A (great) hazard of writing this series every month about people in their jobs is receiving tips about your great-aunts or your friends and the wacky, wacky stuff people do in this place for a living.
Here’s a great example. I received this link to an interview on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, an online compendium of literary gems and all-around great reading. Don’t click on the website if you have a lot of things to do.
The interview is for that site’s version of our People at Work, “Interviews with People Who Have Interesting or Unusual Jobs.” This time around it features Matt Benson, a San Diegan while he was a student at Point Loma Nazarene University — my alma mater, too.
Now Benson plays professional basketball in Germany, for the BG Leitershofen/Stadtbergen, the Red Kangaroos. Here’s a taste:
Q: Are there any girls who are groupies of the team?
A: We go to the same bar every Saturday after home games, and if the same group of girls happens to hang out with us more than a couple of weekends in a row, some of the guys will try to call them groupies. They are not groupies. They don’t come to the games.
Q: Are your games televised?
A: No way. We’re in the newspaper, though. The articles are about as long as your standard obituary.
It’s worth reading the whole interview; the back-and-forth gets quite witty. On a weirdly related-to-the-rest-of-my-beat note, Benson says that he left a potential job in real estate here in San Diego to go play in Germany. When he returns, he says he’s heading to law school.
I’m always looking for ideas for future profiles in the People at Work series, so pass ’em along if you’ve got some. (Click my name below to send me an e-mail.)