milk and Honey, a Lower East Side lounge where patrons need reservations and a secret phone number to get in.”

I’m not here to Eurotrash Nico, but let’s face it – you are much more of a role model than some punk jet setter who got everything he ever wanted from the gene pool handed to him on a silver platter. And as for being one of the beautiful people, well, you are so beautiful to me, as someone would surely say, like your partner, or your cocker spaniel, or for that matter, Joe Cocker.

Besides, how much better for Jaguar to have an ordinary Joe or Jill show up at the local hot spots in their pricey new sports car—someone who loves the car so much they had to dig into their children’s college fund to buy their wheels, as opposed to someone who just skimmed some caviar money from their trust fund. Besides, that Jaguar will really stand out at the Kit Kat Klub’s Amateur Wet T-Shirt Night, whereas I’m sure that at Milk & Honey, it just gets lost in a sea of limos and Pimpmobiles. [And don’t put up your nose at the Kit Kat, an chic bistro that is not only unlisted, but doesn’t even have a telephone.]

As to your duties, once you have been selected as a Jaguar driver, they are minimal to say the least. “Both my work and my personal time are quite social,” reports Nico, “so incorporating the XK into my everyday life is a natural.”

I’m not sure it will be quite so easy to incorporate an $80,000 sports car into your everyday life, so perhaps Jaguar will chip in a few bucks to help with expenses. Nico pays his own way at his “hangouts,” but unless they have added valet parking at the Bowl ‘n Burger, you may need to hire bodyguards to insure that when you turn in your Jag, it still has its wheels, its radio, and its engine.

You also must be ready to reel off the technical specs of “your” car if some looky-loo celebrity notices it in the Wal-Mart parking lot. Nico has apparently memorized the horsepower and torque data, which he recites with a “hint of an Italian accent,” but no one expects that kind of articulate response from you. Just say, “zoom-zoom, grrrr-grrrr, beep-beep.”

If that doesn’t make Jaguar happy, tough cookies. You’ll just go back to driving your Edsel.