Re:Invigorate With Woof: "WHAT'S YOUR JOB?" 🚔🚒🚕🚃🛢️🛥️🧑🏼‍🍳

Marmots that may have hitchhiked home from Burning Man under people's cars, journalists interviewing an AI-generated actress ("we officially reached the stage where reporters are interviewing people who don't exist"), and a spider-tailed horned viper that wiggles a fake spider to fish for birds — Woof's summary: it was click-baiting before humans were. Two of the six items were New Jersey stories, which he blamed on the radiation.

Woof gave the template answer everyone else built on: what he does, and what nobody outside the industry gets. Mostly that people don't connect crude oil with plastics, rubber, and roughly everything they touch in a day.

A brief accounting of what "full time X" actually looks like. Woof counted eleven the day before — maybe nine once you subtract restarts — and admitted the 288-person Robinhood-green rooms are beyond what he can comprehend, so he leaves.

Flavor scientists, elevator inspectors, potato-chip crunch testers, and a long detour into Harry Potter jelly beans, where both hosts pulled puke, grass, dirty sock, and — Margie B's contribution to science — a baby blue one that turned out to be neck sweat. Also a genuinely alarming underwater welder story: a coworker's friend pinned against an intake grate for 45 minutes before anyone noticed he was missing 28:18.

Margie B's mother-in-law brought home boxes of denim skirts and shirts needing hand-sewn buttons at, she said, a dollar each. A week of blistered fingers and late nights later, the paperwork settled it: one cent a button. The math she'd done in her head at the time — a denim shirt that retails for fifteen bucks can't pay a dollar a button — turned out to be correct and ignored.

Woof's weirdest-job answer wasn't his own job but a coworker's retirement plan, which the man had researched seriously and discussed repeatedly before Woof finally asked what a fluffer was. Margie B, gamely: she'd assumed it meant house calls to plump people's pillows. "Listen how sweet and naive you are" 35:50.

Margie B's actual first job, at four or five: her mother's great-aunt sat her on a clutch of eggs to keep them warm, with a full briefing on what would happen if she cracked one. She lasted ten minutes instead of thirty and got docked to a dime — which bought a rope of string licorice, a bag of chips, a Drake's brownie, and popcorn.

The chicken her father brought home and introduced as a new sibling, tied by one leg to the kitchen table on Margie B's side of it, fattened for months, and then gone — string still there, strange smell in the kitchen, feet on her mother's plate. She got punished twice: once for refusing dinner, once for calling the police.

Margie B wanted to be a Rockette and then a flight attendant; both required height she didn't have, which she noted was her dad's side of the family's fault. BeeCuzFuture wanted the mound — he made it to junior college and reckons a couple more years of development and coaching might have done it 59:43. Woof wanted to be a soldier (did it, eight years) and to sit in a forestry fire tower watching the wilderness, which he never did but took correspondence courses for 1:00:19.

Margie B's said teacher. Woof's said sanitation driver, as did seemingly everyone he knew, which left him suspicious of the test. Margie B's theory: a local driver shortage and some light institutional brainwashing. BeeCuzFuture had a simpler record — he skipped the ASVAB, skipped the college placement exam, skipped all of it, because he already knew he was going to be a professional baseball player 1:03:55.