On my wages, I can't really afford to splurge on little goodies like these; but I have to admit ~~ if they had the SARS coronavirus, I'd be sorely tempted to get one. What clever little toys; how ideal for clever little children.
And that reminds me ~~ I found out last week that my brother & his wife are having a baby. When I heard that my brother is going to be the stay~at~home parent, I was delighted; I told my Mum that I thought they'd made the right choice, and that my brother would be a most excellent house~husband. And my mother corrected me. She said, No, no, no, their decision had nothing to do with who would be the better parent; it's pure and simple economics. She makes three times as much money as he does.
Now, here's why that floors me:
My brother is a consultant in the oil industry.
If I could have spoken to my sister~in~law at that moment I probably would have said something brilliant, like, Not that I want to know how much money you make, but... for heaven's sake, woman! {*Ed grabs her by the shoulders and rattles her*} How ~ much ~ money ~ do ~ you ~ make?
I mean, wars are fought over oil. Empires have been built on oil. Oil is a precious and dwindling resource, and it is getting more rare & expensive with every passing minute.
To put it simply, there are two kinds of oil fields. Oil can lie in pockets, which makes drilling for it very simple because you can sink a pump anywhere in the field and strike oil; or it can lie in fissures, which makes drilling for it incredibly complicated because you have to figure out where in the field to sink a pump ~ and getting it wrong is a Very Costly Mistake. My brother once told me that the oil industry has mapped the underside of the entire province of Alberta down to a depth of seven miles in their search for oil, and that all the fields where oil lies in pockets have already been tapped; his job is help them figure out how best to tap those remaining fields where oil lies in fissures.
He used to commute between his home in Vancouver {where his wife works} to his office in Calgary, so he would routinely cross back and forth over the Rockies several times a month. Imagine that... imagine living in Austria, having an office in Switzerland, and having to pull a Maria von Trapp by crossing the Alps every Monday and Friday just to get to and from work... Now, I don't know whether he was making this trip by plane, train or automobile; but it would have been either very time-consuming, or very expensive. If you can imagine the kind of salary you'd have to be earning to make a commute like that worthwhile, then you'd understand why I'm flabbergasted by the idea that anybody could be making three times that much.
So I bet by this time you're wondering, what exactly does my sister~in~law do for a living? She's a Forensic Pathologist. Yes, like CSI, like Crossing Jordan, like "Quincy with breasts" {when The Sixth Sense came out, she had to put up with a lot of "I see dead people" jokes}.
I finally succumbed to curiosity, and did an internet search to see if I could get a grasp on what kind of salary a forensic pathologist can command...
According to this reference, if you were working in Canada, you could conceiveably hope to achieve a salary of up to $200 000 Canadian per annum. This job listing site doesn't often mention salaries; but here's one it does mention for employment in California: "Annual salary is commensurate with qualification and experience as follows: Forensic Pathologist III (board eligible): $131,980 - $135,531 annually. Forensic Pathologist IV (board certified in forensic pathology): $139,172 - $142,945 annually." $130 000 American converts to {rounded down, even} approximately $174 000 Canadian... and *I* was impressed when I heard that some people in my company for were pulling down $65 000.
And get this: to qualify as a forensic pathologist, you need to do a one~year fellowship. There is only one university in all of Canada {McMaster} that offers such a fellowship. And they only offer one position a year.
So much for the misconception that you end up working with dead bodies because you graduated from med school at the bottom of your class...
"... the human body is a constant, unraveling mystery long after the heart ceases to beat."
Posted by edgar at April 16, 2004 09:15 AM