“Because You’re Mine…I’ll Stand in Line”

Queuing up as a new retirement job

By Ed Goldman

I’ve just learned that one of my many personal oddities—my not minding too much if I stand in long lines—may turn out to be my dream retirement job.

An increasing number of people are standing in lines on behalf of others who pay them to, according to a new article in businessinsider.com. Some are using the website TaskRabbit as their booking agent of record.

One-liners

While I said a moment ago that this could be my dream retirement job let’s make that a dream retirement job. To clarify: for someone other than me. I neither dream of retiring nor of having a job if I were to do so. I realize this may therefore constitute a flimsy premise on which to not only muse but also on which to concoct an entire column.

But I think of my doing it as a public service for all the people I’ve met who retired then hated it—as well as the young people I’ve read about who suffer from failure-to-launch syndrome, that inability or lack of desire to get on with their lives after graduating from college, say, six or seven years ago. It would be fashionable to call young people who retreat to their parents’ basements “subterraneans” but once a terminology springs up to encapsulate laziness, there’s a danger it’ll prove ennobling. This is why the term “slacker” never fails to please. Other faves include “loafer,” “layabout, “idler” and the Applebaum boy. (I know his parents, Herschel and Ida—he’s an ob-gyn, she’s a kosher caterer, and oy! are they disappointed in him. Herschel often says to his friends, “I blame myself” and Ida always agrees with him.)

Professional line-standing isn’t all that new, though calling it a profession implies there’s some dough to be made at it. I had a friend years ago who had to fly down to Mexico to settle his father’s estate and because the bureaucracy there “makes ‘glacial’ too kind a word,” as he told me, he hired a young woman (who came with references) to do it for him. While my friend had only one estate to settle, the job wasn’t just a “one-off” since the task at hand mandated standing in several different lines over the course of a month.

It was a little like getting a permit approved to build a backyard deck when your home is on some kind of “preservation treasure” list. Or to cut down a dangerously leaning elm in your front yard whose circumference is even a pica more than 100 inches, making it a “heritage” tree. What well-meaning people sometimes don’t get right is that some old homes were built lousily in the first place even though they’ve managed to keep standing for 75 years. (This happened with a beautiful Catholic church, the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament, in California’s capital a few years back. A local contractor hired me to document its extensive work in the hope it would qualify them for a statewide award: spoiler alert, it won. But what fascinated me was just how shabbily the joint had been first thrown up —yes, that’s the proper word choice—in about 1889. It’s a gorgeous structure, don’t misunderstand. But as in many cases, including my own advancing years, old doesn’t always equate to quality.)

Anyway, standing in lines may be a good fit for you, especially if you like meeting people, can’t get the hang of technology, enjoy the outdoors even if you’re being rained on and don’t like strenuous exercise (oh, sure, you’ll do some walking but rarely at a pace that exceeds a half-mile per hour). It’s also a pretty good way to avoid romantic hook-ups since the odds are pretty long you’re going to be in the same place in line behind or in front of the same person repeatedly. Sure, line-standing may get old after a while, but here’s some breaking news: So will elms, cathedrals and if you’re very lucky, you.

Ed Goldman's column appears almost every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. A former daily columnist for the Sacramento Business Journal, as well as monthly columnist for Sacramento Magazine and Comstock’s Business Magazine, he’s the author of five books, two plays and one musical (so far).